The commemorations of November 11, 1918 are over. Few can have remained unmoved by the recollection of a cataclysmic and heroic struggle which changed everything and shaped the modern world.

But for us Brits there was an added poignancy. How is it that the nation which, from the  Congress of Vienna, 1815 to the Versailles Conference of 1919 was the arbiter of Europe, and from 1940 to 1941 faced the might of Hitler’s Germany alone, cannot now find it possible to negotiate its way out of the European Union?  How has the land of Wellington and Churchill come to this? Remembrance, for us, is coloured over with shame.

Lions led by donkeys?