Dalrymple notes, in The Salisbury Review, Jose Manuel Barroso’s progression “from revolutionary Maoist student to Prime Minister of Portugal to chief apparatchik of the European Union to vice-president of Goldman-Sachs with special responsibility for advising the bank on how to mitigate the effects of Brexit (for the bank, of course, not for Britain or Europe)” and concludes:

The attraction of the European Union for those who are prepared to endure its tedium and its requirement always to speak in langue de bois is evident. It offers a golden reward in exchange for the obliteration of personality, character and scruple. It plays Mephistopheles to a hundred minor Fausts.