What a difference a fortnight can make. After the enforced transfer of the Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife from their Caracas palace to a New York prison, Sir Keir Starmer and his ministers devised an equivocation that avoided condemning the United States for what was a flagrant breach of international norms and allowed them to sit firmly on the fence. No tears would be shed for Mr Maduro, so the formula went, but the legal rights and wrongs were for the US to decide.
The UK, and the prime minister personally, had invested too much in securing the prized “special relationship” to have it upset by an episode that, awkward as it was, was confined to the other side of the Atlantic. Donald Trump’s ever more insistent claims to take over Greenland from Denmark, in contrast, seemed relatively simple to handle. It was up to the Danes and the Greenlanders to decide what, if anything, should change.
