The Foreign Office headlined this speech on its website: “Britain is back East of Suez.” That’s an astonishing sentiment. Any mention of Suez in the context of British foreign policy causes one’s throat to tighten in embarrassment. The humiliating loss of the Canal Zone to the Egyptians in 1956 signalled the end of Britain’s independent global role, and the slow military retreat from the gulf and South-east Asia was, for decades, regarded as natural and even ethical by the foreign policy establishment. Goodbye Aden, farewell Hong Kong.

Johnson casts this as a philosophical decision – but the fact is that no one wanted us to mess about in their politics any more and we also couldn’t afford to. Britain’s post-war leaders, such as Jenkins, deserve credit, not shame, for managing this retreat as peacefully as they did.

Johnson’s point, however, is that times have changed. Britain is now richer and so is the east. The engagement that he’s proposing isn’t colonial, it’s transactional. Johnson flattered his hosts by listing their investments in the UK: the UAE’s Excel exhibition centre and the Tidal Array, for example, or the Emirates cable car, “an indispensable mode of transport; thank you very much for that.” And there was a dash of Johnson’s personal taste for immigration. Britain might want to tighten its borders to East European plumbers, but the doors are open to Arabian shoppers and scholars: “We have 20,000 Gulf students in London and they are very welcome may I say, as are their fees.”