THURSDAY week ago, after it emerged a French frigate was at Limassol in Cyprus and Spanish, Italian, Greek and Dutch ships were on the way to help defend the island, the right-wing press and TV stations in Britain went ballistic.

“Britannia’s Shame” was the Daily Mail headline. “Is this the Royal Navy’s biggest humiliation?” groaned the Daily Torygraph. How ridiculous.

They just don’t get it. Neither do the Conservative and Reform MPs they cater for.

They’re caterwauling from an old hymn sheet from the 1960s. You can see that in the phrases they use.

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One newspaper complained that Britain was unable to defend its ‘overseas territory’ in Cyprus, so others had to do it.

‘Overseas territory’ may be technically correct, but RAF Akrotiri isn’t a colony. It’s a remnant of one, now a garrison base over which Britain has sovereignty. (There’s another one at Dhekilia).

Secondly, it never seems to occur to Britain’s right-wing media that Cyprus is independent and an EU member state, not a dependency of the UK, the point which President Macron’s visit with the Greek prime minister on Monday was underlining. The EU was rallying round a member state.

Besides, all that British angst is stupid stuff.

Even if a destroyer had been ready to sail, how would it reach Cyprus before a French frigate based in Toulon, or a Greek vessel from the big base at Souda Bay in Crete?

The days of British Royal Navy vessels routinely patrolling the Mediterranean (or anywhere else) are long gone.

The UK only has six ships capable of shooting down missiles or drones. They don’t need any more. There’s no empire to defend any more.

That’s why they have the smallest army since Waterloo. No-one is going to invade.

The defence ‘experts’ writing in the Tory press and appearing on GB News still haven’t come to terms with the reality of Britain’s status or, if they have, don’t want to admit it.

Britain is a medium-sized European state which is in a parlous political, economic and financial position.

Ah, they say, but the UK is the sixth largest economy in the world.

Listen, the gap between the top two economies and the rest is like the distance to the nearest star.

The UK economy is the same size as California’s – not negligible, but a fraction of either the US or Chinese economies.

Britain is in a parlous position because it has cut itself off from the EU.

The attempt to go it alone through the madness of Brexit was driven by the same outdated world view that Britain’s right-wing media editorialise and broadcast every day.

They never came to terms with the loss of empire. They talk of “global Britain”. In their fantasies everything they do is “world-beating”.

Part of this mindset is an absurd comparison with today’s imperial America and the mythical ‘special relationship’, which in reality is to act diplomatically as America’s poodle and militarily as its biggest aircraft carrier.

It’s long clear beyond peradventure that the special relationship is dependency.

Now, here’s something else Britain has to terms to terms with. The US isn’t going to return to the state it knew before Trump.

He got 77 million votes in 2024, 49% of the total. They included blacks, Hispanics and Irish Americans. Voters turned away from the offer the Democrats made to them.

Trump has damaged so many American institutions and norms that they will never return to what they were.

Many Americans don’t want them to return because they subscribe to the MAGA movement.

British governments will have to make a choice: throw in their lot with the EU or, post-Trump, imagine they can restore the relationship they had pre-Trump.

The latter is not an option that is available.

At present the hapless Starmer is walking a tightrope, but Trump’s capricious, erratic actions are increasingly pushing him towards Europe, which is his preferred inclination.

Starmer won’t be around much longer after the May elections in Britain.

Nevertheless, the choice confronting Britain will become more urgent whoever succeeds him and it will be what the electorate will vote on in 2029 or earlier.

It will boil down to whether voters decide to support a party that accepts the reality of Britain’s diminished place in the world and the need to link up with the EU, or a party which continues to pursue a chimera which vanished 60-odd years ago never to return: Britain on a world stage.

Of course, no-one here will have a say in the matter.

Somebody in Westminster will decide for you, because unionist leaders are too dumb to plan their own future and take their destiny in their own hands.

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