I promise I’m not making this up, but a Brussels top-level meeting to discuss the details of the Eurozone bailout scheme had to be postponed yesterday. The reason given was that there weren’t, as such, any details to discuss.

BBCNews reporter Stephanie Flanders commented that it’d be nice if this wasn’t the sort of thing the markets had to find out. This is her well-brought-up way of asking just what the blue blazes it takes to get fat Eurocrats out of restaurants and on the case.

The EU hasn’t covered itself with so much as a figleaf of glory in the last few weeks, and the only clear response to currency dealers during that time has been to slag them off as being a wolfpack. This isn’t the way to win friends and influence people, especially as the dealers’ only crime has been to spot that the eurozone is a soi-disant free trade area full of bureaucratic regulation, and lots of cowboys paying not a scintilla of attention to those rules.

Things aren’t getting any better. Geli Merkel the Maverick Queen bans nakedness while Christine Lagrande says growth all depends on how you choose to add up. Romano Prodi hails the new Merkel Plan as the future, while admitting he got in illegally through the back door. And Osborne reveals that the EU budget next year will go UP by 6%.

The Reichstag passed the €500bn eurozone support package today – but with a whopping 195 abstentions and 73 against. So we have both inter-member and intra-member disagreement. Rebel leader Peter Gauweiler told the press “At first the package for Greece was to be an absolute exception, but as soon as 48 hours later we had another rescue plan that was six times as big. All you can do is shake your head…”. Listen Peter mein Freund, at least you get to shake your head: the voters merely get told what’s happening.

Getting things down to a local level, Bavarian President Horst Seehofer said: “We have witnessed over many years Parliament losing its voice on European affairs. Europe can only succeed if the public is consulted on these big questions – and a €148 billion credit authorisation is a big question.” Good for you Horst…but with everyone from the IMF to Greece asking for money, ein Bisschen spat, nicht wahr?

In the Guardian, the ever-sensible Simon Jenkins got it spot-on by writing that ‘European co-operation and combination are necessary, political and currency union impossible. That might change if attitudes and institutions meld, as in America. But a freemasonry of like-minded Eurocrats does not make a united Europe.’

On his BBC blog Nick Robinson wrote that ‘David Cameron now has not one but three coalitions to manage when it comes to Europe. Not just the Lib-Con coalition, but also the coalition which is the EU and that which exists in his own party between anti-Europeans, Euro-sceptics and Euro-pragmatists.’ Nice one Nick, but The Slog got there a day earlier.

In fact, almost every EU member state has local politics, coalition politics, intra-Party politics, electoral politics and Brussels politics with which to deal. In the US they’ve been at this lark for over 230 years with a common language, and they still have States’ rights, local cops ruling as if they were Saxon chiefs, banks that behave like the mafia, and a real mafia that very probably killed the President in 1963. Surely even those not used to being realists should now be asking what the point of The Great European Project can possibly be, and whether we have the remotest chance of achieving anything beyond anarchic disaster or a thinly-disguised German led dictatorial superState?

This is not to make the case for ageing cynicism – far from it. I have been a passionate Europhile since the mid 1960s. I have many American friends, but I’m a European and I think our future lies there. I was infuriated when William Hague knee-jerked onto a Washington-bound plane last week: he should have taken the Eurostar to Paris, followed by a Lufthansa flight to Berlin.

But this EU we have today is a surreal nightmare of corrupt, anti-democratic control freaks being driven over a cliff by unelected wankers in Brussels. I wanted what old Sailor Ted wanted: a Europe where the best government experiences are pooled, cultures shared and genuine free trade is allowed to flourish. Instead, we have bent elections, bullied nations, ignored citizenry, an unelected plonker of a President, and stitch-ups via which third-rate nations gain entry because they agree to buy German milk. The whole tableau is an utter disgrace, an obscene perversion of the vision of those who passed this way before with higher ideals.

Forget these pathetic U-Boat analogies being dished out by self-serving losers. If the currency traders and lenders do nothing more than teach these silly, bloated twerps a lesson, they will have done all of us huge favour.