Britain now has the most monolingual political and journalistic class in Europe.

Twenty years ago, a Labour education secretary, Estelle Morris, axed compulsory foreign language teaching for over- 14-year-olds. It was the first official government move to disconnect Britain from Europe.

Minister for the Constitution and European Union Relations Nick Thomas Symonds, who has three major political biographies to his name, openly lamented at an EU-UK conference in Brussels recently that he had not learned to speak a European language at school.

Today, 10 years after Brexit, we have less and less news about our part of the world broadcast as normal daily journalism on the BBC. The death of any minor American film star, or a sports figure, is more readily reported on the BBC than news about the prime minister of France or Greece.

Those MPs who speak foreign languages are mainly the 37 Labour MPs from India or Kashmir whose mother tongue as toddlers growing up in Britain will have been Punjabi or Mirpuri. But the last prime minister who could address a European audience in their language was the French-speaking Tony Blair.

So Chapeau! as one might say to a British journalist fluent in more than one language on a readable book on what is happening in our near neighbourhood and why we should know more of our near abroad.

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