Recent weeks have laid bare the Prime Minister’s narcissistic, ineffectual and self-serving nature. Not only does Sir Keir Starmer appear to be enjoying playing the big statesman but is also purporting to have a superior moral framework based on his hallowed safe space of “international law”. It is ironic that the current conflagration in the Middle East has brought into sharp focus what has always been the reality, that there is no such thing as international law and those in the cosseted political elite who thought they could control the world through international forums have been living in a fools’ paradise. It is doubly embarrassing that some, including Starmer, don’t seem to realise that they have been rumbled.

There is no global government, no international police force, no world army, only agreements for the time being between sovereign states. The left/liberal political elites wish that this was not the case, but it is. This emperor has no clothes and they need to wake up to that fact. Not a new world order as some claim, but a world order that has always been there no matter how massaged and masked by lawyers in the human rights industry.

It is not the first time this has played out. In the interwar years of the 1920s and 30s, Britain and others preferred to believe that international agreements and the League of Nations (the UN of its day) would substitute economic growth, a strong economy, being armed to the teeth and prepared to defend our way of life.

It was easier for politicians not to face the hard truths, to “smoke their on dope”, to believe their own propaganda. The fact that the USA, Germany, Japan, the USSR and others had not signed up by degrees to this cosy club might have been a clue as to how disastrous this would prove to be. And indeed it helped create the conditions for the mass slaughter of the Second World War.

Weak-minded leaders preferring to think that all actors on the world stage were gentle folk and that being nice to potential aggressors like Hitler, Stalin and Hirohito would save them from aggression. Sound familiar?

Our benighted PM seems not to have read his history and says that he is acting in the “national interest”, but he seems to have a strange interpretation of what that is.

This is the man who has presided over diminishing UK economic growth. Countries are only secure if they have strong growth and are becoming wealthier. Britain has fallen to 39th in the world based on GDP per person, measured by purchasing power, and yet our politicians give away our money to other countries and all manner of virtue-signalling activities.

Is it in the national interest that we should be destroying manufacturing by having the highest energy costs in the developed world in order to pursue the conceit of Net Zero madness?

Does giving away UK territory in the Chagos Islands or Gibraltar constitute the national interest? Or subjugating ourselves as a rule-taker of the EU for no obvious economic benefit? We’re setting ourselves up as Ursula von der Leyen’s willing gimp in order to curry favour, while putting in jeopardy our superior trade deals with the Trans-Pacific nations plus India, Australia, New Zealand, Japan etc. Not to mention the USA.

Do secret deals with China, kowtowing over its embassy and dependency on Chinese products, highlighted in a recent Independent Business Network report, constitute the national interest?

Special relationship a fiction

Starmer is correct to claim that post-Brexit Britain should set its own course and not automatically and blindly follow the USA, but nor should we bind ourselves to the failing and protectionist EU or to China. The whole point of sovereignty is that we should be sovereign!

The special relationship with the USA was always a fiction, intelligence sharing aside. US political doctrine from the time of President Wilson over a century ago was for the USA to usurp the British world system.

The US navy even war-gamed battle against Britain in the 1920’s. The Second World War position of the UK was supported by the US only at enormous cost to Britain. They built economic strength and wealth on the back of British sacrifice.

Of course it was our choice in the face of German aggression, Vichy French capitulation and the threat of Communist Russia. By 1942, having chosen to fight on, we were in effect bankrupt to America, through the ineptitude of Maynard Keynes subject to the US debt by 1945 and a demoralised and lost power by the time of Suez.

While the US granted monies to Germany as its preferred partner in Europe, an impoverished Britain, fresh from a pyrrhic victory, was made to pay its debts to the US right up until the turn of the century.

The US has never been our friend for free and has shown a tendency to try to keep us trapped in the EU box lest we do re-emerge.

As a re-emerging, Brexit nation, it would be right to steer an independent course in the world, but Starmer has chosen the wrong time and the wrong cause.

He has been enormously biased in his choice of bedfellows, wanting freedom from some and subjecting himself to others, while diminishing our economy and starving our armed forces of resources.

We can only hope that a new 1939 is not on the horizon, if it is the outcome might this time be even worse. There are no dress rehearsals or movie sequels to be had.

These matters are not ones for the student politics of the Labour Party or for that matter the communist Greens or the ultra-naive Lib Dems. We desperately need serious people in charge of our politics.

John Longworth is an entrepreneur and businessman, Chairman of the Independent Business Network of family businesses and a former MEP