Foreign affairs

Boris Johnson is largely toothless. And that’s just how Theresa May likes it

Boris Johnson is incapable of flying below the radar. So the cancellation of his visit to Moscow last weekend, which would barely have been noticed if Britain possessed a greyer foreign secretary, is being seen by some as another career crisis for this emotionally neediest of politicians.

True, it is a tad embarrassing for the foreign secretary to be pulled off the plane to Russia as if he was some surplus United Airlines passenger on an overbooked flight. But let’s not exaggerate it by being wedded to the worn-out narrative that everything that Johnson does is always either fascinating or important.

More significant than the postponed Russia trip, in many ways, is Johnson’s semi-isolation from more cautious G7 foreign ministers in their talks in Lucca over how to approach Vladimir Putin’s Russia in the aftermath of the Assad regime’s Sarin attack in Idlib.