Edouard Tétreau [from Le Figaro]: Brexit is also very good news for France and French diplomacy. It will not change the remarkable and close-knit joint military ventures between the UK and France, in operation since the Lancaster House Treaties. But it will allow France – along with Germany – to instil into the EU a less interventionist foreign policy. This diplomacy was present in the Iraq War, supported by Tony Blair, and in NATO’s eastward push to Ukraine, reawakening Russian paranoia.

Denis Boyles: ‘European unification is a constant thread running through all our postwar decades. Reading accounts of twentieth-century Europe, you can’t help notice how little the Continental political class has been affected by the massive storms that have broken over her. The worldview of the European political elites is the same now as it has always been. The growth — usually predicated on various claims of urgency and necessity — of government and the inevitably consequent centralization of power have a persistent gravity all their own. ‘

Nigel Wheale: ‘The contours of the debate change from day to day—I read new contributions yesterday, and nearly changed my mind. On 19 September, the conversation will not stop, it has only just begun. A reformation is needed, and urgently; the Scottish referendum argument has opened up so many possibilities for a properly democratic, federalist, responsive future – for everyone. Borders once invented and imposed so confidently are now contested, erased, become meaningless, through the aggressions and oppositions that they created in the first place. Populations move across the Sykes/Picot line in the sand, because it has become just precisely that.’