Imagine popular rage, therefore, when it was discovered that he escaped aboard lifeboat No 1 with the women and children — and it was whispered that he and his wife had even bribed the crew not to rescue victims in the water, in case the boat should be swamped. As it was, this hateful calumny was later disproved; and Duff Gordon’s defenders made an important point about his basically wretched behaviour. It was true that he was one of a small percentage of men to survive, and it was true that lifeboat No 1 carried — incredibly — just 12 people, when later boats were full to bursting of terrified human beings. But the reason his lifeboat was so comparatively empty was that when it was launched, so many people on board Titanic still shared the optimism of the Costa Concordia waiters.

They believed the newspaper claims that Titanic was unsinkable, and you can see their point. It must have seemed utterly incredible that a gigantic steel vessel, in a flat calm, on a well-known route, could come a cropper on a piece of frozen water. And to the cruise ship waiters this weekend, it must have seemed even more incredible that their floating village — twice as populous as Titanic — could just flop on its side within sight of Tuscany.

Millions of people take these cruises every year, including 1.7 million Britons, and the boats are one of the safest means of transport on earth; and as they felt that first crunch and tremor in the hull, it is no surprise that they defied the evidence of their senses and continued to scoop up the olives and the breadsticks as they rained off the tables. They were in the grip of denial, a denial based on the fallacious and complacent inductive logic that because things have been all right so far, they are going to continue to be all right — and as with the good ship Concordia, so with the ship of state.

It is now more than 300 years since that saucy and magnificent vessel, HMS Great Britain, has sailed the seven seas, and for those of us who have been aboard all our lives, it still seems out of the question that she could really hit the rocks and break up. Britain is a giant fact, one of the world’s most successful political unions, that has produced everything from an empire to a broadcasting corporation to a particularly nasty type of sherry. I am like the Concordia waiters, in that I can’t really believe, somehow, that we can be set on a course for destruction.

But look at the facts, my friends. Look at that submerged reef marked “devo max”, or fiscal independence for Scotland. If you can unpick the fiscal union, what is there to maintain the monetary union? And if you unpick monetary union — as George Osborne rightly points out — then political union is dead. The Coalition Government is like the chap in the crow’s nest of the Titanic (his name was Frederick Fleet) who strained his eyes into the night at 11.40pm and then cried, in a stammering howl: “Iceberg, right ahead!” I don’t know if there is time to avoid a rupture.

As things stand, the polls suggest the people of Scotland are too wise to go for full independence; and, as I say, no one currently believes in their bones that it will really happen. But then, the waiters of the Costa Concordia couldn’t understand how their colossal ship — the biggest ever built in Italy — could founder in such humiliating circumstances, and the unsinkable Titanic lies broken in two at the bottom of the sea. That is the nature of slo-mo disasters: they can change very quickly, from being an outlandish theoretical possibility to a predestined inevitability.

But if the film takes liberties, it is poetically truthful. It is true to the essence of Thatcher, and above all Meryl Streep is amazing. She enters into her; she becomes her: the ruby lips, the flashing eyes, the pineapple hair, the pale skin transpiring at every pore with the fire of pure certainty. Somehow this God-gifted, 62-year-old American actress has re-explained to the world what it was like to see, meet and be the West’s first female prime minister.

Somewhere the film’s director has said that it is a King Lear story, an examination of a tragic loss of power, a meditation on the sorrow of old age. That may have been the intention of the writer and director (neither of whom, I guess, would call themselves ardent Thatcherites) - and yet it is the younger, stronger Thatcher/Streep who seizes the film and takes it over. I watched the matinee in Putney, and most of us agreed afterwards that the dementia stuff was actually quite tastefully done - a sensitive treatment of an important reality for millions of families. We just felt that there was too much of it.

Yes, she is eventually felled by the men in grey suits, but by the end Streep has effectively reminded us of what Thatcher was really all about. It wasn’t just me-first, get-rich-quick, Devil-take-the-hindmost exaltation of the values of Essex Man. That was the caricature. Thatcher herself emerges from this film as a far more revolutionary and inspiring figure - because she was a woman. From the very beginning and at all the critical moments you can see that what really actuated Thatcher was a feminine impatience with the cosy, clubby, complacent politics of the post-war consensus - a consensus that was held overwhelmingly between men of a certain age and class. Of course she believed in thrift and hard work and rewards for merit - but a proper understanding of what Thatcher really stood for is vital today.

To take the issue of the hour, I believe she would have strongly disapproved of boardroom greed. She never really much liked the City - she thought that on the whole the bankers liked interest rates to be too high for the good of her vision of a property-owning democracy. Insider traders were prosecuted on her watch, after years in which such tip-offs had been treated as a “victimless crime” that was traditionally conducted over a vinous, nose-tapping lunch. She got rid of automatic commissions for stockbrokers.

