THREAD: Britain's worst foreign policy disasters since the First World War, in chronological order.

I'm taking the Great War as the starting point, because I think it resides in a hideous category all by itself. Was there ever a more futile, elites-driven war in human history?

Blackadder Goes Forth wasn't just so popular because it was so funny. It was based on large kernels of truth. "Field Marshal Haig is about to make yet another gargantuan effort to move his drinks cabinet six inches closer to Berlin" and all that.

That war wasn't Britain's fault - but it wasn't Germany's fault either. It was Empire's fault. It was the inevitable conclusion of centuries of Europe having carved the whole damn world up for itself - and fighting each other too.

Afterwards, did anything change? Nope.

See the Sykes-Picot Middle Eastern carve-up, with devastating consequences even today. See, too, Georges Clemenceau at Versailles, and what that did to Germany. And American isolationism and the miserable, unmitigated failure of the League of Nations.

And so, via the Wall Street Crash and Great Depression (yay capitalism ), we come to the first great blunder of this thread. Appeasement.

But here's the thing. Most of appeasement's many critics do so from a position of hindsight. It was completely explicable at the time.

1. Europe had gone through a devastating war barely a generation earlier, and naturally did not want to do so again.

2. Both Britain and Germany were not in a state of readiness for war (and both wildly over-estimated each other's capacities).

3. However monstrous Hitler's policies became at home, until March 1939, he could absolutely be viewed as a Versailles revisionist. Uniting the German-speaking peoples was to revise Versailles. German nationalist parties like the DNVP had also called for that.

March 1939 - the annexation not just of the Sudetenland, but THE WHOLE of Czechoslovakia - changed that completely. Britain had made every effort possible to achieve peace; Hitler simply ripped the Munich Agreement up, and showed what his intentions truly were.

It has always been unclear to me what an unready Britain could've done instead. Pre-emptive war? There was no public will behind it at all. Chamberlain's approval ratings actually remained at 60% well into 1940. His disastrous place in history probably isn't justified.

Next, Suez. The last, desperate flailings of a former Empire whose role in the world had shrunk dramatically over the preceding decade. Britain had entered the war primus inter pares; it ended it tertius inter pares: bankrupt, economically and militarily dependent on the US.

And of course, the Cold War divided the world into two massive power blocs. A small island nation was hardly going to remain pre-eminent in such circumstances... but amid much tub-thumping and jingoism, many in Britain couldn't handle that.

Suez took place in late October/early November 1956. The timing was probably the biggest blunder of all. The timing was quite mad actually: because it all happened in the days before the US election.

Eisenhower had campaigned for those elections as a man of peace and stability.

Through John Foster Dulles, his Secretary of State, Ike repeatedly warned Dulles' counterpart, Harold Macmillan, that the US would not support Britain's plans in any way: least of all before the election happened.

Macmillan then went back to Anthony Eden and lied.

Well, I say 'lied'; it is absolutely plausible that Macmillan, whose friendship with Eisenhower dated back to the war, simply convinced himself that the President was bluffing. "I know Ike. He will lie doggo".

British politicians persuading themselves of something totally at odds with reality based on their own sense of self-importance is nothing new. It's happened throughout history. But when it came to Suez - completely illegal - Macmillan was "first in, first out".

His had the voice loudly urging Eden on in Cabinet, and laughably comparing Nasser with Mussolini (note to Supermac: it was Britain which behaved like fascists in this sorry saga). Then his was the loudest voice begging instant retreat when a livid Eisenhower threatened sanctions

Yes, that's right: sanctions. Against the UK.

The UN General Assembly voted 64-5 for an immediate ceasefire, withdrawal, arms embargo and reopening of the Suez Canal: a historic, catastrophic humiliation.

And to my mind, worst of all: all this enabled the USSR to destroy the Hungarian uprising while the world focused on something else. Suez' timing couldn't have been more ideal for Nikita Khrushchev and the Red Army; less so for poor, heroic Imre Nagy, who paid with his life.

Yet here's the thing. Macmillan actually received CREDIT from the Tory Party for having been so pro-war in the first place. He was cast quite monstrously in Churchill's image; Rab Butler in Chamberlain's image.

And astoundingly, under him, the Tories were back ahead in no time.

By which, I mean a matter of weeks. The thing about Suez is among the British public, it was quickly forgotten. It was more symbolic than anything else. It meant that, with the sole laudable exception of Wilson and Vietnam, Britannia would now do whatever Uncle Sam demanded.

And interestingly, it clearly also persuaded Macmillan that Britain's future lay at the heart of the Europe too. From then on, he aimed to reach out to both the EEC *and* Washington - though famously, De Gaulle snubbed the former efforts.

Overall, in part because of how quickly it all started and finished, I think Suez is more important to historians and academics than to the public.

Now we leap forward 47 years. To Iraq.

The backdrop here has to include:

1. The 1980-8 Iran-Iraq war, in which we supplied weapons to Saddam Hussein; but also

2. The 1990-1 Gulf War, which followed international law. A massive UN-backed global coalition forced Iraq out of Kuwait but didn't go further.

