So it begins. This is either going to be the most tedious two years of argy-bargy, mind-numbing detail, procrastination, futile grandstanding, and empty threats ending with something that looks remarkably like the present arrangements... or it isn’t.

What could and should happen is that the UK creates not just a stunning precedent in the modern European era of a country leaving what was supposed to be an everlasting relationship, but an entirely new model of the nation state fit for the 21st century.

Europe has almost forgotten – sometimes with good historical reasons – what pride in nationality might mean, and how democratically responsive governments in touch with their populations might have something valuable to offer the world.

Ironically, the idea of the self-governing state directly answerable to its own people was lost in the terrible shame of the twentieth century’s nationalist crimes.

But the EU now finds itself harbouring a return to just the kind of populist nativism which it was designed to prevent. Will this generation of British politicians have the vision and the strength of character to re-invent nationhood? Who knows?

Until this moment, I suspect that at least some of the EU establishment doubted that Theresa May would go through with it. Presumably this is why Donald Tusk has to be given forty-eight hours to make a formal response to the announcement of the actual date: he and his colleagues must be allowed to come to terms with the reality that some political leaders mean what they say.

Yes, this is really happening. March 29th will be the first day of the rest of our lives.

David Fuller's view

I’ve said it many times – don’t play the expensive and frustrating EU delaying game.  Leave the EU politely but quickly and without an agreement, if necessary, which can come later. 

The alternative, described by Janet Daley in her opening sentences above, would be like spending two years on a tiny desert island with Jean-Claude Junker.