The British attitude to Europe was probably best summed up by the perhaps apocryphal 1930s Times headline that read: Dense fog, continent isolated. The British establishment has often tended to view the continent as a hotbed of dangerous ideas, from communism to the euro. Little surprise then that the latter’s recent travails has been met by a mixture of schadenfreude, to borrow a phrase, and relief that the UK was never seduced by the single currency. But the idea that the UK economy can sail serenely on while the continent implodes is little more than wishful thinking.