The strange Tory delusion, that the EU can be meaningfully reformed, is immune to all facts. Sunday’s revelations about Angela Merkel’s real attitude to migration should have surprised absolutely nobody.

Germany’s construction of a borderless liberal empire from Shannon to Brest Litovsk is exactly that, and the obstruction of its imperial nature – a seamless and unbroken sovereignty, polity and economy – is an unpardonable crime in Berlin's eyes. What other attitude could she ever have taken? What informed person could conceivably have been surprised?

Also she knows that David Cameron is wholly committed to Britain’s continuing submission to this empire, and that by denouncing his absurd and empty brayings on the subject, she damages him. For she also knows that Britain’s media and political classes are scared stiff of life outside the EU, and will not permit Britain to leave.

Yet time and again, Tory propagandists and their media servants try to pretend that Frau Merkel is in some indefinable way sympathetic to Mr Cameron’s plight. So much so that she has once before been forced to set them right in public, during her visit to London in February, see here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/02/angela-merkel-and-the-eurosceptic-delusion.html

As I wrote last February : “The ridiculous expectations of Mrs Merkel’s visit, drummed up by the Tories, do make me laugh. Do they really still not understand that the EU never gives back the powers it has gathered in, because that is the whole point of it? Do they really still not grasp that Germany has abandoned national glory and imperial power in exchange for a different dream, of a Europe in which Germany dominates everything but never raises her voice or actually asserts her power in public?

If Britain wants to be part of that, Germany will be polite to us, even flatter us, and allow us various trinkets and tokens to soothe those who still like to think we were the victors of 1945. But the great sausage machine of ever-closer-union will continue to mince up the gristly and bony remains of national sovereignty, and turn them into the smooth, bland, pink paste of ‘Unity in Diversity’, with which the Euro-Sausage is so tightly packed. If Britain seeks to be a serious obstacle to the sausage-machine, then she will be crushed, overborne in the Commission, slapped down in the Luxembourg Court, regulated to death and eventually compelled to accept total submission by joining the Euro and abolishing what remains of her national borders, and signing the Schengen agreement with trembling fingers as her new masters look on, smiling benevolently.

The German government was apparently so alarmed by the ridiculous suggestions in the British media (that Mrs Merkel would somehow be David Cameron’s ally in a great return of lost powers to the individual nations) that it was thought necessary to slap this down hard and fast today.

So, in the part of Mrs Merkel’s speech delivered in English, these words could not have been clearer:

'Some expect my speech to pave the way for a fundamental reform of the European architecture which will satisfy all kinds of alleged or actual British wishes. I am afraid they are in for a disappointment.’”

This is still true. What I genuinely find hard to understand is that the conservative media of this country, for years rationally hostile to the EU and all its works, whose logical position must surely lead them to favour a British exit, continue to do all they can to maintain and defend the Tory Party whose aim is the precise opposite of that.