Some see a silver lining to the Brexit cloud.

And some never even saw the cloud.

A former Australian diplomat in Brussels remembers when he first broached the topic of the then-approaching Brexit referendum with other European diplomats.

He did not expect the response.

“The mood was ‘good riddance, we’d be better off without them’,” he says.

Britain had been more trouble than it was worth for years.

And what’s more, if they did vote to leave, “we’re going to make it hurt”, he was told.

And so it’s come to pass.

The EU has channelled Britain through a Brexit process that has forced the United Kingdom to confront reality: it is giving up power, profit and influence in the pursuit of gains that are illusory, or at least unquantifiable.

And in the meantime Europeans have, more or less, accepted Brexit and moved on. With negotiations at the pointy end and Britain’s exit from the EU treaties due in a few months, many just don’t care any more.

“Brexit is not the top of the agenda in Brussels,” says another senior Australian diplomat, just days before a summit where EU leaders will sign off on the Brexit documents.

There are much bigger fish to fry. The rise of populism and nationalism in almost every European country, and the migration surge that inspired it, are considered existential crises for the union.

Italy is threatening the eurozone with a budget that breaks the rules that keep the currency sound.

Donald Trump is starting trade wars.

Islamist extremists continue to plot atrocities.

Angela Merkel is on the wane in Germany and Emmanuel Macron is on the nose in France, leaving a vacuum in the union’s biggest powers.

European elections next year threaten the stability of the European parliament, and could force traditionally opposed centrist parties to patch together alliances just to get laws passed.

“Among our long-term issues, Brexit doesn’t feature,” says Fabian Zuleeg, head of the European Policy Centre, an independent Brussels think tank.

“[The major issues] are the fragmentation in the European Union, the threat coming from populists and illiberal democracies, it is the impact of migration … it is about thinking where Europe is going to go in areas like security, we have economic and monetary union back on the agenda.

“There are many weighty issues which concern the European Union a lot more than Brexit.”

After Brexit Day in March, from the British point of view the journey will have hardly started. They will be in the ‘transition’ stage, trying to negotiate their future relationship with the EU while following all their rules, but having lost any ability to set them. It will be a painful limbo.

But not for Brussels.

“Brexit will truly drop off the agenda,” says Zuleeg. “Then it becomes a routine negotiation that will still be obsessing the UK but not the rest of the European Union.”

Instead there will be economic and business advantages in Brexit for EU countries to pursue as capital and investment cross the Channel (or the Irish Sea) to find new pastures.

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And there is a school of thought that Britain, through distrust or envy, had been deliberately holding back the development of a more robust foreign policy where the EU could take a more assertive place on the world stage, flexing its economic and diplomatic muscles, perhaps even becoming a military power in its own right, with a seat at the highest United Nations tables, even on the Security Council itself.

“Wait and see,” says one senior EU politician. “The European caravan continues on its way.”

The UK has been the EU’s biggest military and second biggest economic power – but also an odd fit. Britain often fidgeted and complained in its EU bonds.

On the continent, the union has not exactly won hearts - but there is still a sense it is the result of choosing peace over war, democracy over dictatorship, unity over conflict.

Britain, though, never fell to the Nazis or had Soviet tanks on its streets. The EU was a market, not a project, and the flow of regulatory, judicial and economic powers across the Channel felt - especially to a certain kind of Englishman - like the surrender that Churchill promised never to give.

And the EU noticed this attitude. It was hard not to.

“After [Brexit] we will lose a lot of British anti-Europeans in our parliament,” says a senior German member of the European parliament. “That will make life easier.”

They will no longer have to put up with, for example, Nigel Farage, who takes visible joy in taunting his fellow MEPs. Just last week he told them they were dominated by Germans who were launching a “new Cold War against the United States”. He was loudly booed.

Trolling the EU for domestic consumption may have been perfected by Farage, but it was pioneered by a British journalist in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the London Telegraph’s correspondent in Brussels, one Boris Johnson.

A former foreign editor of The Times, Martin Fletcher, wrote recently in the New Statesman that Johnson “took Euroscepticism to new levels … he made his name by mocking, lampooning and ridiculing the EU”.

“He wrote stories headlined ‘Brussels recruits sniffers to ensure that Euro-manure smells the same’, ‘Threat to British pink sausages’ and ‘Snails are fish, says EU’. He wrote about plans to standardise condom sizes and ban prawn cocktail flavour crisps. He set up Jacques Delors, who was then the European Commission president, as a bogeyman and claimed credit for persuading Denmark to reject the Maastricht Treaty in 1992.”

Many of Johnson’s stories, Fletcher said, “bore scant relation to the truth”.

But most Fleet Street editors ordered their own correspondents to follow suit (Fletcher among them, to his dismay).

And Johnson was astonished by the power of his inventions.

“Everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive ­effect on the Tory party – and it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of power,” he later told the BBC.

Political leaders played along with these distorted EU narratives, and the seeds of Brexit were sown: the core stories of gallant, commonsense Britain versus an oppressive and vexatious EU superstate.

Johnson returned to this fertile soil in the EU referendum. He claimed EU law forbade the recycling of teabags (it didn’t), that children under eight could not blow up balloons (a packaging warning, not a ban), that the EU had blocked moves to improve cab windows on trucks to stop cyclists being crushed (in fact the European parliament had voted to improve truck design), among many others.

