All prime ministers end up being their own foreign secretary. Keir Starmer started off as one. He has been moderately successful in foreign affairs, but has gained no credit for it from the British electorate.
He has played a role in rallying Europe to the defence of Ukraine. This bore fruit at what we might call the half-baked Alaska summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The meeting failed to end the war in Ukraine, but that also means that President Trump did not sell out the Ukrainian people, which he has threatened to do.
We cannot be sure how important European voices, including the British one, were in holding the line, but it seemed as if the conference call Trump held with European leaders on Wednesday was a significant moment. The briefing from the Europeans was almost ecstatic: that the US president seemed to recognise that a peace on Putin’s terms was unacceptable, and that it was Putin who was the obstacle to a fair settlement.
Starmer has played a surprising role in organising that show of European unity. Surprising, because so many of those who wanted Britain to stay in the EU argued that leaving would diminish our standing in the world. On the contrary, Starmer’s diplomacy has vindicated the Brexiteers who said we could be more nimble, more creative and more assertive outside.
Precisely because Britain is not a member of the EU, Starmer was better able to overcome EU disunity by assembling his “coalition of the willing” to pledge solidarity with Ukraine, backed up by plans for (some) higher European defence spending.
He was able to do it because the British people are so supportive of the Ukrainian cause. That allowed him to finesse the two possible sticking points in giving practical expression to that support.
As with a lot of opinion-poll findings, the British are very supportive of the Ukrainians until it starts to cost them a noticeable amount of money. We have thrown open our doors to 200,000 refugees, but higher taxes to pay for the Ukrainian war effort? Ni, dyakuyu.
Luckily, Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, found an electorally painless way of increasing defence spending by simply switching money from the most unpopular Budget heading, namely foreign aid. The almost total silence since that announcement in March has been instructive: the great enlightened achievement of Tony Blair and David Cameron in meeting the UN target for foreign aid spending is something that, it turned out, almost nobody cared about.
The other sticking point in support for Ukraine is the idea of sending troops to help repel Putin’s aggression. That has been out of the question for all of Ukraine’s allies: we are happy to supply arms and money, but Ukrainians must do the fighting. Yet British public opinion is sufficiently supportive that Starmer has been able to talk about deploying British forces to help deter further Russian aggression if there is a peace deal. It is unclear how or whether this would work, but it has helped focus attention on the difficult question of who would guarantee a settlement and how that would work.
What was most surprising about Trump’s statements after the Alaska summit – apart from referring to Mark Rutte as the “highly respected secretary general of Nato” – was his promise that the US would provide “robust security guarantees” to support Ukraine.
All in all, then, and considering how badly the summit could have gone, given Trump’s belief that the Ukrainians brought their troubles on themselves, his disdain for Nato and his desperation for a Nobel Peace Prize at any cost, the Alaska meeting went well. Starmer can take some credit as the leader of a nation that is an important ally of Ukraine and an enemy of aggression.
But that is another limit to the sympathy the British people feel for the Ukrainian cause: they are not going to reward their own leader for giving their sentiments practical expression on the world stage.
Just as they are not going to give Starmer credit for his handling of the US president on tariffs, which has allowed him to carve out a better deal for the UK than for any other country.
Nor will they give Starmer credit for the deal with Emmanuel Macron by which France has accepted that Britain can send back some of the people crossing the Channel in small boats. My astonishment at Starmer’s skill in securing this concession is heavily outweighed by most people’s dismay that the boats keep coming. The British public has had enough of the boats and is not inclined to wait a year or more to see if the numbers being sent back can be increased to the point where they act as a deterrent.
I remember the European parliament election in 1999, when Tony Blair had saved the Muslim population of Kosovo from expulsion by Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian dictator. It was a moment of shining moral leadership, by which Blair persuaded a divided Nato and a reluctant Bill Clinton to stand up to ethnic persecution, and which was a triumphant success. It was a success that brought him 15 minutes of adulation from the tabloid press, followed almost immediately by sullen complaints about traffic jams and trains not running on time. In the European election, held on the day that the Serbs withdrew, Labour did extremely badly.
What reminded me of that election was a “government source” quoted in The Times: “World War Three is breaking out internationally; it’s unreasonable for people to expect Keir to be caring about potholes.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong. International leadership is well and good, but unless Keir can fix the potholes and stop the boats, it counts for nothing with the voters.
