Chagos, again. How do you even commentate on this government?

A group which doesn’t get as much sympathy as it deserves is journalists who need to write an editorial this morning when their colleague covered Chagos yesterday. Here’s Robert Courts tearing the deal to pieces, if you need another fix. And here’s some of our previous commentary on the subject. There will surely be more.

What else is there even to say? The whole thing is nuts, sure – the new nautical exclusion zone would allow a missile from a Chinese warship to reach the base in about 50 seconds, which is not long enough to do anything about it. We’re proposing not only to pay Mauritius for the base (again) but will need to tell them where all the planes are going.

Honestly, the most convincing argument I’ve seen for why Port Luis is so desperate to frontload the money is because the terms of this deal degrade the use-case for Diego Garcia so badly that, if they are upheld, it seems very likely that we – which is to say the Americans, whose base we’re paying for – give up on it long before the nominal lifetime of Sir Keir Starmer’s lease.

Could we repudiate it? Yes, of course. It’s very much Not The Done Thing in international law circles, of course, but states are sovereign actors and can ultimately Just Do Things. That radical freedom is, of course, constrained by practical considerations, such as the risk of starting a war and the size and power of those with whom you might fight it.

But the counter-party in this case is Mauritius, naval displacement: zero tonnes. Bismarck once quipped that if the British landed in Germany, he would dispatch the Berlin police to arrest them; Port Luis would have only police to send, and they couldn’t even get there.

(The Chagos Archipelago is just about the most remote inhabited landmass on Earth. In the First World War it was so remote that the German SMS Emden, taking a break from single-handedly bringing Indian ocean commerce to a halt, put in for repairs and spent a convivial month with the British garrison, who didn’t know there was a war on.)

So Kemi Badenoch should commit to abrogating this treaty before Nigel Farage does. Ah, too late. Well, she should do it anyway. If Badenoch is going to have a fight with the international law brigade, it would be better to do it on an issue where their case is both really, really stupid and directly opposed to normal progressive principles. She should have lots of actual Chagossians at the press conference.

In the meantime, Labour’s commitment to bump defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP at some point has taken on an exciting new meaning, because the Government is apparently refusing to rule out counting the £101 milllion-per-annum rent (for an American base, on what will no longer be our territory, for which the Americans are not paying for some reason) as part of the defence budget.

But it’s not all doom and gloom; the Government has recouped one fifth of one year’s payments to Mauritius selling the Royal Navy’s entire amphibious landing capacity to Brazil.

At the same time, Angela Rayner is busy circulating memos full of exciting ways to claw revenue out of this country’s shrinking band of net-contributor taxpayers, with reversing the Conservatives’ changes to child benefit entitlement thresholds top of the list.

That was going to happen anyway, of course, as Britain’s innumerate addiction to entitlement spending eats its government from the inside out. But those tax rises might at least have been paying for something useful, or failing that something popular.

Instead, it’s going on this. This! How far have we fallen that politicians levying self-harming taxes to do merely popular things is redolent of the good old days? There were giants in the land once, who at least bribed their own voters.

Will Parliament kill it? Probably not, it would need a major Labour rebellion. Could Parliament kill it? Possibly. Should Parliament kill it? Obviously. I know we’ve done the traditional switching of sides on matters of governmental principle that normally accompany taking and relinquishing office, but it was Labour who decided to curb the royal prerogative power on treaty-making in the first place.

So to any Labour MP who chances to read this, remember: you’re never going to like these people any more than you do now, nor they you. There are far too many colleagues backed onto your benches for everyone to get their turn as parliamentary understudy for whatever. Your whip already has your number.

All they’ve done since taking office is ask you to sign off on cutting this and maintaining the cap on that, and it’s only going to get worse – the money in Rachel Reeves’ spending plan for the parliament (that would be in scare quotes if our style guide permitted them) runs out next year. All that awaits you is more of the same, and every time they demand this efficiency saving or decline to back that pledge, they’ll have found another hundred million a year to pay for this.

That isn’t your fault. Whatever cause motivated you to come into politics, it was unfortunate not to hire an old buddy of the Prime Minister’s as its legal counsel. Perhaps, having performed the professional equivalent of separating the earth from the waters and letting there be light, Phillipe Sands KC will be looking for a new commission. But there’s only one of him, and lots of causes.

So think about the good you think this government could do with £100m a year, and then vote this down and make the demand of the Chancellor. She won’t be able to say there isn’t the money.