Anne-Sylvaine Chassany’s very human, even moving, description of her and her son’s reactions on returning to her native France from London is a perfect illustration why, one way or another, sooner or later, Brexit is inevitable.

The crucial and categorical difference between the UK and the European Union is the difference between a political and legal system where the residual liberty rests with the individual – as, in the UK, it has rested for several hundred years – and the system of the EU, where the residual liberty rests with the state. The sustained intolerance and inflexibility of the EU in its Brexit negotiations, as it seeks to punish the UK for leaving the EU and pull up the drawbridge against other would-be leavers (shades of the Berlin Wall), have served to underline this fundamental and unbridgeable conflict.