She believed in competition, and allowing the market to work - not stitch-ups. Ask yourself what Margaret Thatcher would have thought of a system where directors sit on each other’s “remcoms” - remuneration committees - and defend each other’s expanding awards, even when the directors in question have presided over commercial disaster of one kind or another. She would have thought it was absurd. Thatcher wasn’t against money, and she wasn’t against pay as an incentive to real exertion and real talent. But - and I have taken the trouble to consult her biographer, Charles Moore, who supports the point - she would have been totally opposed to all that now whiffs of a male-dominated cartel, a you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours conspiracy against the shareholders and the wider interests of the company.

Thatcher was brought up a Methodist, with a deep attachment to the values of the Protestant work ethic. She would have been against any kind of crony capitalism, and as for the solution - well, she would not have wanted pay set by politicians, and she would not have gone for any kind of continental-style socialism. But I reckon she would certainly have gone for any kind of poujadiste revolt that gave shareholders a simple way of voting down pay awards they thought were excessive.

In tackling boardroom greed, David Cameron is not bucking the market. He is acting in the true Thatcherite tradition of the Conservative Party, because male clubbiness, jobbery, idleness and complacency were the very things Margaret Thatcher fought against all her political career.

Now a psychiatrist might look at these symptoms and conclude that the British are somehow needy. We seem to want some kind of comfort. We are evidently anxious. After all, you drink when you need to drown your sorrows or in some other way deal with reality. You compulsively buy stuff when you want to make yourself feel better. And the classic analysis suggests that you eat more than you need when you are unhappy about something.

So what is up with us? I suppose it might be some kind of Weltschmerz, a general disappointment that Britain is no longer incontestably the most powerful country on Earth. Some people might even argue that our overeating is all caused by the gloom of the media. Perhaps it is the travails of the euro that is sending us to the fridge, or doubts about the durability of the Arab Spring. Perhaps it is the BBC economics guru Robert Peston who is causing us to motor through the custard creams. It’s possible, but somehow I don’t think that is how people really behave. They don’t eat or drink or overspend in response to external political events.

It’s much more likely to be all about us and how we feel about ourselves. We live in a media-saturated age where we are constantly told that we would attract greater admiration from other human beings if we looked better or owned a smarter car or a newer pair of gym shoes. People feel challenged to possess this or that useless item, and we judge ourselves harshly when we fail. The consumerist boom has been accompanied by a widening gap between rich and poor, and it follows that there will be more disappointment out there – more unhappiness, more jealousy and more self-punitive overeating.

Food gives us that fix of calorific comfort that we need, and of course we are sometimes so horrified by the results of our overeating that we have to console ourselves with some small pleasure, and so we eat even more. We need to end this mad cycle, and the first and most important step is to end the national cult of self-dissatisfaction, our envy of others when we have material things our grandparents could only dream of.

Some might say that we need to cure our unhappiness and associated overeating by massive redistribution of wealth. Well, they tried that in places like Russia and Cambodia and it wasn’t a roaring success. They had Marxist-materialist societies in which elites hoarded wealth and privilege in a way that was all the more disgusting for being done in the name of the people. Others might urge a more ruthless programme of NHS-funded stomach stapling. Apart from the expense, it does seem a curious denial of personal responsibility.

Surely what we need, if we are all going to lose weight, is to create a less insecure, hung-up, envious and self-hating kind of society. Easier said than done, I grant you – but that is the root of the problem. If you have the time before going back to work, I recommend a film called Dodgeball. Here we see a world of two gymnasiums – Average Joe’s and Globogym. We celebrate the triumph of physical mediocrity over the hysterical body fascism of White Goodman, played by Ben Stiller, who makes his money by persuading people they are the wrong shape.

That is what is required: a Britain where we are so happy in our skins that we don’t stuff our faces. Somewhere along the line we managed to lose religion without finding any alternative source of spiritual nourishment. Hence the use of food, drink and consumerism. Some day a prophet will arise – perhaps in these pages – who will teach us a new form of self-control and moral wisdom. But until that glad day I leave you with my patent diet. Lay off cheese. Avoid alcohol. Cut out potatoes, bread, pasta and stuff like that. Eat stupendous quantities of kale and apples and perhaps the odd small piece of dried fish. It’s a piece of cake – which is what you will certainly deserve if you keep it up for more than four weeks. Happy New Year!

Now a psychiatrist might look at these symptoms and conclude that the British are somehow needy. We seem to want some kind of comfort. We are evidently anxious. After all, you drink when you need to drown your sorrows or in some other way deal with reality. You compulsively buy stuff when you want to make yourself feel better. And the classic analysis suggests that you eat more than you need when you are unhappy about something.

