The rules for European travel are so complex that we’ve become a nation of timid stay-at-homes

Every EU country is sovereign – and accordingly they seem determined to come up with 27 varieties of admissions policy for British visitors, writes Simon Calder

Perhaps this could be the summer when Britons finally learn to appreciate the wonders at the heart of Europe (Getty)

Name? Passport? Batch number? Just when travellers felt that crossing frontiers couldn’t become any more complex, along comes a freshly terrifying headline: “European holidays could be off limits to 5 million Britons given Indian-made AstraZeneca jab”.

The front-page story in The Telegraph marked the end of an exhausting week for those of us who try to keep tabs on the tangle of travel restrictions that are spreading across Europe, at the same time as coronavirus infections rocket in the UK.

A long-standing anti-EU trope maintains that what Angela says goes, and some of the coverage created the impression that Chancellor Merkel had imposed mandatory quarantine against British travellers.