If no EU officials are attending Theresa May's Florence speech, then why did she use taxpayers' money to fly herself out there?

We have to wonder if Theresa May was surprised, at the UN on Wednesday night, to stare out in to the Grand Assembly Hall and see row on row of empty seats

It has come to light that no EU officials will be attending Theresa May’s Florence speech (Getty)

It is reassuring to remember that no one actually ever believed that stuff about leaving the European Union being Britain’s chance to “get out on to the global stage”.

There was a time when talk of a “global Britain” was the slogan of choice of the lunatic fringe section of the lunatic fringe Eurosceptic moment, until smarter minds took back control, who worked out if you actually wanted to win a referendum the only way you could do it was by telling xenophobia-infused lies about Turkey and painting other lies down the side a bus.

All that stuff about a “global Britain” is back now, an unsurprising consequence of the country having a Prime Minister who won the job by losing the referendum and so, inevitably, reaching again for the losing tactics that she clearly feels more comfortable with.

But the first steps of Theresa May’s journey out in to the world are not going so well, are they. At the United Nations, where officials work out which visiting world leaders other visiting world leaders are going to want to listen to and assign slots accordingly, our own Prime Minister was 19th out of 20 on the bill, long after such titans of the global stage as Finland, Panama and Azerbaijan.

And we now know that for Friday’s big Brexit speech in Florence, there will be almost no one in attendance who has not flown in especially from Britain. The European Commission is not sending a single person. The Italian Prime Minister is not attending. Why would he? Italian politics is no stranger to bitter domestic conflict, yet embryonic Italian governing coalitions have not yet hired hotel function halls in Leeds or Reading in which to make their announcements to the world.

Whether Theresa May imagined more of the people of Europe would be inclined to listen to her speech if she relocated it to a hard to access town in central Italy, as opposed to say, her own nation’s capital lying within a two-hour direct train from Brussels, we cannot fully know.

Still, to assemble large numbers of British people and make them travel en masse to Florence to listen to another British person is not necessarily an act of madness. I have done it myself, as it happens, though that was on a school trip, and the British person in question was my history teacher Mr Clark.

We have to wonder too if Theresa May was surprised, at the UN on Wednesday night, to stare out in to the Grand Assembly Hall and see row on row of empty seats. Usually, on such occasions, armies of local activists are brought in and given tutorials on how to most effectively wave placards for the benefit of the TV cameras (“Up and down, not side to side.” I witnessed this happen with my own eyes).

On a personal note, I cannot help but feel that the right not to listen to Theresa May has to be earned. You can’t just not to turn up to a Theresa May speech. You’ve got to do the hard yards first. You’ve got to ride at dawn on every substandard privatised rail network to youth centres, church halls and community centres in every corner of the land to hear the same three soundbites on repeat, the same questions never answered, before you have the right to just say, “No I’m not going to a Theresa May speech.”

But world leaders are busy people, and politically astute too, even the ones who don’t put themselves to the bother of winning elections (as our own one didn’t in fact).

That Britain is apparently going out in to the world with its public face a leader who has, to reluctantly verb a noun, lame-ducked herself for no great reason, is particularly unfortunate.

That said, it’s sad to not be listened to, but perhaps, for the rest of us, the alternative is worse.