We make at least one fatal mistake in dealing with our beloved friends and partners in the European Union. And that is that we persist in the delusion that they do not really mean what they say.

Every so often the hierarchs of Brussels publish a manifesto or programme, sketching out the route map to further integration. They set out their ambition in black and white – to create a monetary union, a political union, a social union: in essence, to take a load of disparate countries and to try to fuse them into one, with common citizenship and loyalty to a “European” idea.

Oh come off it, we say. It’ll never happen – it’s just the usual old windy Euro-rhetoric. I well remember how we reacted to the...