European leaders gather to mark 60th anniversary of Treaty of Rome

The UK was merely a side-note as the 27 other member states descended on Italy to embrace bloc and call for greater unity

Only once, and fleetingly, was the 28th member state of the European Union mentioned during the formalities of a distinctly sombre summit in Rome held to mark the 60th anniversary of the bloc. And it was not to celebrate what Boris Johnson has taken to describing as Britain's liberation.

Lamenting the EU's failure to respond adequately enough to the economic crisis of 2008, the Italian prime minister Paolo Gentolini told leaders and dignitaries: "That [failure] triggered in part of public opinion - unfortunately the majority of public opinion in the United Kingdom - it triggered a crisis of rejection. It brought forward the nationalism that we thought had been closed down in the archives."