Now this alliance against nature is in meltdown as Michal Kaminski, leader of Tory MEPs in the European parliament, has quit his own party on account of its extremism.

Kaminski’s record on wartime massacres of wartime Jews, his link to the extreme right in his early political days and his ugly homophobic statements suggests that this is a man who knows an extremist when he sees one.

But David Cameron brushed aside warnings to enter into his alliance with oddballs and defenders of the Waffen SS. Good journalists like Toby Helm and James Macintyre who exposed this scandal last year were trashed by the likes of Guido Fawkes and Daniel Hannan. Now Helm and Macintyre have been vindicated.

The bigger question is whether Kaminski quitting his own party allows David Cameron to rejoin mainstream European centre-right politics.

It was an extraordinary series of misjudgements by the Tory high command that led them into the toxic politics of east European populism and nationalism. Cameron and William Hague just listened to the Europhobe rantings of their new friends and did not bother to do due diligence on their nastier, unacceptable politics.

Now that Cameron has dumped Hague’s crude anti-EU rhetoric and is today an active EU player using taxpayers’ money to bail out the Euro-Ireland crisis there is no point in pandering to Fawkes, Hannan and other Europhobes who overlooked the line of Jews, gays and the Waffen SS emanating from their new friends in excitement at their anti-EU utterances.

Cameron and Hague’s misjudgement did damage to the reputation of British politics. As Dovid Katz warns from Vilnius and as Rafal Pankowski writes from Warsaw there is a new stridency in the extreme right which, like our own BNP, is rooted in anti-Jewish ideology.

Might we hope that the prime minister leaves the nutters, antisemities and homophobes to their own batty and unpleasant politics, sits down with Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy and re-enters the world of common sense European politics.

Labour may have enjoyed the idiocy of Tory betrayal of their historic centre-right partners in Europe. But Britain is diminished when our MEPs sit down with nutters and the rest.

Photo: European Parliament