When Britain handed Hong Kong over to China in 1997, Tony Blair was in melancholic mood. The newly elected prime minister turned to his aides Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell and mused: ‘We shouldn’t lose any more territory. Britain needs to be big. Look at a map. Britain is so small.’

Nearly 30 years later, Britain is shrinking further. Blair may offer advice to his successors in private – Campbell does so in public – but the only one of the trio exercising real power now is Jonathan Powell. He is the Starmer government’s national security adviser – the single most influential actor in British foreign policy. And he’s the architect of the debacle which has come to symbolise everything wrong about that policy: our surrender of the Chagos Islands.

We are not only losing territory, but paying for the privilege. Britain is not just smaller, but poorer too

Powell’s is not the only sinuous mind behind the transfer of British territory into foreign hands. He has been supported and encouraged from outside government by the distinguished human rights silk Philippe Sands and from within government by the equally distinguished human rights silk Richard Hermer, Keir Starmer’s Attorney General.

Together they have ensured that the UK government has entered into a treaty with Mauritius – an economic dependency of China– to hand over sovereignty of the Chagos Islands, which includes the Anglo-American military base of Diego Garcia. This handsome gift is to be accompanied with payments running into the billions of pounds, money going straight from the UK defence budget to the Mauritian government. We are not only losing territory, but paying for the privilege. Britain is not just smaller for this deal, but poorer too.

While the treaty has been signed, the parliamentary legislation underpinning the handover has been stalled. Opposition in the House of Lords – from Conservatives, of whom I am one, plus Liberal Democrats, cross-benchers, non-affiliated peers and the Labour backbencher (and former First Sea Lord) Alan West – has forced the government to pause. Allegations that the Lords’ actions are anti-democratic run up against the unbudgeable opposition of the Chagossians themselves to the deal. They want to remain British. Now that Donald Trump has apparently withdrawn acquiescence in the handover, the surrender seems increasingly friendless.

To understand why the government is still, formally, set on this course it is necessary to understand the impulses and ideology driving men such as Powell, Sands and Hermer, all of them friends of the Prime Minister and all of them inhabitants of a thought-world in which the concept of Britain’s national interest is subordinated to the dream of a borderless world governed by international jurists. Those who threaten the British state and its allies are to be indulged and appeased rather than confronted and defeated.

Powell’s most significant role........

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