This crisis that proves nothing is more certain than uncertainty

A faith in the euro that was more theology than economics

made its potential collapse impossible to foresee.

In a secular age, “Europe” is one of the ideas that has taken the place of divine providence. Instead of revealed destiny, we have a grand supranational plan designed to homogenise a continent of multifarious nations, to enforce the obviously preposterous idea that there can be a single interest rate from Ljubljana to Lisbon, from Dublin to Dresden. Again, this is theology, not economics.

All politicians are prone to this delusion. The European centre-Left has used the EU to fill the “Marx-shaped hole” left by the death of socialism. But the Right is not immune to flights of teleological fancy, imagining that small-state, low-tax, free-market societies are somehow the inevitable terminus of human development and that all else is a crime against the natural order. Margaret Thatcher was a persuader, not an evangelist. Some of her followers have forgotten the difference.

The Sunday Telegraph