There was a time when the post of foreign secretary was considered one of the great offices of state. A person who could be guaranteed to remain calm under fire and take the heat out of global flashpoints. Someone other countries might take seriously and respect.
For reasons best known to itself, though, the Conservative government has abandoned any pretence of taking the foreign secretary seriously. Boris Johnson is now a one-man rogue state, free to do more or less exactly what he wants, safe in the knowledge that no one dares sack him. A latter-day Toby Young on speed who roams the world losing friends and alienating people at an alarming rate. His motto: there’s no bad situation that can’t be made worse.
Boris doesn’t hold with anything so old-fashioned as diplomacy. His mission is not the promotion of peace, it is the tireless promotion of himself. In Boris world, nothing really matters but Boris. Anything and everything is just leverage for his own career. A walking narcissistic personality disorder, the last remaining believer in his own genius who is oblivious to the destruction he creates.
Even when confronted with a list of his more obvious failings at Foreign Office questions, Boris shows an almost psychopathic lack of remorse. The fact that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe faces extra charges as a result of his incompetence doesn’t seem to cost him a second of sleep. And certainly not his job. In his own echo chamber of a mind, everything he does gets rewritten as a major triumph.
Take the Commonwealth. Even the doziest Brexiter MP knows that increased trade with the Commonwealth won’t come anywhere close to making up for lost trade with the EU if the UK leaves the customs union and the single market, but Boris feels free to insist that it will.
And no one bothers to contradict him – mainly because it’s not worth it. There’s only so many times you can point out that a serial liar is lying before you want to kill yourself. So he jabbers and blathers on, laughing at his own tired jokes that no one else now finds funny.
Boris’s selective memory has extended to all corners of the globe. He forgot that Malaysia’s new 92-year-old prime minister is a committed antisemite when praising the return of democracy to that country. He forgot that he had once said President Erdoğan was the “wankerer from Ankara”, when welcoming the visit of the Turkish leader to the UK.
He forgot he had called for Donald Trump to be awarded the Nobel prize shortly before the US president pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and moved his embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He forgot there is no area of realpolitik that he can’t be relied on to make the wrong call.
Labour’s Emily Thornberry chose to test him on his recall of cabinet splits over the customs union. Did he think cameras counted as physical infrastructure? Silly question. Boris doesn’t think. So he didn’t answer. Would he care to explain his differences with the prime minister and how he thought his “Mad Max” plans would work?
“I am completely behind our magnificent prime minister,” he declared. Even his most loyal fans on the Tory backbenches were taken aback at that. Boris didn’t even so much as blush. If Theresa May had even a hint of self-worth she would sack him right now, before he undermines her any further. She’d feel so much better if she did. And so would the rest of us.
The Tories had wisely made sure that Boris was kept off the subject of the massacre of more than 50 Palestinians by the Israelis. Some things are too sensitive to be handled by the foreign secretary. So it was left to junior minister, Alistair Burt, to update the house.
What did he make of Boris’s claims that the US moving its embassy could be a force for peace? “I always agree with the foreign secretary,” he said miserably. At least there’s one person left in government who still believes in collective responsibility.