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The real concern is over digital and Europe's dependency on Chinese technology. "I worry more about other kinds of vulnerabilities, such as in the case of 5G, the possibility that it could be used for espionage or the possibility that it could be just turned off altogether," Ian Bond, director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform (CER) think-tank, told Euronews. 

The crisis was a “big shock to the UK’s broad economic model,” said John Springford, from the Centre for European Reform. Productivity took an immediate hit as exports of financial services plunged. It never fully recovered.

Divorce from Brussels has made GDP more than 5 per cent smaller than it would have been otherwise and investment 13 per cent lower, according to the Centre for European Reform. Last year alone, UK exports to the EU fell by 13 per cent.

Just yesterday, here is the deputy director at the Centre for European Reform. ‘I'm not a Scottish nationalist, but euro membership doesn't get forced on member-states’.

She [Giorgia Meloni] may be lukewarm, however, about any moves towards further European integration — seen by France, in particular, as a precondition for the further eastward expansion of the EU, said Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform. “This will be very bad for those who really care about enlargement, because the French and others are quite clear there will not be another country joining the EU until the treaties have been changed to have more majority voting,” he said.

The folly of Brexit, which I campaigned against, has played a role in the subsequent madness. Its supporters maintained leaving the EU would put rocket boosters under the UK economy. It has done exactly the opposite, cutting the size of the economy by over 5%, according to the Centre for European Reform.

“After focusing on electricity market interventions in September, the European Commission has now turned to measures to tame gas prices,” says Elisabetta Cornago, a researcher at the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank. “Price limits for gas transactions on the TTF exchange may be difficult to implement and might risk muddling incentives to save energy. Joint procurement of gas instead is a smart approach to negotiate more convenient gas prices, which should ultimately benefit consumers.”

In figures provided to me by the Centre for European Reform, a London-based think-tank, Britain’s average GDP growth rate (in real terms) from 1945 to 1973 - outside what was then called the European Common Market - was 2.8 percent.