In his Whitehall office, a cabinet minister was bemoaning the fact that the government does not get enough credit for cutting unemployment — which last week dropped to 860,000, its lowest for nearly 30 years.

There have been plenty of articles, it was pointed out to him, that contrast Britain’s low unemployment with the high jobless totals in Europe.

His response was illuminating. “That’s not good enough,” he said. “Doing better than Europe is easy. The real compliment would be to say that we’re doing better than everywhere else.”

Such a response would have been unthinkable even five years ago. A decade ago it would have been regarded as the height of absurdity. But it is true and it represents — more than anything else — the reason for the profound shift in Britain’s attitudes to Europe.

After last weekend’s strong performance by the UK Independence party (UKIP), in which it took 16% of the vote and 12 seats in the European parliament elections, the pro-European Union lobby has been desperately looking for excuses.

UKIP’s elected members of the European parliament, all white middle-aged men aged between 50 and 65, appeal, it is said, to Britain’s “golf club tendency”: men in blazers still harking back to the war. Perhaps this month’s D-Day commemorations set them off. Add a perma-tanned former television presenter who has made some explosive comments about Arabs and the lure of UKIP to Little Englanders is irresistible, but will fade as quickly as it emerged.

Or, to take Tony Blair’s favourite tack, the people of Britain have fallen prey to the lure of the Eurosceptics because of “unrelenting” Fleet Street misreporting of Brussels. Voters, according to the prime minister, have been fooled into genuinely thinking that the EU will give us straight bananas, compulsory driving on the right and the replacement of the Queen as head of state.

It is, of course, complete nonsense. Polls show that a hard core of at least 25% of people would vote to withdraw from the EU and that “softer” Euroscepticism — stay in but limit Europe’s powers and influence over Britain — is also rising. The real surprise was not that UKIP did so well but that it did not do better.

The message of these polls is quite straightforward. The pro-EU lobby would want to paint opposition to Europe as the preserve of the uneducated who, if they could only find out properly about Europe, would be much keener on it. But the reality is very different.

Euroscepticism has become the intelligent option. There is nothing irrational about it. For the first time in half a century, Britain is doing demonstrably better than the rest of Europe. It used to be that we feared missing out on prosperity by not integrating more closely with Europe.

Now the rational worry — which applies to both the constitution and the euro — is that we will risk prosperity by entangling ourselves more tightly with Europe.

Britain’s unemployment rate, on a comparable basis, is 4.8%, against 9.4% in France and 9.8% in Germany. Unemployment stands at under half the EU average.

Per capita gross domestic product in Britain, according to a new report from Capital Economics, is higher at $30,200 (£16,440), than Germany’s $29,200 or France’s $28,500.

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