Remainers, Leavers, post-imperial dreamers

Our involuntary responses know us better than we know ourselves. As I left King Charles Street in Whitehall last week and passed under the archway into the great court of the Foreign Office — and before I knew where it came from or why — an old and familiar feeling inhabited me. Dejection. This is where I started my working life as an administrative trainee, and those two years were a wretched time: a gradual understanding stealing upon me that I had no talent for this job. This courtyard was the opening scene of my every working day. It struck misery into my soul then, and 45 years later it still does.

I blame myself, however, not our Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I still feel the pride in our history on the world stage, in the way we helped shape the modern world, and in the underlying if sometimes stumbling pursuit of peace, order and civilisation that our country has seemed to me to represent during my own post-second world war lifetime.