There’s only one way we can escape from the German empire...

NEGOTIATION is a test of strength. And Britain is far weaker than the giant German empire that is the EU. Sooner or later, if we truly want to get out of that empire, we are going to have to grasp this. Poor, hopeless Theresa May hasn’t a chance, not least because she has never really wanted to leave. So she flounders between wild fake militancy, adopted to protect her right flank, and pathetic weakness – her actual position.

But I have even less time for the posturing braggarts, on all sides of the question, who now pretend that their positions are so pure and wonderful that they cannot give an inch. The Europhiles are ghastly, especially their dangerous call for a second referendum.

It was one of them, the disastrous David Cameron, who lumbered us with the first referendum. Now, like a man with a crushing hangover who reaches with trembling hands for the bottle that gave it to him, they whimper for another one.

But worst of all are those who demand a total, pure exit from the EU, even if it means a catastrophic walkout with nothing agreed.

As I sometimes point out, I don’t recall seeing most of these heroes around when I was one of the few voices calling for British independence in the long years before 2016.

Back then, most of these bornagain, all-or-nothing fanatics, in politics and the media, were keen allies of Mr Cameron, perhaps the worst Prime Minister this country has ever had.

Remember how he derided any- one who objected to the loss of national independence as silly old fools ‘banging on’, or as ‘fruitcakes’. Well, it seems, they are all fruitcakes now. Though their obsessions are strange.

I wanted to get out of the EU, and still do, because I believe continental l aw and forms of g o v e r n ment wi l l e v e n t u a l l y destroy English law and our unique free Parliament.

I couldn’t give a farthing for the f r eedom to i mport chlorinewashed chicken from the USA, or fling our markets open wide to Asia. In fact, I rather fear it. I do not think that, by leaving the EU, we will suddenly export more. Why would that happen? Our goods are not especially cheap and we make little that the world actually wants. I think we will import more.

What I want to do is rip up our allegiance to the European Arrest Warrant, a grave breach of our ancient liberties which everyone seems to have completely forgotten about. I want to get rid of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, now our real Supreme Court. And I want to stop rubber- stamping European Commission directives and pretending they are our own laws. And I would also like to shake free of the crazy policy of pushing the EU eastwards into Ukraine and the Caucasus.

If Brussels and Washington really want a war with Russia, then let them have one. But Britain has no interest at all in reviving this grubby, aggressive conflict, which has already convulsed Europe twice in one century.

These aims can be achieved by doing what I have now been urging for months – the Norway Option. This needs no permission from Brussels. It formally takes us out of the EU, so fulfilling the referendum vote. It would make the Irish border as relaxed as the current frontier between Norway and Sweden, which is pretty relaxed. It frees us from three-quarters of EU interference in our laws and life.

I t keeps us in t he European Economic Area, so there is no risk to the economy. It frees us from the EU’s damaging Common Agricultural Policy and from the dayl i ght r obbery of t he Common Fisheries Policy. It hugely cuts our contributions to Brussels.

But, thanks to strident, inflexible groups of MPs whose main concern is their future careers, it has barely been considered.

I can’t stop them. But if they manage to lead us into chaos and an economic crash, then I shall at least try to make sure that their selfish folly is not forgotten.

I AM rather ashamed now by how unmoved I was by the original Moon landings in 1969. It was only after I saw, in a Moscow museum, the tiny fire-blackened capsule in which Yuri Gagarin returned to Earth that it came home to me just how much courage astronauts needed to go into space. The powerful if rather gloomy film First Man, in which Ryan Gosling plays Neil Armstrong (left), is a useful reminder of an astonishing episode which I lived through, but which is now as remote as the first flight of the Wright brothers was to me in my childhood. It’s also amusing to be reminded that man went to the Moon in supposedly archaic miles, feet and inches, not modern metres.