Petulance is not a good look in a prime minister. Maybe Rishi Sunak’s refusal to meet his Greek counterpart this week was more calculated than capricious – a tactical flash of temper to convey firmness regarding the fate of the Parthenon marbles. Even so, it came across as childish. Mr Sunak might have been genuinely affronted by Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s comments likening the British Museum’s possession of the ancient Greek sculptures to cutting the Mona Lisa in half. That intervention might have reneged on a commitment not to campaign for restitution of the marbles while visiting Britain. More likely, it crossed a line that Downing Street projected on to conversations that are interpreted differently by the Greek side.
Either way, calling off a meeting was a wild overreaction. It is doubtful that a domestic audience, whatever views people have of the marbles question, will have been impressed. Overseas, it looks like a return of the prickliness and insecurity that Britain’s neighbours associate with Brexit at its most belligerent.
That impression will be compounded by the prime minister’s response to subsequent criticism of his poor diplomacy. In the Commons on Wednesday he attempted to parry Keir Starmer’s questions with a charge that the Labour leader is subservient to the European Union.
If Mr Sunak thinks that is his strongest card or, worse, has engineered a row with the express purpose of playing it, he is delusional. The pity of it is that he has, so far, been more constructive in European diplomacy than either Liz Truss or Boris Johnson. Normalisation of continental relations, facilitated by the Windsor framework, is one of Mr Sunak’s few achievements in office.
Mr Mitsotakis represents a government of the centre-right in a Nato country. He and the Tory leader could have found plenty of common ground while agreeing to disagree on the obvious point of contention. A more adept politician than Mr Sunak could have found a way to articulate displeasure without wrecking the visit.
The inability to calibrate a diplomatic rebuke expresses political weakness and a temperamental flaw. The prime minister’s peevish streak is rarely far from the surface. It shows in interviews when he doesn’t like the tenor or persistence of questions. Charisma can be overrated and is not reliably correlated to capability, but charmlessness is a definite deficiency in a leader.
Mr Sunak’s readiness to sacrifice relations with an EU member state is also symptomatic of intuitive Eurosceptic prejudice. The prime minister has risen through the ranks of a Conservative party steeped in contempt for the European project and ideologically convinced that Britain should pursue economic and strategic interests elsewhere. The reality of Brexit should have refuted that worldview, but it is too deeply ingrained. It is revealing, for example, that Mr Sunak has not visited Berlin since becoming prime minister. A rational appraisal of Britain’s diplomatic interests post-Brexit would have prioritised bilateral dialogue with Germany.
Perhaps the prime minister is simply not interested, or maybe he limits continental contact for fear of upsetting hardline Brexiters. Either way, he has been guilty of neglecting a necessary component of his job. In the case of Mr Mitsotakis, he has advanced from neglect to vandalism. Relations between Britain and Greece will recover. It is Mr Sunak’s ambition to be taken seriously on the world stage that has sustained the most damage.
