Boris Johnson’s Global Britain is exposed as impotent and friendless by Afghanistan

When a freshly elected Joe Biden had his first transatlantic phone conversation with Boris Johnson, Number 10 bragged that the prime minister was at the top of the list on the new American president’s call sheet. Downing Street flourished this as evidence that, whatever differences between the two men there might have been in the past, the “special relationship” was as warm and deep as ever.