WHEN I was young, a strange character haunted my home town. It’s harsh to say, but he was shabby, disliked. He lived in a fancy house outside town, but was down on his luck – dirty and ill-kempt. He was nasty and odd. He’d shout at shopkeepers, bully youngsters. He didn’t have a friend in the world.

After university, I worked briefly for my home town newspaper. I hadn’t been back for years, but when I returned that strange old man was still there. Curiosity being an essential journalist trait, I asked questions I hadn’t raised as a kid, like: what’s this guy’s story?

I discovered he’d once been a successful professor. He’d sunk his money into a get-rich-quick scheme, left his job hoping to become a millionaire … but lost everything, apart from the house. It turned him into a sour old monster. A victim of his own arrogance, he’d gone from cock-of-the-walk to Billy No Mates.

The Shabby Professor is a good metaphor for Britain. The world has started sneering at us, judging us. Across the UK, there’s a palpable sense of decay – that the rot has set in. We’re becoming degraded. Nothing quite works. There’s a mood of quiet despair, and a slight whiff of something unpleasant: cruelty, a nastiness that’s putrifying and corrupting.

It’s quite something when the United Nations’ Secretary General takes a barely veiled pop at a country. But that’s what Antonio Guterres just did to Britain over climate change. Mr Guterres made clear both King Charles and Rishi Sunak should be at the Cop27 climate summit. Mr Sunak snubbed the event. Charles was effectively banned by Liz Truss. Mr Sunak is already considering a U-turn and attending the event, due to an avalanche of criticism. However, the reputational damage has been done. When asked if he worried about Britain’s commitment to climate change Guterres pointedly said that he believed in the commitment of “the UK people”.

Okay … but what about the Government? “Governments are accountable to the people and I believe the people will make the Government accountable in a way that the commitments that were made will be maintained.” It’s not the most diplomatic language for the world’s leading diplomat. His words are understandable, though. The UN has just warned that there’s no credible way for the planet to keep global temperature rises below 1.5 degrees. We’re heading for a 2.5 degree rise and catastrophe.

We’re paving a path toward a future that kills our own grandchildren. Yet Britain – current holder of the COP presidency – looks like it will send neither the head of state nor PM to the world’s climate summit. Over a quarter of the £530,000 donated to Mr Sunak this year came from supporters with interests in oil, gas and aviation. Even Alok Sharma, the government’s climate Tsar, who oversaw Glasgow’s Cop26, feels Mr Sunak risks undermining Britain’s standing on the environment with his clumsy positioning around Cop27.

Another leading UN diplomat also took a swipe at Britain. The special rapporteur on poverty, Olivier De Schutter, singled Britain out for perpetuating the myth that the poor are to blame for their own poverty. While criticising the notion of meritocracy – the Darwinian belief that success in life is solely down to your natural talents, and social factors which might hold you back are irrelevant – he said: “We have many studies showing that the belief in meritocracy is highest in those more unequal societies, and the UK is not faring very well in this regard”. He added that it’s “elites” who “believe in meritocracy because, of course, that’s a way for them to confirm their sense of superiority”.

At home, our Government turns a cruel, inhuman face towards refugees. Home Secretary Suella Braverman “dreams” of sending the world’s most desperate people to Rwanda. Currently, around 4,000 folk she’d love to deport are detained in deplorable conditions at a "processing centre" at a disused airport in Manston, Kent. It’s designed for just 1,600.

People should only be there 24 hours. Some have been held more than a month. One Afghan family slept on mats in a marquee for 32 days. Children have been seen calling for help. Yet we wonder why some lunatic threw fire bombs at a refugee centre. What are we becoming?

The Work and Pensions Secretary backs slashing maternity rights. The Women’s Minister supports cutting abortion time limits and opposes buffer zones. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly tells LGBT folk to respect Qatar, where homosexuality is illegal. Conservatives weaponise trans rights. What’s happening is dark, ugly, illiberal.

A few days ago it emerged that a mother who cares for a child with cerebral palsy faces putting her daughter into care as the cost of living means she can’t afford to look after her. People are skipping work because they can’t afford to keep clean. The need for food banks now outstrips donations for the first time. And the Conservative Government is about to usher in a fresh era of austerity. How much lower will people sink?

Just last week, The Atlantic magazine in America published an article headlined "How the UK became one of the poorest countries in Western Europe". The reason? Brexit, said the magazine.

Recently, there was the most surreal spectacle at the Pride of Britain Awards. Our country paid honour to Michelle Dornelly, a mum who’s fed more than 100,000 hungry people. After she won her award, Dornelly said: “I’m on benefits, I’ve got special needs children.” Refugees were also on stage at the Pride of Britain, picking up awards. The very people our Government denigrates were being celebrated by the British public.

The nation was brought up short by the international reaction to Ms Truss’s premiership trashing our economy, when world leaders, like America’s President Biden, pointedly said the Government had made a “mistake”, and the IMF rebuked and embarrassed Downing Street. The public shaming made clear that the world now thinks considerably less of us.

The decay has set in. At home, the lives of British people get shabbier, abroad we’re at best pitiable, at worst a joke. The madness is that we all know why we’re suffering more than other countries when it comes to inflation and Putin’s criminal war: Brexit. It kicked the legs out from under the UK. It debased us. It turned us into the Shabby Professor. The big shot who became a has-been because of his own selfish choices.

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