Once again a battle-scarred Britain must find a new role in the world
In making his landmark post-Brexit speech in February under Sir James Thornhill’s baroque painted ceiling in the Royal Hospital, Greenwich, Boris Johnson believed he had found the perfect setting to paint his own picture of Britain charting a new course as a free-trading, independent, open and liberal nation.
Like the painting above him, eulogising the triumph of William and Mary over the popish and tyrannical French, Johnson’s speech was an optimistic and patriotic piece of work. It offered a distinctive vision of British prosperity and diplomatic superiority.
The speech had no hint that the world he described, and Britain’s place in it, was under any existential threat. But the past three months have left UK foreign policy thinkers suddenly searching in the fog for Britain’s future role in this changed world.
Indeed, as the UK prepares to celebrate VE Day, the institutional order created by the west following the defeat of Germany, and on which Johnson’s vision rested, seems after 75 years finally to be coming apart. Those institutions, in which the UK thrived, are either paralysed, or a battleground.
Covid-19, an invisible enemy, but deadlier than the blitz, has exacerbated and accelerated trends recalibrating risk, revealing new Great Powers and placing all UK diplomatic alliances under scrutiny. Sir Simon McDonald, the foreign office senior mandarin, says it is a “watershed
