“…the greatest dream realised for human beings since the fall of the Western Roman Empire”.

“[The EU] has brought peace, prosperity, compassion for the poor and weak, purpose for the aspirational, and hope for all its people.”

The question has to be: who wrote this tosh?

Clearly it cannot have been Welby himself. He has been far too busy ‘reimagining’ Britain to swat up on the tragically truncated political career of Romulus Augustulus.

The Roman Empire, in truth, far from being a golden age to which modern Europeans can look back with glowing nostalgia, has been the malign ghost which has cast its sinister shadow across the whole of modern history.

Was the Empire to be resuscitated in a French or a German form? That was the question. The armies of both Napoleon and Hitler marched under its eagles.

And now that the two rivals have made common cause in the project, the people of southern Europe languish under their heartless imperium – poor, neglected and without hope.

But I suppose that an Archbishop of Canterbury couldn’t say that.