Snell argues that since 1997, Britain’s foreign policy has been guided by an underlying theme: a misplaced British belief that it has a better understanding of what is good for most people outside Britain than those people have themselves. It was a day of piercing cold and as I walked through the twilight from the Sheldonian to Christ Church, the streets were empty and the whole city was shutting itself away.

Unlike many foreign ministries in comparable countries, the Foreign Office does not recruit or promote experts to senior management roles. One such story was that the British experience of Empire made them better equipped to win the mind of ‘the Arab’ like latter-day Lawrences of Arabia, and that our softly-softly approach occupying Basra in Iraq was superior to crass American power. Behind the lurid headlines, however, is a deeper story of decades-long economic dysfunction that holds lessons for the future. This masterwork of political analysis is less remarkable for any actual points it makes than for explaining what the author was up to for the three months it took her to resign from Parliament “with immediate effect”. Asserting that British foreign policy has been a key factor in twenty-first-century gepolitical instability, former diplomat Arthur Snell presents a persuasive argument that Britain's marginal role on the world stage has in fact been decisive.Osborne tacitly supported China’s most controversial actions, even when it took the highly provocative step of building artificial islands for military aircraft in the South China Sea. To do so, it must find balanced, long-term strategic relationships with the EU, the US, and China, further divest from Gulf oil and invest in the future sources of human capital. By the 1970s, the Brits were having a national debate about why they were falling behind and how the former empire had become a relatively insular and sleepy economy. Today, in the wake of Brexit, Britain is once again broken – so argues commentator James O’Brien in his new book, How They Broke Britain.

At a minimum any such review can only result in adopting a much more cautious approach to future military interventions.The right wing establishment is the target of this book, because they are the are in power and have been in power across the frame of reference of the book. Its origins, he says, lay in the apparent success of NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign to prevent ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Kosovo.

Yet the myth of the woke mob has eagerly been assimilated by the readers of the Murdoch Press, who now feel threatened if schoolchildren are told about Mary Seacole as well as Florence Nightingale, or if library books now contain the kinds of trigger-warning labels that used to be on DVD cases. In this book he argues that British post-imperial ambitions to ‘punch above our weight’ have significantly contributed to making the world more violent, dangerous and divided today than it has been at any time since the end of the Cold War. All of the blame for absolutely anything is shifted away from the lawmakers responsible and onto a giant conspiracy made up of immigrants, lefties and ‘remoaners’. Snell’s journey as diplomat across the Middle East and South Asia exposed to him the hubris and wishful thinking in foreign policies based on such ideology.It draws heavily on Arthur's (vast) personal experience and this is what brings it to life and makes it a cracking read for people interested in global politics. Before the war, Britain maintained colonies all over the world, which provided valuable raw materials, manpower and strategic bases. With decades of service in the Foreign Office, Snell, an Arabic speaker who has worked with UK intelligence, looks at British interventions from Kosovo to Iraq to Afghanistan, along with the UK policy towards Russia, Saudi Arabia and China. The intervention in Libya was justified by securing a limited UN resolution and then expanding its scope.

Snell is very good at deftly exposing media stories that came floating out of occupied territories, that somehow stuck but which were profoundly if not completely wrong.

The Cold War added further complexities, as Britain attempted to insulate former colonies from the influence of the Soviet Union.