THURSDAY week ago, after it emerged a French frigate was at Limassol in Cyprus and Spanish, Italian, Greek and Dutch ships were on the way to help defend the island, the right-wing press and TV stations in Britain went ballistic.

“Britannia’s Shame” was the Daily Mail headline. “Is this the Royal Navy’s biggest humiliation?” groaned the Daily Torygraph. How ridiculous.

They just don’t get it. Neither do the Conservative and Reform MPs they cater for.

They’re caterwauling from an old hymn sheet from the 1960s. You can see that in the phrases they use.

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One newspaper complained that Britain was unable to defend its ‘overseas territory’ in Cyprus, so others had to do it.

‘Overseas territory’ may be technically correct, but RAF Akrotiri isn’t a colony. It’s a remnant of one, now a garrison base over which Britain has sovereignty. (There’s another one at Dhekilia).

Secondly, it never seems to occur to Britain’s right-wing media that Cyprus is independent and an EU member state, not a dependency of the UK, the point which President Macron’s visit with the Greek prime minister on Monday was underlining. The EU was rallying........

© The Irish News