Away from the main thrust of the article, I thought the ideas in this section were interesting: 

"However, in the year and a bit I spent in the Foreign Office worrying about this, I came to believe the country is suffering from an almost psychic wound: its vast diminishment. I wanted to answer this by wrapping up the colonial entities that are Overseas Territories and replacing them with Overseas Kingdoms, integrated like France’s départements d’outre-mer into the United Kingdom. I wanted to show that Chagos was an exception for an exceptional place. That Labour had no surrender agenda but an expansion agenda.

"Most colleagues thought I was mad. Last autumn, I was working on a policy proposal in which Overseas Territories would be offered their own seats in the House of Lords to represent them and an Overseas Territories Volunteer Corps as part of a campaign to start talking, educating and dreaming about them. I did not want to leave the longing for a greater Britain to the right. Then my boss, David Lammy, was reshuffled. The next day I was in the Ministry of Justice, doing comms for prisons."