There was for a time the vaguest sense that things had got better since Andy Burnham took charge. That the insanity and inanity of Starmerism had finally bitten the dust. In some narrow respects this is true, yet in the sphere of foreign policy there remains a continuity idiocy which threatens to make Britain even more of an embarrassment than it already is. Key in this are two dismal figures: Luke Pollard and Jonathan Powell.

The catastrophically unimpressive Pollard – the sort of defence minister you’d find with a sticker slapped onto his head in the middle aisle of Aldi – claimed on Sky News this morning that the best way to secure the British military base on Diego Garcia was to give it away. Again, as a testament to the ‘through the looking-glass world’ in which we now live, nobody seems to be able to articulate why surrendering the Chagos Islands is a better deal than not doing so. They just state it again and again. Maybe a better deal does........

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