Well turned piece by Simon Heffer in the Telegraph this morning.

He’s been talking to one of ‘one of our most intelligent diplomats’ (not me – I am an intelligent ex-diplomat haha) about the Eurozone:

On a shimmering day last June, I was talking to one of our most intelligent diplomats about the future of the euro. He told me, matter-of-factly, that there would be a serious crisis again before Christmas, and he suggested that it might not even survive in its present form. He has been proved right about the first point. Whether he is right about the second is anyone’s guess, but if the markets have their way, he will be…

The price of staying in is a final, and perhaps near-permanent, surrender of what remains of Ireland’s economic sovereignty. The central bank in Frankfurt, funded by increasingly agitated Germans, has covertly been helping out tottering Irish banks. It would now, effectively, have to colonise Ireland.

Is that what the centuries-long struggle for independence from Britain was supposed to culminate in? I doubt it.

This national sovereignty idea is very odd when you think about it. We don’t lament the fact that Yorkshire or the west part of London or a quarter of Shanghai don’t have the freedom to run their own economic policies.

So why does it really matter if Ireland’s small population end up being told what to do by stern German bankers? 80 million Germans seem to be managing fine under that arrangement.

One answer might be that Ireland would have no say in the German decisions, so it wouldn’t be ‘fair’. True. But it is the Germans’ money bailing Ireland out.

Maybe if you decide to take a huge risk and mess up, part of the deal is that you lose your right to decide for yourself until you have been sorted out – on the terms of the people doing the sort out. A bit like a belligerent drunk being incarcerated to sober up.

The really interesting thing about the EU crisis is that as Simon Heffer says, it forces out into the open First Principles and collapses careless assumptions.

I wrote this in 2008. And gosh, it reads nicely now (emphasis added):

Trust grows in subtle unexpected ways, usually slowly and through doses of unhappy trial and error. It can not be created by European elites telling us all what is good for us. Especially when some of them look to be cheating on their expenses which our taxes have paid for.

Another former colleague recently said to me, "the trouble with you is that you reduce everything to first principles!"

He’s right. I do. 

The risk for someone who does that lies in sounding like the wily but annoying Irishman who tells a lost traveller trying to get to Dublin that it is "no good starting from here".

The key advantage in looking hard and regularly at First Principles is that one is less likely to build a tall edifice on wobbly foundations. And perhaps more likely to be a better source of advice as to when something tall and imposing is in fact risking collapse.

That former colleague is a prominent EU fan. QED.