To have done so would've destroyed a coalition made up not only of the US, UK and France - but Arab states, the USSR, even Israel. However. not doing so left the Kurds in the north and Shia and Marsh Arabs in the south to suffer a horribly grisly fate.

The armistice terms required Saddam to comply with UN weapons inspectors and to destroy any remaining chemical or biological weapons.

And of course, sanctions were imposed. "A price worth paying", said Madeleine Albright about half a million dead children.

In the mid-1990s, Douglas Hurd, recently Foreign Secretary, came to speak at my school. I challenged him furiously on sanctions. "Saddam can sell oil for food", Hurd protested.

"Saddam does not give a damn about his people - and their suffering is a propaganda victory for him", I fulminated in response.

To me, sanctions were lunatic. Mad. In which we punished the Iraqi people for consequences our arming of Saddam had helped bring about.

Vile.

Also in the mid-1990s, something significant. VERY significant.

Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law, left Iraq surreptitiously along with his wife, brother and the latter's wife. His aim was to bring Saddam down by working with the international authorities in Jordan.

Once in Jordan, he told the UN inspectors, US and UK security services that all the weapons had been destroyed years earlier. And remember: by defecting, he'd committed the ultimate act of treason against his father-in-law, and even imperilled two of Saddam's own daughters.

He had precisely zero reason to lie. He couldn't have had less of one. He was telling the truth - but incomprehensibly, mindblowingly, neither the inspectors nor the US and UK's laughably incompetent intelligence services believed him.

Jordan quickly withdrew its support for him

And he and his brother were left with no option other than to return to Iraq. At the border, they were separated from their wives - both Saddam's daughters, remembered - and executed three days after their return. Gunned down after a firefight in their own home.

Kamel's testimony that Iraq had destroyed all its weapons of mass destruction was quite massively important. It's probably how Robin Cook knew Iraq no longer had any WMD.

But it wasn't just ignored. The section which mentioned that Iraq had WMD *before* they were destroyed (naturally, because they'd been supplied by Britain and America) was actually cited by Colin Powell to the UN. The important bit - that they'd been destroyed - was omitted.

9/11, of course, changed US foreign policy - 60 years of multilateralism - pretty much overnight. The UN hadn't stopped the US from being attacked, argued Bush; so it was every nation for itself now, amid a thirst for vengeance which swept so many of his people.

That desire for not justice, but an almost biblical sense of vengeance, is why the death penalty still exists in the United States. "Someone's got to pay". But that someone had precisely zero to do with 9/11; that someone was arguably even more loathed by Bin Laden than the US.

Saddam's Iraq was secular. Bin Laden was a perverted, twisted theocratic demagogue. The country behind 9/11 was, in terms of its people, Saudi Arabia, so what did the US do about them? Nothing of course. Because the Saudis meant lots of lovely oil. Saddam was the designated enemy

That's not to say anything other than that Saddam was a man of pure evil, and his son Uday was somehow even worse. Uday would proposition women on the street, kidnap them, rape them... and in a few cases, throw them to a pack of ravenous dogs to be torn to pieces.

Uday would torture the Iraqi football team for their results and missing penalty kicks.

Saddam, meanwhile, would dissolve political opponents IN BATHS OF ACID.

If there's one (and it's the only one) flaw with the left's critique of the Iraq war, it's that the above is ignored.

These were mindboggling evil, depraved, sadistic mass murderers. Saddam, of course, even gassed his own people.

But going to war can never, ever, ever be a first resort. It's a last resort: when all other means have been exhausted. And when the casus belli is clear.

In Britain's case: Tony Blair either flat out lied or, like Macmillan, lied to himself about the evidence... or lack thereof. The weapons inspectors wanted more time and there was no reason whatsoever not to allow it to them. The intelligence failures were astonishing.

- No awareness on the huge differences between peoples in different parts of Iraq: Sunni, Shia and Kurd, in a country with little sense of true nationhood and unity because Sykes-Picot wedged it together unnaturally in the first place.

- No awareness that Iraq no longer had WMD

- No awareness from a community whose job it is to 'know your enemy' that it was in Saddam's domestic interests to PRETEND he still had WMD (and thereby obstruct the inspectors) when he didn't.

Saddam's domestic position was steadily eroding. Polycratic chaos was everywhere throughout a crumbling Iraq: crumbling because of over a decade of sanctions.

Saddam could only survive by acting the regional strongman; pointing to the West as the collective enemy.

Why did I, an international relations graduate, know this - but our so-called 'intelligence' services and our leaders not know it?

No justification for war. No UN support for an illegal, pre-emptive war. And worst of all...

No plan for what came afterwards. None.

If you're going to do what we did in Iraq, you plan comprehensively for the aftermath. You do what we did in Germany and Japan after bombing both to bits. You absolutely DO NOT do what we and the US did.

When the looting and violence began and Iraqis were dying in their droves after Saddam's fall, Donald Rumsfeld said:

"Stuff happens".

