A gaping lacuna at the heart of European democracy

One of the unintended consequences of the Second World War was that I learned to fly an aeroplane at the age of 17.

Having been caught short of pilots in 1940, the Air Ministry was determined that this shouldn't happen again. I spent the summer of 1963 happily airborne at Government expense.

Part of the training involved handling an aircraft in a stall - the time when the speed of the aircraft falls below the necessary minimum to sustain flight and it falls out of the sky. With d...