The arrival of Rishi Sunak in 10 Downing Street has lifted EU hopes of a long-awaited improvement in relations with the UK, but no one is banking on a breakthrough.
EU leaders knew little of Britain’s latest prime minister, who was elected to parliament only in 2015 and never held a senior ministerial role while the UK was a member of the EU. Despite Sunak’s record as an unwavering Brexit supporter in 2016, so far, the mood music is promising.
In a phone call the day after taking office, Sunak told the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, he wanted a “negotiated solution” on the Northern Ireland protocol, part of the post-Brexit agreement that created a customs border in the Irish Sea. That issue has bedevilled the relationship since Boris Johnson’s government launched a bid to rewrite the protocol in July 2021, followed by a threat to unilaterally abandon the agreement via the Northern Ireland protocol bill.
The Irish taoiseach, Micheál Martin, said this week he was “very encouraged” by his conversations with Sunak and was persuaded that the new prime minister understood the need to find “a way back to an agenda defined by growth and cooperation”, according to the Irish Times.
Some senior EU diplomats have also concluded that the weakness of the British economy and chaotic end of the Truss government means the UK can no longer afford a trade war with the EU – an outcome that remains on the cards if the British government pushes ahead with plans to unilaterally abandon the protocol.
Sunak begins with one big advantage: he is not Boris Johnson. “Who knows what we will get under Rishi, but BJ would have been terrible,” said one diplomat after Johnson announced he would not be standing for the Conservative leadership.
EU diplomats are still waiting for the prime minister, who is heavily preoccupied by the domestic agenda, to spell out his approach to the EU. “There are lots of positive noises. That’s good, but there isn’t actually any substance to gauge it yet,” the diplomat said.
Sources point out they have been through the new UK prime minister cycle a few times before. “We had similar hopes with Liz Truss,” said a second EU diplomat. “There isn’t much apprehension left when it is the third prime minister in a couple of months … Obviously, we see the political turmoil in the UK and it’s clear that the UK government, and perhaps the UK political class, need to start sorting some things out internally, before they can be a stable and reliable partner externally.”
The wait-and-see mood is a little brighter than when Truss took office two months ago. While the EU hoped for warmer relations, there was scepticism whether Truss the prime minister could dial down the confrontation that Truss the foreign secretary had escalated with her pursuit of the Northern Ireland protocol legislation, which the EU says would break international law. As her premiership imploded, EU officials quickly concluded she was a spent force.
Far away from the drama of Westminster, technical talks between the EU and UK on the protocol continue. But since the EU published its offer to scrap some of the most onerous checks on goods crossing between Great Britain and Northern Ireland in October 2021, little progress has been made. Officials on both sides say the atmosphere is friendly, although there have been no moves on substance. Minor technical steps keep things ticking along – next week, EU officials are due to test a UK database to get real-time access to data about goods traversing the GB-NI border – an issue that has been a long-running irritant between both sides at the highest levels.
Mujtaba Rahman, the managing director for Europe at the Eurasia Group, thinks a bigger breakthrough is on the horizon. He sees a window of opportunity opening up after the government’s fiscal statement on 17 November, when Sunak will be freer to look beyond the domestic agenda.
“The single most important thing he has got to do is restore the UK’s reputation for economic competence,” after the “spectacular failure” of Truss’s economic experiment, Rahman said.
“He doesn’t really have the freedom to get into a mad row with the EU over the protocol and even risk the possibility of a trade war next year. Markets are going to punish policy choices they believe are going to imperil the economic outlook.”
For Rahman, this means “a reset with the EU and a desire to move the relationship to a more constructive place”.
If Sunak wants to turn the page on Brexit, he can walk through an open door. EU leaders are keen to move on after the tortuous arguments of the past six years over customs forms and cod quotas. Arguably the best day of Truss’s short-lived premiership was her attendance at a European summit in Prague, where she was praised by allies such as the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, and agreed with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to hold a UK-French summit in 2023, marking a thaw in relations after the bitter rows between Paris and London during Johnson’s stint in office.
Adding to optimism is a decision by the UK government announced on Friday not to call fresh elections in Northern Ireland until 2023, a move seen as creating space for talks on the protocol to progress.
If Sunak is serious about a negotiated settlement with the EU, he will have to accept compromises that will be unpalatable to hardline Eurosceptics, likely to include accepting a role for the European court of justice in policing EU law in Northern Ireland. Rahman thinks this is doable if Sunak continues to enjoy a bounce in the polls.
Following the widespread belief in the parliamentary party that they faced electoral annihilation under Truss, Sunak will have a bit more space to do what is needed on fiscal policy and on Europe if his party thinks it can deliver victory in a 2024 general election. Sunak “has given the Tories another lease of life and a pathway, a very narrow pathway to potential victory”, Rahman said, although his base case remains a Labour win.
Nobody in Brussels is taking anything for granted. “We have been going back and forth like a dog chasing its own tail in trying to figure out how to move forward with this relationship,” said the second EU diplomat. “And every time there seems to be space for a step forward we get overtaken by events in British politics [that] bring us back to square one.”
