Barely a day passes, it seems, without Keir Starmer talking to another European leader or preparing for a continental summit. The crisis over Ukraine has very much pushed the UK closer towards the centre stage than at any point since Brexit. But is this a new era or a false dawn?
One thing is certain: the optics of engagement have changed. Starmer never shared Boris Johnson’s almost active pride in stoking a row with Brussels, but particularly before the election his advisers were wary of reminding voters about his past as a diehard remainer.
With support for Ukraine about as close as the UK gets to an all-party consensus, things are very different. Starmer can be photographed at the very centre of a gathering of mainly European leaders, as he was on Sunday, safe in the knowledge that even Nigel Farage will praise him for his diplomacy.
Donald Trump’s apparent abandonment of Ukraine and reversal away from decades of Nato defence guarantees “has really accelerated the rapprochement between Britain and Europe, not just the EU”, said Peter Ricketts, the former senior UK diplomat and government national security adviser, who is now a crossbench peer.
“All the reports I’ve heard from European friends in Brussels and Paris and elsewhere are that they are impressed and pleased with the Sunday meeting, and the sense that Britain is back in its natural place as a leader in European security,” he said. “It has taken the crisis, in a way, to really galvanise the improving relations that were already under way.”
This is happening amid what could be seen as a wider political shift. Polls about Brexit increasingly show that many voters view it as a mistake, and while there is arguably minimal appetite to revisit an issue that crippled UK politics for several years, trade unions are now pushing for closer EU ties.
So could the necessities of supporting Ukraine help smooth the way for a close EU-UK relationship on trade? Lord Ricketts said he would be surprised if any of these Brussels red lines were suddenly blurred.
“I would draw a distinction between defence issues and the treaty-based issues about trade, fishing and energy markets and so on, which are all rooted in EU texts or EU-UK legal texts, which are going to be slower to change,” he said. “I think even with a crisis in Europe, in those sorts of areas it’s going to be slow going.”
Ukraine is to an extent a distinct issue. Defence links are often separated from Brussels, while the still-emerging “coalition of the willing” to fill the security vacuum covers some non-EU European states such as Norway, as well as Canada and potentially Australia.
“The defence and foreign policy wonks were already comfortable with a closer relationship with the UK,” said Ian Bond, another former UK diplomat, who is deputy director of the Centre for European Reform thinktank. “The problem is what happens in other parts.”
He added: “The thing will be to keep as much as possible of the new relationship at the level of leaders. Macron gets it, I think that when Friedrich Merz becomes German chancellor he will get it.
“If their fishing ministers don’t get it, that’s something which hopefully they will manage domestically, rather than the reset of the EU-UK relationship coming to a grinding halt over how many sand eels Danish fishers are allowed to catch off the Dogger Bank.”
And what of the domestic political considerations for Starmer? According to Paula Surridge, a professor of political sociology at the University of Bristol and the deputy director of the UK in a Changing Europe thinktank, these are thus far relatively minimal.
“At the moment, there’s not really a downside to him being pictured with all the other European leaders,” she said. “One thing some voters have been worried about recently is the waning influence of the UK, and seeing that makes people think that we have a seat at the table in world affairs, in a way we haven’t seen really since 2016.”
Similarly, even Reform UK, seen as a looming electoral threat to Labour, is not making a fuss, with Farage even claiming that Starmer’s role in trying to find accord between the US and Europe was a direct benefit of Brexit.
There is, of course, a much greater external factor at play: what happens with the ever-unpredictable White House.
“A lot is going to depend on what happens with Washington over the coming weeks,” Bond said. “If Trump calms down and stops trying to ensure that Ukraine loses, which is what he seems to be doing at the moment, I can see that traditional British reflexes of ‘we must at all costs protect the special relationship’ kick in pretty hard.
“But if Trump continues to try to destroy Ukraine and to normalise relations with Russia, and keeps threatening to invade Greenland and absorb Canada, I think it’s going to become increasingly difficult for the Brits to pretend that nothing has happened.”