The EU was so used to this kind of treatment that it barely complained - except once, when Johnson told the Sunday Telegraph that the past 2000 years of European history had been marked by repeated attempts to unify Europe.

“Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically,” he was quoted as saying. “The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods.”

Donald Tusk, European Council president, had so far followed the EU line of desperately trying to stay out of the Brexit debate. But the former Polish prime minister said: “When I hear the EU being compared to the plans and projects of Adolf Hitler I cannot remain silent.

“Boris Johnson crossed the boundaries of a rational discourse, demonstrating political amnesia,” said Tusk, adding there was “no excuse for this dangerous blackout.”

European distaste for and hurt over British Europhobia rarely makes it into British media headlines, but it is real. And as Brexit has unfolded that Europhobia has become more bold: in the press, in headlines such as The Sun’s “EU Dirty Rats”, and in politics.

This year Johnson’s replacement as foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, accused the EU of trying to block Brexit.

“What happened to the confidence and ideals of the European dream?” Hunt asked in his speech at the Conservative Party conference. “The EU was set up to protect freedom. It was the Soviet Union that stopped people leaving.

“The lesson from history is clear,” he said. “If you turn the EU club into a prison, the desire to get out won’t diminish.”

Tusk, again, couldn’t contain himself. It was unwise and insulting, he said.

Estonia’s ambassador to Britain, Tiina Intelmann, also found it insulting, she said.

Baiba Braze, Latvia’s ambassador in London, wrote on Twitter that “Soviets killed, deported, exiled and imprisoned 100 thousands of Latvia’s inhabitants after the illegal occupation in 1940, and ruined lives of 3 generations, while the EU has brought prosperity, equality, growth, respect.”

And then, most recently, even the ultra-pragmatic, Remain-voting Prime Minister Theresa May joined the EU-bashing, in a speech last week intended to promote Britain’s yet-to-be-released post-Brexit migration policy.

"It will no longer be the case that EU nationals, regardless of the skills or experience they have to offer, can jump the queue ahead of engineers from Sydney or software developers from Delhi," said Mrs May.

It undercut two years of reassurance to EU citizens in Britain, and was a dog whistle clearly heard across the Channel.

No wonder the anger in the tone of a former EU foreign minister who told The Guardian this week: “You English must have your noses rubbed in it and discover how cold it is outside [the EU]. Then in 10 years' time you will come back with your tails between your legs.”

Meanwhile, there’s a lot the EU wants to get done. Wiegand, while emphasising that Brexit isn’t a good thing, goes on to describe the benefits.

“More people are discovering the continent who had looked at Europe rather only through one country [the UK],” he says.

For historic, financial and linguistic reasons, many foreign businesses and investors chose Britain as their access point to the EU.

Whatever the shape of the final deal, that access will be more limited. Many service providers, says Wiegand, will have to invest in a new presence in the European Union.

“This diversification is unfortunately – or fortunately – a logical effect of Brexit,” he says.

Another diplomat called it Brexit’s “hello effect” for Europe.

The Financial Times recently reported that key parts of London’s trading markets are setting up in the Netherlands and Italy, and banks are moving jobs to Paris and Frankfurt.

Dutch regulator AFM told the FT it was “taking account of a scenario in which 30 to 40 per cent of the European capital market will come to the Netherlands”.

Brexit may accelerate a trend towards the separation of different parts of a trade: initiated in Paris, hedged and cleared in London, but booked in Amsterdam or Milan, the FT said.

Paris is looking for a banking renaissance. Amsterdam, new home of the European Medicines Agency (formerly in London), hopes to entice big pharma. Dublin is after the tech companies.

And there’s not just talk of an economic Brexit jackpot (in local terms at least: overall, Brexit is calculated to have a small negative effect on the EU economy and budget).

Some believe the departure of Britain removes a political deadweight that was holding back reform. Without Britain, a much closer federal union is possible (Martin Selmayr, secretary-general of the European Commission, is reported to hold this view).

And one project that Britain has long opposed is now made possible by Brexit. With Trump’s United States suddenly an unreliable defence ally, at a time when Russia is making almost daily menacing moves on its eastern frontiers, the EU wants to tie its armies and their training and procurement more closely together, moving towards, eventually, an EU army. Both Macron and Merkel have made this desire explicit in recent speeches.

Britain has lost its veto. The prospect of a European army was one of the dire warnings that Brexiters used in their referendum campaign – ironically, their success has made it more likely.

“The UK stopped progress on common defence for 10 years,” says a German politician. “Now we can move forward.

“Brexit and Trump have helped to unite Europe, and people have become more aware of the value of Europe.”

Zuleeg is wary of saying Brexit has a bright side. And he also believes the change in security policy is driven by external factors: Trump and Russia, as well as Brexit.

“We are seeing some areas moving which haven’t moved for a long time,” he says. “Some of these things certainly would have been blocked by the UK – the European army, the idea of taking part of the European Union budget and dedicating it to the eurozone alone.

“But just because the UK is not there any more doesn’t mean we will actually agree on these. Other countries also object who in the past have maybe hidden behind the UK when it came to these votes, and now they will have to come out and actually take part in the debate.”