“The people have spoken, the bastards.” So said one Californian candidate when voters did not respond to his electoral charms in the way he desired.

Many European Union leaders must privately be thinking the same after Irish voters voted No in a referendum on the Lisbon treaty. In one electoral flash, about 1m disgruntled Irish voters have vaporised the product of a decade of impassioned European debate, agonising legislative drafting (and re-drafting) and much mucky multidimensional horse-trading.