“This abject surrender of British sovereignty!” Mark Francois was in full flight, feeling perhaps the relief of one whose enemy has now revealed himself. He had known of course that Labour was full of lily-livered traitors, people not fit to paint the minesweeper upon which his father so famously served on D-Day. Now, though, he had the evidence.

Much has been written about the doubtful future of the Conservative Party after its defeat in July. On Monday, sitting in the gallery of the House of Commons, our doubts were put to rest. It was the finest moment in our island’s history since an admiral in full fig burst in on Margaret Thatcher to tell her that not only could Britain retake the Falklands, it must retake the Falklands. It was the greatest debate in the chamber since Leo Amery urged Arthur Greenwood to speak for England. Could any Briton have felt prouder upon hearing the news from El Alamein or Waterloo than we did listening to the Conservatives leap to the defence of the Chagos Islands?

Before the election we saw again and again that Labour MPs were a lot more interested in the situation in Gaza than Tory MPs were. But what would be the issue that would provoke Conservative interest? Which would be the benighted people who would stir their hearts with their tales of injustice and oppression?

On Monday we found out. Not for the Tories the intractable problems of the Middle East. No, their interest is more … maritime. Specifically, it is in a group of 60 almost completely uninhabited islands somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

The statement on the agreement to hand control of these islands to Mauritius came late in the day, after a long and largely unenlightening statement on Gaza which revealed that everyone still thinks what they thought last week, and almost everyone agrees that peace is the answer (except Ric Holden, the former Tory chairman, who suggested the solution might be the SAS), but no one has much idea how to get it. Keir Starmer had been answering, and whatever his other flaws — and there will be more on those, much more, as we get it — he is in his comfort zone when it comes to seriousness. He may struggle with colour, but his rhetoric has many, many shades of grey, even after the departure of his chief of staff.

The Tory benches had been full at the start of the Gaza statement, but over the subsequent 80 minutes, many of them had drifted away. So too had their fellow travellers. Nigel Farage could be seen learning that democracy involves a tedious amount of listening to other people and not being the centre of attention. As the prime minister talked about the victims of violence, the Reform leader was visibly bored, staring at the ceiling, puffing out his cheeks and then exhaling slowly through pursed lips. After half an hour he’d left.

But they all returned for the Chagos statement. It was a magnificent sight: row upon row of Colonel Blimps, fulminating at the cheek, the damned cheek, of the government giving away a single inch of soil that has been for ever (or quite some time) England.

How many of them, a week ago, could have found the Chagos Islands on a map, even a map of the Chagos Islands? Now they were experts, composing telegrams to the Ministry of Defence offering to join any task forces sailing to liberate the plucky atolls from the vicious grip of Galtieri, Gaddafi, or whichever wrong ’un was holding them to ransom.

The Conservative conference last week was a reminder of the grip that Margaret Thatcher still holds on the party’s imagination. Even those leadership candidates who haven’t, liked Robert Jenrick, given their daughter the middle name “Thatcher” (opting for “Margaret” would have been simply too subtle for the most obvious man ever to go into politics) felt the need to reassure their audience that they viewed everything though the lens of 1982.

And here were distant British islands in peril! But there will be no sailing from Portsmouth, no helicopters decoying Exocets, no ships sunk in exclusion zones. No yomping, no VCs, no counting them all out and counting them all back. Only the union jack going down for the last time.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy set out the situation. The negotiations had begun under the Conservatives. Under James Cleverly, in fact, though Cleverly, who had been present earlier, had realised he had urgent business to attend to elsewhere which sadly meant he was unable to be present at this moment of national crisis. The Tories were having none of it. “Not true!” Tom Tugendhat, who used to be in the army, actually, shouted after each sentence.

“We’ve just handed sovereign British territory to a small island nation which is an ally of China,” Jenrick declaimed, to loud noises of approval. “In whose interests does he govern,” he asked Lammy, “Those of the global diplomatic elite, or those of the British people?”

Farage, when he spoke, was clear who he speaks for, asking whether the government was sure Donald Trump would be happy about the deal. At moments like this, you really feel for the people of Clacton, which has many more British inhabitants than the Chagos Islands, but is rather less well represented in Parliament.

It is definitely true that if you listen to Lammy long enough, you’ll conclude he’s done a bad deal. And it’s also the case that the people who seem to have had the worst of this are the forcibly removed Chagos islanders, even if Crawley is probably a better place to raise a family than Diego Garcia. But it was hard to escape the thought, for all the harrumphing, that if the Chagos Islands really are quite as vital to our national interest and identity as the opposition benches were suggesting, we might have put a couple of our own troops there, rather than simply leasing it to the Americans.

Emily Thornberry asked about the danger of overfishing if the Chagossians returned to the islands. The Tories scoffed. Unlike the islands, for which they care a great deal, these are faraway fish of which they know little.