IT couldn’t be more damning that even Theresa May has found Boris Johnson’s cuts to the UK’s overseas aid budget to be morally indefensible. When even the woman who introduced the Home Office’s hostile immigration environment thinks you’re being beastly to foreigners, it’s a reliable sign that you’ve overstepped the mark.

Although for this UK Government that mark has long since been treated as a baseline to start of from and not as the limit of what is morally tolerable and acceptable.

However, when a former prime minister and home secretary who once threatened to abolish human rights legislation if it “got in the way” of a Conservative government openly rebels against a sudden and cruel withdrawal of humanitarian support for fragile developing nations as the world is being assailed by a lethal pandemic, it’s like finding out that Cruella de Vil is so shocked by your callous treatment of puppies that she plans to report you to the RSPCA.

READ MORE: Why Tories are wrong to paint Australian trade worries as just 'SNP grievance'

A rebellion by backbench Tory MPs, of which Theresa May is now one, was provoked by the decision of Boris Johnson and Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak to renege on the Conservatives’ manifesto commitment to meet the UN target of spending 0.7% of national income on international aid.

Charities including Oxfam and Action Aid UK have condemned the proposed £4 billion cut to foreign aid, warning they will cause devastation in poor and vulnerable nations, leading to families going hungry and children missing out on schooling. The charities say vital projects including water sanitation and training for healthcare workers, will be cancelled.

Ministers made the cut, reducing the UK’s foreign aid budget from 0.7% of national income to 0.5% without bothering to change a law introduced in 2015 by the Conservatives under David Cameron which made the 0.7% figure legally binding.

Other countries have stepped up their international aid programmes in response to the Covid pandemic, and the UK is the only member of the G7 to have rowed back on its international aid commitments.

With a summit of leaders of the G7 due to be hosted by the UK in Cornwall later this month, any other government might be shamed by the fact it has chosen to slash its aid budget precisely at the time when assistance is most needed by developing nations whose health systems are crumbling under the onslaught of the pandemic.

Yet the UK, whose leaders love to boast that it has one of the world’s largest and richest economies, is citing the effects of the pandemic on the British economy as the reason why it’s making the cuts. It’s like refusing to donate to a fund to help out your neighbours who have been left homeless and destitute after a fire because you had to pay the window cleaner to wash the soot off your garage windows.

Boris Johnson is not ashamed. Not at all. This is a man for whom shame is a concept as foreign as compassion and empathy. He’ll be spending the G7 summit polishing his brass neck and basking in the light reflected from it.

The heartless attitude of this government towards the poorest and neediest countries on the planet speaks volumes about the UK’s priorities and the kind of state it has become. Although the aid budget is to be slashed, leaving thousands in Africa and Asia without access to clean water and the basic essentials of life, the British Government is pressing ahead with spending upwards of £200 million on a new royal yacht to be named after the late Prince Philip. The luxury vessel is to replace HMY Britannia, which was decommissioned in 1997 and is now berthed in Leith.

READ MORE: Kirsty Strickland: How turning to the royals could backfire for the Union

The Government claims the new vessel will be a “national flagship” which will promote the “best of British” around the globe and provide five-star accommodation for members of the royal family as they travel about to wave at the plebs and avoid difficult questions about racism in the royal household and how their lovely new floating hotel could have paid for water purification projects or basic schooling for some of the poorest children in the world instead.

Perhaps Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge can use it to help them tell Scottish people about how they’re not really getting involved in politics as they try to persuade us that we really want to remain ruled by a government which uses our taxes to give a rich and pampered couple such as them an eye-wateringly expensive shiny new toy while it snatches the basic essentials of life away from some of the most deprived people globally.

But never mind. The new yacht will allow the British state to indulge itself in its flag fetish in ports around the globe, and it will likewise ensure that UK aid which survives the cuts will be prominently plastered with more Union Flags than grace the produce counter in an average supermarket.

The UK has become a state which is obsessed with appearance and status over substance. It doesn’t matter if promises are broken and commitments are trashed, just as long as the British state can wave its flags and have a spot of royal pageantry. But no amount of flag waving can hide the stench of its moral decay.