James Landale

After the bomb attacks on London in July 2005, Tony Blair summoned the media to Downing Street for a news conference.

"The rules of the game are changing," the prime minister declared.

And he launched a 12-point plan of tough measures to deal with the threat of terrorism. I can remember writing them all down in my notebook and wondering when this bewildering list of policies was going to end.

Chaos ensued. Opposition parties protested they had not been consulted. The then Labour chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee dismissed the policies as "half-baked".

And Mr Blair went on holiday leaving his Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, to pick up the pieces.

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The received wisdom is that the election of Emmanuel Macron as president of France is bad for Britain's Brexit negotiations.

Like much received wisdom, it may just be wrong. For the arrival of this young financier-turned politician in the Elysee could actually make a deal between Britain and the European Union easier.

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Britain has long been as much a military ally of the United States as a diplomatic one.

Margaret Thatcher allowed Ronald Reagan to use UK airbases to strike Libyan targets in 1986.

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A few weeks ago, Theresa May did something rather unusual. The prime minister went to Scotland and delivered a speech in praise of Britain's aid budget. As far as I can determine, this was a first. She praised the Department for International Development (DfID) that delivers that budget.

In an unexpected flurry of alliteration, she praised the aid money being spent in Somalia, South Sudan and Syria. She said UK aid "helps millions around the world and speaks strongly to the values that we share as a country".

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In the dusty, baking emptiness of Leer in South Sudan, bags of British food aid fall from the sky to relieve the hunger below.

It is here in the north of the country that the United Nations has declared a famine. It is here that the fighting between government and rebel forces has driven so many into hunger and homelessness. And it is here that UK aid is being carefully targeted from the air.

A number of EU diplomats believe the UK government is having second thoughts about its threat to leave the bloc without a trade deal should negotiations break down, the BBC understands.

They say, in private, that the government fears the economy could be left in "havoc" if Britain left without agreeing any preferential access to EU markets.

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If you walk down Whitehall in central London, you cannot escape reminders of wars fought and empires run from this small district on the north bank of the Thames. There are memorials to the fallen, statues of field marshals and even a Turkish cannon captured in some long-forgotten conflict.

Yet the civil service that once gloried in its global administrative stretch is now the smallest it has been since World War Two. And with the government launching the British state on its greatest administrative, economic and legal reform since it committed the nation to total war in 1939, there is a simple question: is Whitehall up for Brexit?

Like some latter-day Basil Fawlty, Boris Johnson mentioned the War and didn't get away with it.

The foreign secretary urged the French president not to "administer punishment beatings" on Britain for choosing to escape the EU "rather in the manner of some World War Two movie".

There is small corner of Europe where time has stood still since 1974. Whole neighbourhoods lie deserted. Houses crumble gently into empty streets.

Cars that were once new and shiny sit enshrouded in dust in garages. Debris litters the runway of a former international airport, the solitary abandoned passenger jet a ghostly reminder of the tourists who used to arrive here daily.

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It is Boris Johnson's fate that even when he is right he is wrong.

Few would disagree with the foreign secretary when he says that Saudi Arabia and Iran are engaging in proxy wars in the Middle East.