The former foreign secretary said Britain was ‘truly headed for the status of colony’ if it followed Theresa May’s Brexit plan – but what does that mean?

So farewell, then, Boris Johnson, who this week resigned from the cabinet because the latest Brexit plan meant that “we are truly headed for the status of colony”. No one knows why this should have suddenly offended the principles of a man who once wrote that the “problem” with Africa was “not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more.”

A “colony” in English was originally just a farm: “colonia” in Latin was a farm or estate, but also a group of Roman citizens garrisoned in a newly conquered country; so “colony” came to mean a settlement by some country in another, regardless of the wishes of the existing inhabitants, as well as describing any group that lives separately from the wider community.

If Britain is to be a colony, what kind of colony should it be? To turn the whole country into a nudist colony, or a penal colony, or a colony of monks or shrubs, might seem perverse. But since the former foreign secretary might now find himself rather underemployed, we could always send him for physical re-education to an offshore labour colony.