The Spectator’s Notes | 14 February 2019

On Tuesday, Le Monde published a piece it had commissioned from me to explain why, from a British point of view, Brexit is not mad. (I was told that all the paper’s readers think it is.) I enjoyed doing this for two reasons. The first was seeing how my English came out in French. Le Monde sent me its translation. I was delighted to sound so much brainier and statelier, though French feels less flexible than English. The second was that writing for an intelligent audience which knows little of the background is an interesting exercise. It forces one to distil. I no longer had to analyse, say, the intricacies of the Northern Ireland backstop or the merits of the Malthouse compromise. I had to work out what this is all about. When you do that, you realise it is almost entirely about history. Humiliated in the second world war, France almost had to sign up for a new European order.