‘Britain is back,’ Burnham declared in his big speech to the UN yesterday. We have been laid low by ten years of Brexit disruption, he told the world. We’ve heard this before: just last year Starmer was announcing ‘Britain is back on the world stage’. Heck, Cameron was insisting Britain was ‘back’ even before that fateful referendum had taken place.

There is something unpatriotic about cementing this narrative of a lost decade. UN functionaries lap it up but it doesn’t do our soft power, which Burnham is so keen to make a national priority, any good. And curiously, having informed the General Assembly that Britain had returned to the world, Burnham then spent several minutes listing all the institutions and alliances from which we have never departed.

Burnham comes across as such a lightweight he could have levitated over to New York

Burnham comes across as such a lightweight he could have levitated over to New York

What else did he have to say? ‘We are going to be much prouder in standing up for our values and the rule of law’. Really? Starmer’s two-tier justice was of course a strange perversion of the law, but arguing our last PM was insufficiently zealous in talking up our ‘values’ and the rule of law is a bit of a stretch.

At times Burnham was almost comically vaunting in his ambition: ‘In a divided world, we have the ability to bring people together – and we will. We are going to step into that role.’........

© The Spectator