Boris Johnson and the epic row over Hitler that just won’t die down, by Robert Mendick. Last week Boris said the last 2,000 years of European history had featured repeated efforts to bring the continent together under a single government, emulating the Roman empire.

The truth is that the history of the last couple of thousand years has been broadly repeated attempts by various people or institutions… to rediscover the lost childhood of Europe. …

Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods.

But fundamentally what is lacking is the eternal problem, which is that there is no underlying loyalty to the idea of Europe. There is no single authority that anybody respects or understands. That is causing this massive democratic void.

His PC opponents screamed outrage, because they have a patented ownership of calling people “Hitler,” and besides they are morally superior and not at all like the socialist Adolf. In other words, they can dish it out but they cannot take it.

On Saturday, Mr Johnson’s analysis received timely backing from Andrew Roberts, the eminent Right-wing historian and author of a number of books on Hitler, the Second Word War and Napoleon.

“I think Boris Johnson is absolutely right from a historical perspective,” said Prof Roberts, “There is something inherently destabilising about trying to get 30-odd states into one political entity. This one-size fits all doesn’t work historically speaking. Boris could have used other examples such as Philip II of Spain, Louis XIV of France or Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, but ultimately his remarks were absolutely right in the view of the fact he used the words ‘by different methods’.”

hat-tip Stephen Neil