The key to our foreign policy, Mr Johnson stressed, will be international cooperation. This will be on a far wider plane than simply the EU, as used to be the foundation of our policy. Our global role, with a seat on the UN Security Council, gives us a key position in working on planning for future pandemic risks, and our chairmanship of the COP26 climate negotiations in Glasgow this November gives a focus on global warming. As a member of NATO we embody the transatlantic alliance – or what he called “the Euro-Atlantic area”. As members of the EU, our foreign policy was largely dictated by having to accommodate the views of other EU members. If we disagreed, we effectively had to grin and bear it. But “in leaving the EU,” as the Prime Minister put it in his Munich speech, “we restored sovereign control over vital levers of foreign policy”.