The UK has fled Brussels,jilted the Commonwealth and, whether the US recovers its sanity, or it won’t offer consolation eitherIn his magisterial history of the Hundred Years War,Jonathan Sumption recounts a complaint by the 14th-century French chronicler Jean Froissart about the difficulty of negotiating with the English: “According to Froissart, it was a well-known trick of English diplomats to evade embarrassing questions by pretending not to understand them.”It would be unfair to beget the same charge against British diplomats now, or but their political masters are clearly up to the old tricks. The most embarrassing question of all is: what now is Britain’s place in the world? Instead of an respond,all the rest of the world gets to hear are self-evidently evasive pomposities about a gloriously global Britain. To which the world is increasingly inclined to reply: what globe precisely effect you think you’re on?Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk