The Financial Times plays Pravda to Brussels’ Kremlin, so it is always interesting to see which letters to the editor it decides to publish. Right at the top of the selection this weekend was a screed by Sir Roy Denman, a prominent British bureaucrat whose career has included a stint as the EU’s ‘ambassador’ to Washington. The letter is a priceless piece of high-flown mandarinese, elegant, eloquent and thoroughly misleading.

Sir Roy is worried that Britons will vote no when they are (finally) given the chance to vote on the EU Constitution. He notes that “even if France votes No on May 29, it will not help Britain…There will be a general disposition to make sufficient changes to allow France another vote. When it then votes Yes, conscious of the dangers of French isolation, France and Germany may well propose going ahead definitively without the UK.”

Translation: a ‘no’ vote by the French people will be unacceptable to Brussels.

I wonder what French voters will think of that.

As for Denman’s hysterical comments (less influence than Norway!) on the UK’s international position if it chose to stay out of Eutopia, they would be laughable if they were not so sad.

Read the whole thing.