Indeed there was, at least some of the time: in 1895 most of Europe united in condemnation of a failed British-backed attempt to overthrow the government of the Transvaal, while Washington forced London to accept its mediation in a colonial boundary dispute with Venezuela, and the protracted Boer War a few years later brought fresh international denunciation of another imperial escapade in South Africa. Looking to end its “splendid isolation”, Britain could in 1902 find no ally closer than Japan, still geopolitically an unknown quantity despite its recent victory against China.

In the 1890s it was France which most resented British imperial strength, culminating in 1898 in a minor war scare over rival military expeditions in Sudan. But with the new century relations with Germany deteriorated, leading to reconciliation with France and later its ally Russia (with which Britain had had another minor incident in 1904 during Russia’s war with London’s Japanese ally). By 1910 something of an informal diplomatic coalition was emerging of Britain, France, Russia, Japan and the US, with London as its principal intermediary.

Britain’s overseas political woes in the 1920s were limited mostly to colonial or semicolonial territories or countries where its influence was seen as over-powerful in the wake of its large foreign investments before 1914 (though in places a British financial presence was seen as a counterweight to rising US economic power). Even defeated Germany availed itself of London’s good offices to moderate its harsh postwar treatment at Allied (mostly French) hands, but relations with the emerging USSR remained intermittent and strained after the British military intervention of 1918-19, being only finally restored in 1929.

1895-1902 was probably the low, with two overseas humiliations and a militarily successful but gruelling and almost universally deplored colonial war. But Britain learned that it needed friends, and by that measure its diplomacy was largely successful until the deterioration of the late 1930s.