It felt like a deeply symbolic, even cathartic, moment on Saturday lunchtime as, on take-off from Stansted, the pilot carrying the new foreign secretary, David Lammy, banked the government plane with the union jack livery sharply leftwards across the sodden and half-occluded fields of Essex and towards Europe.
For the first of what are likely to be innumerable overseas trips, Lammy had chosen Destination Europe, and Operation Reset. It was intended quite literally to be a flying start as he hurtled from his first cabinet meeting down the M11 and on to a flight to Berlin, Stockholm and Bydgoszcz, close to the pastoral family home of the Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski.
