This requires Britain to forget some of the extreme ideology of Brexit and have a pragmatic dialogue. Earlier in the book, Snell is firm about the fact that the military intervention in Kosovo was not a success, even though at the time it was hailed a success and led to lots of Kosovan babies being christened ‘Tonibler’.

Snell is very good at deftly exposing media stories that came floating out of occupied territories, that somehow stuck but which were profoundly if not completely wrong.This masterwork of political analysis is less remarkable for any actual points it makes than for explaining what the author was up to for the three months it took her to resign from Parliament “with immediate effect”. The interventionist doctrine developed for Kosovo was a radical departure from agreed international norms and demonstrated to the world that the system of global rules could be jettisoned whenever convenient. He thinks that Britain might well want to rejoin the single market a generation f He notes the near refusal in British government to connect the dots between servicing this corrupt money, and what comes of it. Driven by post-Brexit trade pressures, the UK is increasingly seeking to do deals with anyone at any cost.

It regularized the de facto nationalization of public assistance, the old Poor Law, in the National Assistance Act of 1946, and in its most controversial move it established the gigantic framework of the National Health Service, which provided free comprehensive medical care for every citizen, rich or poor.The book doesn't attempt much in the way of analysis as to why this happened other than to imply a constitutional dishonesty, wilful ignorance and lazy thinking on the part of UK politicians, their advisers and maybe some of the civil servants who aided and abetted them. The war had stripped Britain of virtually all its foreign financial resources, and the country had built up “ sterling credits”—debts owed to other countries that would have to be paid in foreign currencies—amounting to several billion pounds. In a 2014 speech Putin recognised Kosovo’s secession from Serbia as analogous with his annexing of the Crimea. In a piercing analysis, former senior British diplomat Arthur Snell reveals the role the United Kingdom has played in raising tension and creating flashpoints around the world in the 21st Century.

Ultimately, to realign our foreign policy with our values faces a profoundly important challenge: agreement as a nation as to what our values are. O’Brien’s revelations about the Murdoch-owned media and the Daily Mail under Paul Dacre certainly deserve to be public knowledge. K.’s infamous “productivity puzzle” concluded that outside of London and finance, almost every British sector has lower productivity than its Western European peers. Britain accepted the influx of Russian money, and the following influence, which ultimately comprised the UK’s foreign policy towards Russia, blinding it to the threat the influence posed. A different perspective exposes something new in Oxford’s tangle of streets and colleges; from afar, students on bikes and tourist groups and traffic disputes stop feeling like a nuisance, revealing instead a quiet, understated sort of loveliness.As we have been unaware of some of the historical drivers behind our own actions, our policies have also been marked by a lack of historical and current knowledge about the world with which we engage. In How Britain Broke the World, his first book, former senior British diplomat Arthur Snell (Magdalen, 1994) serves up gracefully written history of ‘Britain in the world’ that goes from Blair/Kosovo and Blair/Iraq right through to Brexit and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, taking account of many chapters in between such as Afghanistan, Libya and other UK geo-political relations including China, India and Russia. The dust cloud of our historical baggage in a province where we had previously fought was visible to them but not to us. And, even aside from the ten people who get their own chapters, the smaller fry is not spared either, whether political bullies like Dominic Raab or hatemongers like Douglas Murray.