QUESTION: When is the UK Foreign Secretary not Foreign Secretary? Answer: When the UK Government thinks he’s an embarrassment. How many times, one wonders, will Downing Street have to insist that the views of Boris Johnson are not representative of the UK position on an issue or country before his job will be on the line?

Last week brash Boris was at it again, making the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) a laughing stock. On this occasion it was less of a jolly gaffe and more outright diplomatic embarrassment for Prime Minister Theresa May when he went off script yet again, saying at a conference in Rome that Saudi Arabia and Iran were stoking proxy wars across the Middle East.

That Saudi Arabia is deemed to be a British ally makes this cringingly embarrassing enough. That the Prime Minister has just returned from a visit to the country during which she met Saudi King Salman and emphasised the two countries’ “vital partnership” and the UK’s desire to “strengthen” that relationship is nothing short of a diplomatic disaster for Mrs May.

Yes, if one thing is certain for the UK Government in these uncertain times, it’s that you can always rely on your Foreign Secretary to drop you right in it.

Yesterday Downing Street was doing its best to extricate itself from the diplomatic doo doo, stressing that Mr Johnson’s remarks were his personal views and did not represent “the Government’s position”.

As regular readers of this column will know, I’m no fan of Mr Johnson and thought his appointment as Foreign Secretary was up there with Tony Blair’s as Middle East envoy in terms of diplomatic cloud-cuckoo-land thinking.

For what it’s worth, however, as a watcher of Middle Eastern affairs, it’s hard to take exception to Mr Johnson’s observation that Saudi Arabia and Iran are “puppeteering and playing proxy wars” in places such as Yemen and Syria. The simple, inescapable fact is that this is indeed true.

For some considerable time, the bitter tussle for regional supremacy between predominately Shia Iran and Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia has been the backdrop against which so many of the Middle East’s wars, open and covert, have been played out, most noticeably of late in Syria and Yemen.

Mr Johnson is right, too, when he says that all of this is tragic to watch and leaders in both countries are cynically manipulating different strains of the Islamic faith to further their political objectives. Already I can feel a fusillade of political brickbats being readied for hurling in my direction so, before those inclined to launch them take aim, let me move promptly on to my real point here.

What sticks in the craw about Mr Johnson’s remarks is that they come from the same British Foreign Secretary who only recently insisted that a “threshold has not been crossed” by Saudi Arabia in its bombardment of Yemen.

This bombardment is carried out using armaments supplied by the second biggest arms dealer in the world, the UK, to its biggest customer, Saudi Arabia. Time and again evidence gathered by conflict monitoring and human right groups points to the fact that British-made Brimstone missiles and other UK and US-supplied weapons have been used by the Saudi-led forces.

While this goes on Mr Johnson and the UK Government also consistently deny that British expert air force and other personnel are involved in picking exact targets of Saudi-coalition air strikes.

According to Mr Johnson’s explanation of this role, they are simply giving “general guidance” and “trying to advise” the Saudis on “how targeting should work”. Sadly for the unfortunate Yemeni civilians and others caught up in this bombardment, it works all too effectively, taking a terrible toll of the innocent.

Between March 2015 and October 2016, at least 4,125 civilians were killed and 7,207 wounded in Yemen, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the majority by coalition airstrikes. The OHCHR reported in August that airstrikes had been the “single largest cause of casualties” over the past year.

How arrogant and totally cynical it is of Boris Johnson and the UK Government to point the finger at “unscrupulous” Middle Eastern leaders who, they claim, foster wars for their own political ends when Britain itself continues to profit in a financial way from the killing.

This somehow stands to make Mr Johnson and Mrs May so much more morally superior in their own political positioning than that of the leaders Mr Johnson criticises in places like Riyadh and Tehran.

Mr Johnson talks of there not being enough big characters, big people, men or women in these countries willing to reach out beyond their self interests to the other side and bring people together, while his own country provides the materiel and logistical support for the very killing he condemns.

The crass hypocrisy here is obvious and nauseating. This is the same Conservative Government that, while rightly condemning Fidel Castro for his human rights record, is suddenly silent when it comes to the appalling record of countries it has been cosying up to in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is not the only Gulf State either in this regard. As Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, said yesterday, if Mr Johnson’s take on Saudi Arabia is genuine, he needs to explain why he ordered his MPs to vote against calls in October to suspend support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen until a lasting ceasefire has been brokered and alleged violations of international humanitarian law have been properly investigated.

This whole affair stinks of double standards. How disgraceful it is, too, that the diplomatic discomfort caused by the Foreign Secretary’s remarks have overshadowed the real issues that are at stake.

What we have seen over the last few days is a Tory government at odds within its own ranks and a clear lack of purpose in terms of foreign policy, especially one underpinned by ethical considerations.

It is a government that takes an unusual view, to say the least, of collective responsibility when the views of the Foreign Secretary are so blatantly at odds with those of the Prime Minister and others.

In terms of Britain’s relationship with Saudi Arabia, it is high time that the UK’s continued acquiescence and material support for the regime there came under much greater political scrutiny and accountability.

Mr Johnson is right on one other thing. There are politicians who are “twisting and abusing” things for their own ends but they are not just in the Middle East. They are right here, right now, in our midst.