Desperate to do some ‘real soldiering’, and to rescue their position, it was the acute embarrassment of Basra that bounced UK defence chiefs into the next big adventure in Afghanistan, where despite the doleful and enormous lessons of history and the loss of most of an army as early as 1842 (the First Anglo-Afghan War), not a single soul paused to consider the risks or realities. Ten chapters detail the ten nasty men and women whom he holds responsible for the decline in the economy, the media and politics. Although British media worry about robots taking everybody’s jobs, the reality is closer to the opposite. He expected the accounts to have been well thumbed in recent years, by analysts on behalf of government, but the archivist confirmed that the sources had not been disturbed for decades.

Britain, which got rich as the world’s factory in the 19th century, had become the world’s banker by the 21st. Hutton is a former economics editor of The Guardian, former editor-in-chief of The Observer and former principal of Hertford College, Oxford. Sometimes you may be asked to solve the CAPTCHA if you are using advanced terms that robots are known to use, or sending requests very quickly. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.In a 2014 speech Putin recognised Kosovo’s secession from Serbia as analogous with his annexing of the Crimea. By drawing a false conclusion Blair was emboldened to push forwards towards the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003, forming an improbably strong bond with US President George Bush that went far beyond normal behaviour, leading to the flawed Weapons of Mass Destruction intelligence that seemed to be more about pleasing the Americans than obtaining the truth. Truman, as he was required to do by law, ended lend-lease, upon which Britain had depended for its necessities as well as its arms. Repeatedly, it hasn’t been the sole actor, nor the most significant, but it has often been the one that tipped the balance, meaning Britain has been the geopolitical player without whom certain events would not have happened. If you regularly listen to JOB on his radio show then this is well trod territory that has been ably assembled, it places the people you know (mostly) at the scene of the crime.

Without the UK’s marginal but key role, Snell argues, the wars in Kosovo, Iraq, and Libya would not have happened and our world today would be safer. 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.

In this engrossing and frankly deeply troubling book , former senior British diplomat Snell explains how Britain’s often incompetent, inconsistent and sometimes downright greedy foreign policy has played a pivotal role in rendering the world a more dangerous place. Eden resigned in January 1957, partly because of ill health but chiefly because of his failed attempt to roll back the retreat from empire by a reoccupation of the Suez Canal Zone after the nationalization of the canal by the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, in the summer of 1956. Ultimately, to realign our foreign policy with our values faces a profoundly important challenge: agreement as a nation as to what our values are.

Osborne tacitly supported China’s most controversial actions, even when it took the highly provocative step of building artificial islands for military aircraft in the South China Sea. The first step must be doing what Snell has done and dispassionately review in great detail the mistakes of recent history. In this period of single-party government, the themes were economic change and the continued retreat from colonialism. Meanwhile, Labour’s slender majority in the House of Commons eroded with the defection of the Liberal and nationalist parties following the defeat of referenda in Wales and Scotland that would have created devolved assemblies.The Oxford Literary Festival was a special opportunity for me and certainly one of the highlights of my career – it was an honour I will never forget. When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, it hit hard, smashing the engine of Britain’s economic ascent.