And it wasn't just the future but the past that they hated. Everything about it was wrong. The important man explained how terrible and base we Europeans had been, how low our civilisation was while the others all rode high. Everyone clapped. We Europeans had been born into sin while everyone else had been born into innocence.

Realising with a start that I was sitting in a chamber full of well-remunerated masochists, I wiled away the time wondering when they would suffer the fate that all masochists finally meet: which is what happens when they finally encounter a sadist. As I ran over the enjoyably apocalyptic possibilities in my head, one thing was clear: the overwhelming sensation that an institution of government so monstrously unaccountable and unnatural which so hates and distrusts the people it aspires to govern is an institution that cannot last.

The day I was there, a new European President and Foreign Minister were chosen in a nearby room. Neither the people who did the choosing nor the people whom they chose could claim to have any approval from the people they claimed to speak for. Yet everyone in power, including all our major political parties in Britain, are in agreement that this is the way things should be done. As Heidegger once said, the decisions have been made for us. There is nothing left to discuss.

Which brings me back to Milan Kundera.

If I manage to live a normal lifespan, I should make it into the 2060s. Had I been born a century earlier, I would have gone from the height of Victoria's Empire into the age of the atom bomb. There is no reason to believe that my generation's lifespan will not see change just as great.

As we stumble along, all we can do is trust our instincts. Yet that is exactly what our politicians no longer do. They distrust their instincts, believing they led them wrong before. Although our instincts certainly can go wrong, they are also the only things that ever guided us well. My own instinct is that something has gone badly wrong and that Brussels represents the core of that wrongness — the centre of the decline from a liberal state into an authoritarian one, a government of the people into a government apart from the people, and finally a government opposed to the people.

I do not know how this will all end. I am no more a prophet than I am a diplomat. But I do know that sometime in the future, older and greyer, those of us fortunate enough to still be around will look back at 2009 and 2010 and wonder why our younger selves didn't see the path a little clearer or tread it rather better.