We’re now living in Brexit Britain – and this is what it means for our place in the world

Within the seconds that it took for the exit poll results to sink in, Brexit quite suddenly became inevitable. But are Britons now becoming reconciled to the UK’s position as a medium-sized power in the modern world?

Boris Johnson’s big victory is a personal vindication for the prime minister – for risking the country’s first winter election for almost a century; for running an almost presidential-style campaign, starring himself; for his ruthless purge of Remainers from his parliamentary party; and, above all, for making the election all about Brexit. Each or all of those decisions could have rebounded. In the end, Boris Johnson’s gamble – and it was a gamble – paid off.

The clarity of his victory gives the Conservative Party the first safe overall majority any party has enjoyed in the House of Commons since Tony Blair’s last win for Labour in 2005, and it frees Johnson from having to seek alliances that would limit his room for manoeuvre. While a bitter blow for still-hopeful Remainers in the UK and opponents of Brexit, such as Donald Tusk, in the just-departed leadership in Brussels, the election result means that there is now not the slightest prospect of a second referendum. The UK is now on course to leave the EU formally by the end of January.

In the short term, this simplifies a great deal. It also rescues the UK from another round of embarrassing and potentially bad-tempered negotiations on a further delay. That should lighten the mood with Brussels, and enable a business-like approach to prevail on both sides as the UK embarks on the next, and potentially still more complex, process of trade negotiations.

Looking ahead to the UK’s post-Brexit foreign relations, it is worth noting how much Boris Johnson achieved in the three months before the election. He not only met his own deadline for revising Theresa May’s “deal”, but he managed to dissipate much of the ill feeling among European leaders towards him personally – some of which stemmed from his 2016 comparison of the Brussels bureaucracy to Hitler in its supposed desire to unify Europe under one “authority”.

As with his electoral campaigning, he showed an ability to establish a personal rapport with key individuals – something Theresa May never achieved – and also to be led by pragmatism above principle, including on the conundrum of the Irish border. Such qualities bode well for future relations not only with the EU, but with the rest of the world.

While Johnson’s convincing victory has surely simplified the Brexit process in the short term, and opened the way for purposeful trade talks with the EU to begin in a reasonably cooperative spirit, it will have another consequence, too – and one whose effects are harder to forecast.

Within the seconds that it took for the exit poll results to sink in, Brexit quite suddenly became inevitable in a way it had not been before. The UK will be seen, and has to see itself, as a country outside the European Union which is (in so far as any country can be today) the master of its own destiny. There can now be no sheltering in apologies or despair for the “mess” that a country regarded before the referendum as generally orderly and sensible has got itself into. Now, or very soon, Brexit Britain will be the reality. The UK will be outside not just EU institutions and structures, but outside the assumed consensus on “values” that has made the EU a beacon for others, including those other European countries that aspire to membership.

It will also be a competitor – in a way that smaller European Economic Area states, such as Norway and Switzerland are not – which is why the UK cannot expect an easy ride in its talks with Brussels on trade. Harmonising regulation, or not, stands to become a big and contentious question, with the UK’s “hard” Brexiteers raising their heads to ask why we have gone through the whole Brexit process if we have not ended up with the advantages they expected to accrue from leaving the EU single market.

In a speech at the College of Europe as he was leaving office, Donald Tusk warned that the UK would lose influence in international affairs, saying that Brexit marked the “real end” of the British Empire. How much influence the UK loses depends to an extent on how Johnson and his new government interpret their much-advertised policy of “Global Britain”. Will the UK have the sense of purpose, and the means, to project diplomatic and military power far beyond Europe? How receptive will former colonies be to wooing from their former imperial overlord? Once Brexit, or at least the first stage of Brexit, is “done”, will Johnson possess the will or the vision to reorientate a foreign policy (and a Foreign Office) that has assumed EU membership for nearly half a century?

And will that reorientation, if it happens, be largely mercantile in character or will it look to foster defence alliances or, alternatively, harness “soft power”. Trade alone may not be plain sailing. Australia and New Zealand, for instance, saw their trade with the UK damaged when the UK joined the EU and have now established flourishing trade arrangements of their own. Why should they do London any favours.

What price, too, for the “special relationship”? The liabilities of any trade agreement with the United States have been well rehearsed, not least in relation to the NHS, however favourably disposed Donald Trump might be both to Brexit and to Boris Johnson. UK relations with China are already complicated by the unrest in Hong Kong and possible security risks from cooperation with Chinese companies. How much clout will the UK command, compared with when it was dealing with China as part of the EU?

Whatever happens with “Global Britain”, however, Tusk is undoubtedly right where Europe is concerned. The UK wielded real influence in the EU – though perhaps not as much as it might have done, had it been more of a team player. That influence is now lost, affecting not only the UK, but those countries – especially in east and central Europe – who felt the UK to be their champion, whether in resisting what they see as the superstate instincts of “old Europe” or in standing up to Russia.

With Brexit, the whole geopolitical balance of the EU has changed.

Depending on Boris Johnson’s appetite for cutting a figure on the world stage, the UK’s image of itself as an international power could also change. There has been a presumption in some quarters that the Brexit vote reflected a desire (however unrealistic) to make Britain, or even England, “great again”. Cue “Rule Britannia” and “Land of Hope and Glory”.

But there was another strand to the Brexit vote, which called for the UK to draw in its horns, not to “punch above its weight” and, following the chastening experience of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, to stay out of other people’s wars. Taken together with the calls to curb immigration, this could reflect an isolationist strand, tinged with xenophobia. But there is also a more charitable explanation. Could it be that Britons are becoming reconciled to the UK’s position as a medium-sized power in the modern world in a way that successive governments have ignored? Will Johnson – a not entirely enthusiastic foreign secretary, it might be remembered – want Brexit Britain to bestride the world, or will his ambitions be more modest, starting, say, with good governance at home?

There were few indications during the election campaign, either in the Conservative manifesto or from Johnson himself, about what place he sees for the UK in the world post-Brexit. The term “Global Britain” – which is not of his coining – has come in for criticism, even ridicule, for its glib emptiness. There was a hint, though, that he would like to rekindle the atmosphere of the London 2012 Olympics (when he was mayor of London) on a national scale and capitalise on the UK’s international appeal in that sort of way.

What is certain is that Johnson’s fateful decision three years ago contributed to the referendum victory for Leave and that making Brexit the focus of his campaign was a big factor in his election triumph this week.

With victory comes responsibility. It is now up to him to chart the international future for a country that already feels much smaller than it did and which, for good or ill, must make its own way in the world. New opportunities may await, but so do enormous risks.