When in The Course of Human Events

Of course President Obama is going to address a pro-EU rally while he is over here. That is why David Cameron is bringing him over here.

Obama is coming to the country where people are girlishly flattered by the attention of the President of the United States, so pitifully do they crave it.

It is expected that he will tell us that we could not expect our own TTIP-style trade agreement with his country, the unspoken but clear implication being that we were not important enough to go to the trouble.

There are a dozen or more countries for which America would make that effort. We are not one of them. We are supposed to receive this non-news as a crushing blow.

And there are those who will. But they shouldn't.

They should say, as some of us are going to say, that they do not want a TTIP-style trade agreement anyway, and that the prospect of TTIP is no small part of why we shall be voting to leave the European Union.

So much for, "We'd get TTIP even if we pulled out of the EU." The Americans would not "let" us. Poor us.

There will be a certain bewildered hurt in some quarters, although both the bewilderment and the hurt would have been greater if the President had been a white man or a Republican. But such a President would have said exactly the same thing.

Once those thus affected had voted for withdrawal, then they would need to consider their intellectual and emotional dependence on the Conservative Party, on the United States, on big business, on the top brass of the Armed Forces, on the Royal Family, and in some cases still on the upper echelons of the Church of England.

Those will all have taken the only view that, in the minds of anyone who pays attention, they conceivably could have done. But their intellectual and emotional dependants, or at least quite a lot of them, will have voted the other way.

There will be no way back.