Christopher Booker: Euro Cloud Darkened the Queen's Jubilee

Christopher Booker is a columnist at The Sunday Telegraph.

There was one shadow over our celebrations of the Queen’s Jubilee so vast that it was not really noticed at all. I do not, of course, mean those silly little BBC babies who thought that Nelson died at Waterloo, or that HMS Belfast weighed 91,000 tons, or who asked a lady waving a Maple Leaf flag,"What country do you come from?" Nor do I mean the BBC’s arranging for a gaggle of ageing 1960s pop singers to cavort in front of Buckingham Palace, before the relief of that stunning fireworks display.

As we watched those little rowing boats processing down the Thames, I suspect that some may have contrasted this with the spectacle at Spithead in 1953 when the Queen was able to review 300 ships and what was still one of the greatest navies in the world. In all the accounts of how Britain has changed in 60 years, one or two commentators did mention the incredible shrinking of our Armed Forces, and how many of the famous companies that Britain could boast in 1953 are either now in foreign hands or have vanished altogether.

But, amid the endless repetitions of how the celebrations made us "proud to be British", and how "we still do pageantry better than anyone else", and how much we admire everything the Queen has stood for, almost entirely omitted was any reference to the most far-reaching of all the changes to the UK’s status in the world during her reign – everything that has followed from that day in 1973 when we became part of the new political entity then taking shape in Europe.

Even today, most people are still only dimly aware of just how fateful was that watershed moment in our nation’s history...