“The Conservative government,” Priti Patel informed the House of Commons, “called for President Assad to go over a decade ago.” And now it had come to pass. She wasn’t taking credit, as such, though if it’s offered, she might not refuse it. In politics you have to grab your victories where you can.

It was an afternoon of friends and enemies. Over in Brussels, Rachel Reeves had arrived for a meeting with counterparts looking cheerful, full of talk of resetting relations and moving forwards. She emerged a little later looking like, well, looking like she’d attended a meeting of European Union finance ministers. Nothing cures enthusiasm for the EU faster than attending an EU meeting. Indeed, from a Whitehall perspective, one of the few undisputed Brexit dividends was not having to go to any more EU summits.

Back in London, the Foreign Secretary David Lammy was updating the Commons on the fall of Bashar al-Assad. His statement was late, having been held up by a previous Urgent Question that overran. Appropriately, this was an endless discussion of delays in Britain’s planning process. MPs are against these, but also, in many cases, against anything that will allow the government to build houses in their constituencies.

The focus of his statement was, reasonably enough, the wickedness of Assad over the past decade. Pressure of time prevented him from going into the moment in 2013 when, in response to the dictator’s use of chemical weapons, he and other Labour MPs had successfully voted to block a British military response. Did that moment of weakness (or statesmanship, if you prefer) shore the Syrian up? Look, it’s complicated.

It was all complicated. Patel, who turns out to be shadow foreign secretary, had to phrase her words about the Tory position a little carefully, because the Conservative prime minister in question had been David Cameron. There was a flash of memory of listening to now-Lord Dave’s spokeswoman assuring us, over a decade ago, that Assad could have no part in Syria’s future. The dictator would go on to see off five British prime ministers.

Indeed, as Lammy told the chamber, it had looked recently as though he was being readmitted to polite society. He’d gone back into the Arab League. He’d been embraced, literally, by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Now he’s in Moscow, doubtless regretting the short supply of really good cold weather gear in the Middle East.

Why had his government fallen now, after hanging on for so long? It was, as I say, very complicated, so Lammy focussed on one important point. People had urged Britain to start dealing with the Syrian dictator, but Britain — though Lammy was too modest to say it, we were left in no doubt that he was talking about himself — Britain had stood firm.

“This government chose not to re-engage,” declaimed the Foreign Secretary. “We said no, because Assad is a monster.” It was stirring stuff. Listening, it was all we could do not to leap to our feet, salute and cry “God Save The King!”. Would this effect have been in any way undermined had we recalled an interview Lammy gave three months ago where he’d expressed an interest in looking for a deal with the Syrians to return asylum seekers? Perhaps a touch.

But this is to sneer. Let us return to Lammy’s speech. “We said no, because Assad was a dictator whose sole interest was his wealth and his power! And we said no, because Assad is a criminal who defied all laws and norms to use chemical weapons against the Syrian people! We said no, because Assad is a butcher with the blood of countless innocents on his hands!” He’s jolly good at this kind of thing, Lammy, in the sense that he can deliver a speech that makes it clear that everything is very simple and that there are good guys and bad guys, and he is one of the good guys.

As for the other guys, well, as he spoke, Keir Starmer was in Saudi Arabia, meeting bin Salman, a man implicated in his own fair share of unpleasantness, and inviting him to Britain to watch some sport. You say “butcher with blood on his hands”, I say “football mate”. Po-tay-to, pot-ah-to.

Lammy was now answering Patel, and speaking off the cuff. “None of us,” he said, “want to see Syria become like Libya next door, fractured and vulnerable to different terrorist groups.” At this point you could see journalists’ foreheads creasing as they tried to remember their Middle Eastern geography (it’s Jordan that always gets me, and I’ve been there). Is Libya, 600 miles and two countries away, strictly speaking “next door” to Syria?

In 1877 one of Lammy’s predecessors, Lord Salisbury, told the House of Lords that many mistakes in British foreign policy were down to people in London looking at maps with the wrong scale and concluding that Russia was next door to India. There was a pleasing symmetry in his successor illustrating the point. It really is all very complicated.