Snell showcases a Britain that is ‘at the very least, desperate to please [the US, later China and the Saudis], delusional, self-important, and slapdash. The Afghans I met in Helmand saw our arrival as another phase in the ebb and flow of our presence in the region. His point as elsewhere is that the reason for UK not intervening in Syria was as shabby and shambolic as its reason for intervening in all the other places. Meanwhile, Labour’s slender majority in the House of Commons eroded with the defection of the Liberal and nationalist parties following the defeat of referenda in Wales and Scotland that would have created devolved assemblies. Today, in the wake of Brexit, Britain is once again broken – so argues commentator James O’Brien in his new book, How They Broke Britain.

Snell argues that since 1997, Britain’s foreign policy has been guided by an underlying theme: a misplaced British belief that it has a better understanding of what is good for most people outside Britain than those people have themselves. Why, for example, were diplomats not able to develop a close relationship with Ireland, which stood to lose more than the UK from a bad deal?

It can be argued that the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine represent the permanent involvement of the United States in Europe.

Then there is Dorries’ underlying assumption that everyone was in it together, that the coup against Johnson was perfectly coordinated and agreed on by everyone involved. In fact, Heath was defeated by the trade unions, which simply boycotted his industrial legislation, and by the Arab oil embargo, which began in 1973 and which made a national coal miners’ strike in the winter of 1973–74 particularly effective. Although British media worry about robots taking everybody’s jobs, the reality is closer to the opposite. Unlike many foreign ministries in comparable countries, the Foreign Office does not recruit or promote experts to senior management roles. This traffic may have been sent by malicious software, a browser plug-in, or a script that sends automated requests.This requires Britain to forget some of the extreme ideology of Brexit and have a pragmatic dialogue.

The country now faces several interlinked crises, including a turbulent economy, a rise in the cost of living, an increasingly divided society and the looming break-up of the UK. In a remarkable diplomatic career that followed his 1st class history degree at Oxford, Arthur served in Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Yemen, learning Arabic. Without the UK's marginal but key role, he argues convincingly, the wars in Kosovo, Iraq, and Libya would not have happened and our world today would be safer.

Desperate to do some ‘real soldiering’, and to rescue their position, it was the acute embarrassment of Basra that bounced UK defence chiefs into the next big adventure in Afghanistan, where despite the doleful and enormous lessons of history and the loss of most of an army as early as 1842 (the First Anglo-Afghan War), not a single soul paused to consider the risks or realities. The whole ability to attack in 45 minutes seemed unlikely, and the connection to Al Qaeda didn’t seem plausible either. January 1st arrives amid lingering holiday indulgence, often leaving us with hangovers and half-hearted promises of change.