So what is up with us? I suppose it might be some kind of Weltschmerz, a general disappointment that Britain is no longer incontestably the most powerful country on Earth. Some people might even argue that our overeating is all caused by the gloom of the media. Perhaps it is the travails of the euro that is sending us to the fridge, or doubts about the durability of the Arab Spring. Perhaps it is the BBC economics guru Robert Peston who is causing us to motor through the custard creams. It’s possible, but somehow I don’t think that is how people really behave. They don’t eat or drink or overspend in response to external political events.

It’s much more likely to be all about us and how we feel about ourselves. We live in a media-saturated age where we are constantly told that we would attract greater admiration from other human beings if we looked better or owned a smarter car or a newer pair of gym shoes. People feel challenged to possess this or that useless item, and we judge ourselves harshly when we fail. The consumerist boom has been accompanied by a widening gap between rich and poor, and it follows that there will be more disappointment out there – more unhappiness, more jealousy and more self-punitive overeating.

Food gives us that fix of calorific comfort that we need, and of course we are sometimes so horrified by the results of our overeating that we have to console ourselves with some small pleasure, and so we eat even more. We need to end this mad cycle, and the first and most important step is to end the national cult of self-dissatisfaction, our envy of others when we have material things our grandparents could only dream of.

Some might say that we need to cure our unhappiness and associated overeating by massive redistribution of wealth. Well, they tried that in places like Russia and Cambodia and it wasn’t a roaring success. They had Marxist-materialist societies in which elites hoarded wealth and privilege in a way that was all the more disgusting for being done in the name of the people. Others might urge a more ruthless programme of NHS-funded stomach stapling. Apart from the expense, it does seem a curious denial of personal responsibility.

Surely what we need, if we are all going to lose weight, is to create a less insecure, hung-up, envious and self-hating kind of society. Easier said than done, I grant you – but that is the root of the problem. If you have the time before going back to work, I recommend a film called Dodgeball. Here we see a world of two gymnasiums – Average Joe’s and Globogym. We celebrate the triumph of physical mediocrity over the hysterical body fascism of White Goodman, played by Ben Stiller, who makes his money by persuading people they are the wrong shape.

That is what is required: a Britain where we are so happy in our skins that we don’t stuff our faces. Somewhere along the line we managed to lose religion without finding any alternative source of spiritual nourishment. Hence the use of food, drink and consumerism. Some day a prophet will arise – perhaps in these pages – who will teach us a new form of self-control and moral wisdom. But until that glad day I leave you with my patent diet. Lay off cheese. Avoid alcohol. Cut out potatoes, bread, pasta and stuff like that. Eat stupendous quantities of kale and apples and perhaps the odd small piece of dried fish. It’s a piece of cake – which is what you will certainly deserve if you keep it up for more than four weeks. Happy New Year!

“This is quite unacceptable,” the Liberal Democrat leader is supposed to have fumed at the French government.

I don’t know if the French have been chastened by this rebuke, but I think we should urge Nick to relax. Look at the polls. Anyone would think that Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron began that summit with a secret meeting, at which they agreed to help boost the other’s domestic ratings. “I’ll bash you if you’ll bash me,” they said. “Our voters will love it!” And hey presto. The Prime Minister takes a principled opposition to plans for a Fiscal Union (FU), and shoots ahead of poor old Ed Miliband in the polls.

Sarkozy bolsters his own election hopes as he launches an ever-popular tirade against les rosbifs and their appalling belief in free markets. It’s win-win. That is the point about the pantomime xenophobia between the French and the British: it is essentially innocent — or more innocent than almost any other form of xenophobia; because in our hearts, au fond, neither side really believes it. We have to admit there are times when we enjoy a good old orgy of gratuitous Frog-bashing. There are times when we are all prepared to read how our continental cousins are a bunch of garlic-breathing Strauss-Kahns with a deeply suspect interest in structuralism and gloomy films. In this stereotypical world, their women fail to shave their armpits, they have a weird obsession with suppositories and a fanatical lust to eat our children’s ponies.

As for the French view of the British, I am afraid that there are times when they can be heard to say that we have terrible food, that we prefer hot water bottles to sexual intercourse and that most of the men in our ruling class (this was a tart observation by former prime minister Edith Cresson) were not the marrying kind. This is the kind of cheerful abuse that we have been directing at each other for generations, and ever since the battle of Waterloo it has not been meant very seriously.

Deep down, all reasonable English people know that the French have an extraordinary culture, that their understanding of cheese-making is god-given, that they have high-speed trains of a kind we are still trying to imitate and that it is a shame that we (and our children) are so feeble in our mastery of their beautiful language. You can tell that the British secretly love and admire the French by the sheer numbers who go to France for their holidays, and who make their homes in the Dordogne.

