Any other business: It rained on President Hollande’s first parade, but not on mine

While François Hollande was being shoulder-barged by Angela Merkel as they inspected a rained-on guard of honour during the French president’s tense first visit to Berlin, I was enjoying a parallel encounter with military formality in the spring sunshine of Rome. In town to lecture at the Nato Defence College, I shared a staff car with a Luftwaffe general. A former fighter pilot who did his training with the RAF, he’s now part of Nato’s ‘smart defence’ command structure, which seeks efficiencies by combining national resources where it makes sense without compromising the kit that individual nations might one day need for themselves — such as, in Britain’s case, for defending the Falklands again.

Writing last week about a ‘mood of defeatism’ in the fag-end of Nato’s Afghanistan mission, Con Coughlin characterised the 63-year-old organisation as an arena for ‘unseemly squabbles’ between its 28 member states. Underpinned by American funding, at arm’s length from democratic accountability, Nato can hardly be presented as an exact role model for the European Union.