In the wake of Brexit, the Commonwealth has been identified as an important body for future British trade and diplomacy, but few know what it actually does. How is it organised and what has held it together for so long? / In The Empire’s New Clothes,​ Murphy strips away the gilded self-image of the Commonwealth to reveal an irrelevant institution afflicted by imperial amnesia.

As director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, I know what this institution does – and the notion that it can pick up the slack when the UK leaves the EU is nonsense.