As for the French, they know in their hearts that for all the 20th-century misunderstandings between us — Verdun, Mers-el-Kebir, Suez, de Gaulle’s “non” — we remain indispensable allies; and all civilised French people understand that we also have our good points: humour, gardens, custard, pubs, democracy, the theatre and everything else that makes this country great. That is why so many hundreds of thousands of French people have moved to England in the past 20 years, and that is why London is now the sixth or seventh biggest French city on Earth. In fact, there are now so many talented French people living in the English capital that a special MP has just been appointed for outre-manche.

Victor Hugo said something about how the French and the English needed each other, because they both did well from the competition — and he was right. And the final reason to be cool about the gall of Gaul is, of course, that we are not the real object of French wrath. It isn’t Britain whose dithering is causing the continuing and growing uncertainty over the euro. Downing Street is not responsible for the failure to reassure the markets with a credible plan to guarantee the sovereign debt of the peripheral euro nations.

The French are really disappointed with Germany; and it is a golden rule of European politics that when France is angry with Germany, Britain gets the blame. That is because a rant against Germany is a very different thing, with a much heavier charge. Sixty-seven years after the war, the French are facing up to the reality that the European experiment has failed to contain German economic might, and that the Germans are unwilling and unable to help other countries cope with the agony of the euro.

That is what is really making them angry — but that is taboo. Much better to chuck a cow at les anglais.

No, they aren’t really angry with us for opposing the new Treaty for Fiscal Union. The reason our brother and sister Europeans are so chronically enraged with the British is that we have been proved completely right about the euro. For more than 20 years, British ministers have been coming out to Brussels and saying that they just love all this single-market stuff, but that they doubt the wisdom of trying to create a monetary union. And for more than 20 years, some of us have been saying that the reason a monetary union won’t work is that you can’t do it without a political union – and that a political union is not democratically possible.

We warned that you would need a kind of central Euro-government to control national budgets and taxation, and that the peoples of Europe wouldn’t wear it. Now look. It wasn’t the Anglo-Saxon bankers who caused the trouble in the eurozone, Sarkozy mon ami. It was the utter failure of the eurozone countries – starting with France, incidentally – to observe the Maastricht rules. It was the refusal of the Greeks to control their spending or to reform their social security systems. In Greece and Italy, the democratic leaders have been effectively deposed in the hope of appeasing the markets and saving the euro; and what makes the leaders of the eurozone countries even more furious is that it doesn’t seem to be working.

They blame David Cameron for “vetoing” a new EU treaty, when really he has done no such thing. It is perfectly open to the other EU countries now to go ahead and form their own new fiscal rules. If they want, they can decide to create an economic government of Europe. They may decide that now is the time – even though electorates are already feeling alienated from the political process – to hand sensitive decisions on tax and spending to unelected bureaucrats. It strikes me that this would be an amazingly dangerous thing to do, since the peoples of this Supra National And Fiscal Union (Snafu) would rapidly discover that they could no longer remove their government from office. I doubt very much that it would work, since there seems no particular reason why national governments should respect a collection of new “binding” rules any more than they respected the “binding” rules of Maastricht – not unless there is some secret proposal to enforce them by violence with a Euro-army.

But even if the Snafu has little prospect of success, there is no reason for David Cameron to commit this country to a project that is intellectually, morally and democratically bankrupt. He was quite right to say that Britain would not participate; and the reason the others are angry with Britain is that the row conceals the real failure of the summit – and that is to come up with a solution for the problems of the euro. The best hope now is for everyone to cool off and look at the things that the citizens of Europe actually want from their institutions. The euro may or may not be saved – though it seems unlikely that it will still exist in exactly its current form a year from now, and the best thing would be if the Greeks (and perhaps others) were allowed an orderly exit from their pain.

But there are still plenty of things that the European Union could provide its struggling peoples. In January, it will be 20 years since the dawn of the “single market”, and yet there are still all kinds of non-tariff barriers to trade. Here we are trying to create an economic government of Europe, and yet we haven’t even passed the services directive, which would allow everyone from opticians to estate agents to insurance brokers to set up more freely in other European jurisdictions. We are telling the Greeks that Brussels must effectively run their economy – and yet we can’t even agree on a common European standard for plugs.

Everyone is now worried that other European countries will “punish” Britain, perhaps with new directives on financial services designed to damage the City of London. Well, in so far as that is a problem, it is not a problem that has been made any worse by this summit; and in so far as we need to assert our European credentials, now is the time to set out a positive vision for a Europe that actually helps individuals and businesses. Next time these leaders have a summit, let’s lock them in until they agree the services directive and come up with a Europlug.