Plumber's mate and myself took part in the quiet, dignified, ranting-speech-free protest in Brussels on Saturday.

For the first time in my life, the European flag really meant something to me and I was pleased to walk behind it: not in a flag-waving Euro-jingo spirit but precisely because the European Union, with all its faults, is the fruit of Franco-German reconciliation. It came about after those two countries had battered each other to death for the greater part of a century (coal and steel, not oil, were the "resource war" commodities in those days), and because its core value is the belief that jaw-jaw is better than war-war.