One of the most racist, orientalist things I've ever heard any politician anywhere say. That was how little the Iraqi people meant to us.

We'd tied ourselves to a rogue, neo-conservative administration which had seized the opportunity of illegal regime change and massive pillaging of Iraq's resources. We'd destroyed our global geopolitical and diplomatic reputation. And we'd turned Iraq into a hornet's nest.

Where Iraq had never been a breeding ground for terrorists before the war, now we turned it into one, with bells on.

Where Iraq had been the crucial regional balance between Saudi Arabia and Iran, now we'd destroyed it: with consequences for the whole region.

And what did we achieve? Nothing. I'm sure there must be Iraqis out there grateful to us for having removed Saddam - and later, helping to destroy Daesh - but this was failure with a capital 'F'. Catclysmic.

Not least in how it started the long, awful process of the British public's loss of trust in their leaders; the people who were supposed to know best and keep them safe.

The people had been right, for the right reasons. Their leaders had been wrong, for the wrong reasons.

Which brings us neatly on to... Brexit. The ultimate kick in the wotsits from a public sick to the back teeth of being talked down to, condescended to, lied to, by a political class which had nothing in common with their lives at all.

But also to a referendum campaign of lies.

Lies, lies and more lies - and a media (including the BBC) which failed totally to inform and educate the public on anything at all.

Do you think most voters on 23 June 2016 knew what a customs union even was?

Do you think most voters knew anything about the implications for Northern Ireland?

Do you think most voters even realised that we could control immigration or be in the single market... but not both?

"We can be like Switzerland! We can be like Norway!" lied a bunch of disgusting chancers and opportunists: guilty men, all of them. Guilty women too, when we include Kate Hoey or Gisela Stuart.

Liars. They lied to the public and helped destroy the country's whole future. Shame.

And Remain? Most bogglingly of all, Remain did not challenge Leave on any of the above. None of it. Instead, it was all doom and gloom about money but no detail whatsoever - and no positive reasons for staying in the EU at all.

Naturally, the public was confused.

A fraudulent, mendacious beyond belief Leave campaign against a weak as piss Remain campaign: overseen largely by the same masterminds who'd plotted Labour and the Lib Dems' disastrous 2015 elections.

Why is Alan Johnson, for example, never called out for his disgraceful incompetence? Oh yes, I know: it's because the media wasn't paying attention. As usual.

What did 52-48 actually mean? It meant "er... um... we don't know".

It meant, as an absolute maximum: leave the political institutions, stay in the single market and customs union. That's the only way Brexit could've been a good (or at least net neutral) thing.

Instead, Theresa May chose to interpret a narrow, divided margin as "immigrants OUT!"

That's what her 'burning injustices' speech was actually all about. It was about the 'injustices' of immigrants competing for jobs, homes etc in communities which hadn't been invested in for 40 years.

And she also chose to set an impossible to meet series of 'red lines'.

Where Britain is now is STILL a direct result of those utterly preposterous red lines: because it convinced the Tory Party and much of the public that we could somehow get everything we wanted... despite it being impossible. Against the rules. Unworkable. Pie in the sky.

What would a sensible, sane democracy have done following a 52-48 outcome on a binary choice with no detail? It'd have formed a cross-party negotiating team and sought the softest possible Brexit - not the hardest one. It wouldn't even have politicised the issue at all.

Instead, Brexit would expose:

- A wildly outmoded, prehistoric political system which isn't fit for purpose

- A joke media which STILL wouldn't inform the public on anything

- Remainers who spent years punching not right, but left: doing Brexiteers' bidding for them

So it was that during the last election campaign, Boris Johnson was able to trot out his bullshit about an "oven ready" deal - and nobody challenged him on it. Nobody in the media; even Corbyn himself scarcely did in any effectual way.

What he was actually doing was leading Britain towards disaster capitalism and vulture capitalism. Towards complete disaster and the devastation of the country's future for maybe generations to come.

And no-one challenged him on it during the campaign. Unreal.

Even if we get a deal now in the time remaining, it'll be thin. Weak. It won't be steak; it'll be gruel. However much Boris will laud it as a triumph and a compliant, disgusting media will parrot his drivel.

And if we don't...?

There is no such thing as No Deal. No Deal is the strawberry jam at the bottom of the cliff after we've jumped off it. Be afraid, Britain. Be very afraid.

Which, though, was the worst of the four blunders this thread has set out?

In death and destruction, it was Iraq, no question.

In consequences for the British people, it's Brexit, no question.

The left often focuses on the former. It needs, urgently, to focus on the latter. All of the next 20 years of politics are being shaped between now and Dec 31.

The consequences for the poorest and weakest of no deal will make austerity look like a picnic.

And no, leaving isn't some two fingers up at "privileged, middle class liberals". Leaving in this way is a national catastrophe, period. The only winners are con men and shysters.

Britain's always had more than its fair share of those - but they've never wrecked their compatriots' future quite like this before.

The magnitude of this disaster is historic. And in its impact on British people, I think it's the worst of the lot.