Why Britain and France can’t have an amicable divorce

Former Chancellor Nigel Lawson famously said that the National Health Service is the nearest thing we British have to a state religion. You could say much the same thing about the European Union and the French.

To our Gallic neighbours, the ‘construction of Europe’ is a sacred task that brooks no challenge. What goal can be higher than binding the once bellicose German nation into a new rules-based European order that has brought peace to a continent riven by war and revolution? What nobler cause for France than leveraging the outsized economic heft of its neighbour outre-Rhin in support of its mission to create an alternative beacon of enlightenment values to counter that tawdry Anglo-Saxon economic and cultural hegemony?

Attempts to challenge such logic are met not just with incomprehension from the French elite, but with the kind of full-on wrath that previous generations reserved for heretics, scoffers and unbelievers of every stripe.