Britain is back. That was the concise verdict of Eléonore Caroit, the vice-chair of the French national assembly’s foreign affairs committee. And the optics of Sunday’s crisis talks on Ukraine bore this out, with Keir Starmer at the very centre of the leaders’ joint photo.
“You are back on the scene, of the leadership in Europe,” Caroit told the BBC on Monday morning. James MacClearly, the Liberal Democrat MP who speaks for the party on Europe, was equally adamant, praising the prime minister for taking this chance “to bring us back to the heart of Europe where we belong”.
So is this a post-Brexit turning point? Is the UK, which since 2016 has become accustomed to watching from afar as European decisions are made, at the heart of the action once more?
The slightly unsatisfactory answer is: it depends. There are, however, a few things that seem clear.
The first is that Starmer, in his self-declared mission to be a “bridge” between Europe and Donald Trump’s tempestuous America, has made himself a significant player in efforts to ensure a fair and secure peace deal for Ukraine.
While the UK prime minister arrived at the White House two days after Emmanuel Macron and was somewhat less ostentatious with the tactile “Trump whispering” than the French president, he was arguably received with greater warmth by the US president.
And after his attempts to draw Trump into backing a peace deal were derailed by Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s abrasive treatment a day later, Starmer tried to mend the damage, receiving the Ukrainian president warmly in London and speaking by phone to Trump on consecutive days.
The other point of general agreement is that in trying to keep a peace plan involving the US on track while also pushing ahead with European efforts at Sunday’s conference in London, Starmer has shown the skills of a natural diplomat.
Beyond general cross-party support for his plan, Starmer has been praised by the likes of the Conservative former defence secretary Ben Wallace, the Tory backbench grandee Roger Gale and Simon Fraser, the former head of the Foreign Office, for, as the latter put it, having “played a blinder in recent days”.
But whether this heralds anything more permanent, let alone if it could mark any softening of EU attitudes as Starmer embarks on the longer-term project of easing post-Brexit ties with Brussels, remains to be seen.
“Starmer has done it all very well, but it’s partly a question of circumstance, in that the reason London could convene this event is that the EU clearly isn’t the optimal institution to handle all the things that are going on,” said Anand Menon, the director of the thinktank UK in a Changing Europe and professor of European politics and foreign affairs at King’s College London.
“Brexit didn’t stop us collaborating very closely with the EU over Ukraine anyway. The really interesting issue will be when it comes to the economics of defence – that is to say, the money the European Commission is pouring into joint procurement schemes and things like that, because at the moment they are limited to members of the single market.”
Even if the UK decided to take part in joint defence procurement with the EU, Menon added, it seemed unlikely the EU would be tempted to pull back on the red lines it had set out in terms of updating the UK’s post-Brexit relations.
“If you’re fighting off populists [in other EU countries] who are saying, ‘We want a looser relationship with the European Union, we don’t want all these rules and regulations,’ what you don’t want to provide them [with] is an economically successful Britain that seems to be getting the best of both worlds,” he said.
There are also the domestic political considerations. Starmer has been very clear he has no plans to relitigate Brexit, and the threat from Reform UK in many Labour seats will sharpen minds still further.
But at the same time, it is fair to say that Sunday’s summit showed the definitive end to the immediate post-Brexit era under the likes of Boris Johnson, where, as Menon put it, it was “a politically good thing to be at loggerheads with Europe”.
A whole series of international orthodoxies have been overturned by the Ukraine war and now the second Trump presidency. And one of them might be a UK edging further into the European spotlight. On those terms at least, Britain is back.
