I’m pretty sure the EU would welcome the U.K. back - not easily, of course, lots of stuff to negotiate and I should think the EU would ask for guarantees that we would pay into the budgets for the next 25 years, no matter what happens.

I’m sure they’d be happy to let us keep the pound and stay out of Schengen.

But timing matters … first there’s a constitutional debate that the EU would want to settle before letting the U.K. back in and if they move to more qualified majority voting, it might be that the U.K. wouldn’t want to join after all.

The whole “ever closer union” bit seems to have been ignored by Britain, even when they first joined. Did we think those words meant nothing?