Mrs May's clumsy attempt to link security cooperation and trade in her letter to Donald Tusk this week comes just a couple of weeks after President Trump presented Angela Merkel with an invoice for $300 billion to cover, so he said, the US costs of NATO. Mrs May was taking a leaf out of his playbook.
It put me in mind of the Monty Python sketch involving a couple of gangsters, the Pirhana brothers Doug and Dinsdale, wearing black shirts and white ties with the obligatory sun glasses, threatening a British army base for refusing to pay protection money. One can almost imagine the prime minister, during the negotiations in Brussels and while carefully examine her nail varnish like a gangster's moll, leaning towards Mrs Merkel, "Nice continent you got 'ere, shame if anything sort of...... 'appened to it".
What have we come to? What do we look like? It is utterly shaming on us. The Sun had a headline, "Theresa May threatens the EU, Your money or your lives". Churchill would be turning in his grave.
