During the first referendum on Europe in 1975, those campaigning to leave likened the Treaty of Accession to Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement and appeasement. The year before, as he was preparing to address the Labour Party conference, the West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt asked his cabinet what he might say in his speech that would help convince voters to stay in the EEC. One of his ministers, who had just met her British counterpart, Barbara Castle, told him: “The only way to keep Britain in the European Community is not to remind it that it is already in.” This memo formed part of an exhibition at the German House of History in Bonn in 2019 entitled “Very British: A German Point of View”. This was one of the museum’s most popular shows. It had been devised before the referendum, but its contents were amended to include a room focused on Brexit. Hoffman admitted Germans’ fixation with Britain’s travails had boosted visitor numbers. Germans have devoured British subculture, pop music, TV shows (they too found Fawlty Towers funny in a self-deprecating way), the glamour of Emma Peel and the Avengers. Many can recount holidays to Cornwall, Scotland and the Lake District in their camper vans. They are glued to Premier League football. They obsess about the royal family (Germans, from Hanover, they like to note). They love English traditions, even when they make them up. Every New Year’s Eve, the entire country, young and old, watches Dinner for One. First aired in 1963, it is the most repeated TV programme in history, the 90th-birthday dinner of Miss Sophie, a bejewelled English aristocrat. Germans know every line. No Briton I have met has ever heard of it. The show is funny, informative – and painful. It is about an unrequited love. That love has faded fast since 2016. Britain, on the other hand, never seems to know what it wants of Germany. When its economy struggles, as it did in the mid-1980s and mid-’90s, it is derided as the “sick man of Europe”, over-regulated and hidebound. When Deutschland AG corners global markets, it is over-weaning and rapacious. The British don’t want Germany to throw its weight around the world, yet they do want it to pull its weight.

And all that, before the “battle” of the vaccines. The many failures of the European Commission have pained Germans. Some wondered why they bothered handing jurisdiction to Brussels in the first place. Early on in the pandemic, in a group with the French, Italians and Dutch, they were making good headway with the pharmaceutical companies. They were furious with the Commission and its (German) president, Ursula von der Leyen. After all, the successful trial the previous November of the first vaccine, Pfizer- BioNTech, had been heralded as a very German success story. The Commission’s efforts to offset blame were bad enough. Its panicked attempt to interfere with the newly-erected Irish protocol caused considerable, perhaps irreparable, damage. Immediately, the DUP went on the rampage, seeking legal advice on removing the protocol. Many Brits enjoyed watching Von der Leyen’s hapless attempts to explain the bureaucratic sludge. They relished her description of the UK as the speedboat and the EU as the tanker. The worse it has got, the more Germans have indulged in their favourite pastime – self-criticism, thinking the worst of themselves. Locked down, like pretty much everyone else in Europe, Germans had already begun the year with trepidation. Towards the end of 2020, the relative consensus on dealing with the pandemic began to fray. Covid-deniers and anti-vaxxers mounted vocal, if small, demonstrations. The government responded with less precision than earlier in the crisis. Some of the regions became more fractious. Rules were not adhered to as strongly as they should have been. Britain, alongside Israel and even the US, has been faster and nimbler on the vaccine. Even the most ardent Johnson critic is required to concede that. This was the first instance of the Johnson government doing anything right during the pandemic. Much of the British media went into instant schadenfreude, and “told you so” mode over Brexit. Who needs solidarity when you can be nimble? Might Johnson emerge the “victor”, some wondered? Might he “get away with” whatever criticisms a public inquiry on the pandemic might throw at him. After all, hadn’t his team scored the winning goal in the final minute of the game?

Politics reduced to sport or a game. A very British way of looking at things.

People were encouraged to forget that, throughout 2020, Britain’s response to the pandemic was a study in failure. Every development was hailed by Boris Johnson as “world beating”, only to fall apart. The contrast with Germany’s relative success in the early stages made it all the more painful for Brits who are often frightened to look at their own country through a clear lens. Announcing 100,000 deaths in Britain, Johnson said it was “hard to compute the sorrow contained in that...