Cleverly shares his diplomatic tips

To the House of Lords, where last night the neophyte neoliberals of the Adam Smith Institute were toasting three centuries of Scotland’s greatest economic thinker. And while Rishi Sunak preferred to spend his night cracking jokes about Boris Johnson at the nearby Policy Exchange party, his Foreign Secretary was on hand to offer some much-need soundness instead. Bright young things and old survivors gathered together to hear James Cleverly, who delivered a rousing endorsement of Smith’s philosophy:

Adam Smith didn’t just talk about competition and free markets. He was a great pragmatist in terms of international relations. He recognised that in terms of international relations we had to deal with the world as it was, we had to deal with people as they were, rather than bend them and force them to be an idealised version of themselves. We had to deal with the real world. And that meant that we had to be willing to defend ourselves against tyrants and aggressors.