“I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so.”

Though Ms Huckabee Sanders’ boss offers more than enough opportunities to inflame liberally-minded Americans — there may still be some — it is more than likely her president’s now-rescinded and deeply disrespectful policy of incarcerating immigrants’ children after taking them from their parents was at the root of her restaurant difficulties.

Just as the world’s immigration crisis changed Ms Huckabee Saunders’ dining plans, it occupied Europe’s leaders this weekend. It will do so for the foreseeable future.

Population dynamics, as one commentator pointed out this weekend, confirm this.

Even though we live in the most difficult destination country for African immigrants, legal or otherwise, to reach, the spectacular statistic that more children will be born in Nigeria this year than in all of Europe must concentrate minds.

It is impossible to pretend that this contrast will not have an impact in continental Europe and that the ripple effect will not wash up on our shores.

In a neat catch-22 of our globalised world, our strengthening economy also makes this a destination of choice for refugees and economic immigrants.

The consequences of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s generous and brave open-door policy for refugees — a policy that, just like POTUS’s child-snatching, had to be reversed in the face of growing opposition — was the starting point for the fraught EU summit.

Italy’s prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, agreed to go to Brussels only after Ms Merkel agreed to set aside prepared conclusions.

A pre-cooked communique that emerged last week angered Rome because Mr Conte said it neglected the “emergency” of migrant arrivals in Italy.

Mr Conte may have been one of the most strident opponents of Ms Merkel’s come-and-join-us generosity, but then his country, unlike our island, straddles what might be described as the San Andreas fault of this issue.

Ms Merkel may have come to embody this dilemma.

Her instincts are humane but in many European cities the practicalities of that instinct have fermented, provoking fear and rejection.

This meant a sea-change in domestic German politics too, where Bavarian conservatives want to crack down on migration.

Interior minister Horst Seehofer, of the Bavarian Christian Social Union, has said he will order police to block migrants registered in other EU countries if Ms Merkel failed to reach a deal yesterday, though that would be a near-impossibility in a Europe deeply divided on this issue.

Of course we can regard all this with our usual thank-God-we’re-surrounded-by-water disdain and continue to dodge the issue.

That however, will become increasingly difficult.