Sketch: Theresa May gets a vision of what we’ve turned our backs upon during visit to Berlin

Chancellor Merkel was happy to talk about Turkey. Happy to talk about Syria. But Brexit? No

Theresa May, left, and Angela Merkel, brief the media at a news conference at the chancellery in Berlin yesterday (Reuters)

It was as if Prime Minister May had wandered in front of a green screen and had someone activate the CGI for German welcome. The sky above the distant dome of the Reichstag was so blue, the carpet so red, Ms Merkel’s jacket so turquoise, and the soft peels of the German military band playing God Save The Queen so reverberant beneath the fluttering Union Flag, and the Bundesflagge and the encircled yellow stars of the European Union, it was as if none of it was real. Which it wasn’t. As if it could be turned off again in an instant. Which it will be.

Of course, it was history. The leaders of two great nations (great, at least, for the time being), inspecting a guard of honour, not a Y chromosome among them. Arguably, it’s a pity that it has taken a self-inflicted turbo cock-up and not a general election to make it happen, but it was no less moving for that. No less a vision of how the world should be, and how perhaps it may be hereafter.

Of course, it was a vision of what we have turned our backs upon. There were few kind words between the two women.

“Take your time,” said Ms Merkel, though not in so many words. Take your time. You won’t win. The process by which a nation leaves the EU was very deliberately designed to serve the interests of the EU, and not the leaving nation.

Until Article 50 is invoked, nobody talks to you. That’s the rules. Once it is invoked, there is two years to sort it all out, until you are ejected on deeply unfavourable terms. It is a crystal maze game, with no exit and no crystal.

Ms Merkel was happy to talk about Turkey. Happy to talk about Syria. But Brexit? No.

There were few kind words between Theresa May (left) and Anglea Merkel in Berlin (Reuters)

A German journalist asked Theresa May why she had appointed Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary, the man who more than any other has made Brexit a reality. “To use a football analogy, it is like putting a player on the pitch who doesn’t want to play.”

Ms May tried a joke: “I think it would be dangerous for a British Prime Minister in Germany to talk about football.” No one laughed. No one pointed out, either, that Wales just made it to the semi-finals of Euro 2016, the same as the Germans.

So wide ranging are the people Mr Johnson has upset in his long decades in public life, never guided for a second by anything beyond his own ambition to further his own status in the world, that wherever she goes or whoever comes to visit, he will be the unnervingly loquacious albatross around her neck in both the short and medium term.

Invoke the Article. Start the madness. Once upon a time, Britain and Germany scrambled for Africa. Now they will scramble for a concession here, a bit of leverage there. But they are part of a mighty Empire, built how empires are built now. Through negotiation. Through diplomacy. Through hard work and compromise. We were too, but we have walked away, led by a thin line of deranged generals armed with undergraduate politics degrees and their own private sovereignty neuroses, who think their nanoscopic abilities will be enough to build something better, but who are too cowardly to acknowledge the army of racist thugs that march behind them.

Berliners live with the visible presence of north African and Middle Eastern migrants on their streets. In their bank accounts there are euros, a currency that survives through their bailing out of others who have been reckless with it. These are two realities from which the UK is exempt. And yet in Germany support for EU membership never dips below 80 per cent. In 2016, it is to their great good fortune that there is not a sizeable proportion of the population that still thinks it’s 1945. They are not burdened by a determination to live in the past. They will not find themselves suddenly borne down in a paroxysm of Spitfire nationalism.

The two women made a rapid exit at the end, heading to the top floor of the German Chancellery for a meal of veal and mushrooms followed by marinated wild berries and ice cream. Prime Minister May will do the same in France on Thursday. She had better get used to dining at small tables.