Crude and Blunt

Although it was not the Imperial Haystack himself but a spokesbeing for Tin-Pot Tessie who criticised John Kerry for criticising the Righteous State, one can hardly imagine Johnson making a better bungle of it. Crispin Blunt, the chair of the Commons foreign affairs committee, whose smallest right toenail probably contains more good sense than Tin-Pot Tessie's entire cabinet of gibbering ideological flatworms, has expressed concern over the briefing, which is being interpreted as a rather pathetic attempt to crawl up the Donald and get Tin-Pot Tessie a bit higher on his list of people to phone. "I have absolutely no idea what was behind No 10 briefing in the way that they did," Blunt told the BBC.

Well, perhaps some clues might be given. There are a number of reliable indicators as to whether a particular government has a coherent and sensible foreign policy. A measured and calculated refusal to engage in petty tit-for-tat squabbles is one. Another is a basic level of plausible consistency between statements and actions; another is a willingness to engage with other states in a manner befitting one's own relative power in the world. A coherent and sensible foreign policy, in other words, requires that one should not be the kind of leader whose idea of a Foreign Secretary is Boris Johnson, and who is blithely incapable of counting to twenty-seven.