Only the geese roamed free at Blenheim Palace, the Oxfordshire estate where Britain hosted 45 European leaders for a regional summit earlier this week.
Security at the European Political Community gathering was oppressive. Phalanxes of armed police officers lined the roads for miles around, while others strolled the palace lawns.
Although security was tight, there was a real openness in the attitude of the UK government under Keir Starmer to the other European leaders who attended. The new Labour prime minister was on a mission to repair the relationships that had been strained under the Tories in post-Brexit Britain. “We have reached out a hand to our European friends,” he said.
The Labour government has raised hopes within the EU for a warmer relationship with the UK. The chances of a “reset” have opened the door to the two sides smoothing over some of the sharpest edges left after the UK ripped itself from the other 27 member states four years ago.
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Options include closer defence co-operation, a veterinary trade agreement to remove checks on the movement of livestock and food between Britain and the EU, and a deal making it easier for young people to move between the two to study or work.
There is cautious optimism for deals on some of the above, according to diplomats and other officials in Brussels. But the ball is in Labour’s court. “We’re all ears,” one EU official said.
Most see an agreement on closer defence co-operation as a possible easy early win, given supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia is a priority for both the EU and the UK. Negotiations around trade checks, fishing waters or easier movement for young people would be more fraught, highly complex and at risk of becoming politically charged.
“There clearly is a window of opportunity now for a reset,” says Jim Cloos, a former high-ranking EU official who retired in 2021. The adults are “back in the room in London”, he says. Another seasoned EU official who has worked on UK relations since the Brexit vote in 2016 is more sceptical. “Reset is too strong a word,” he says.
One European Commission source says it will realistically be months rather than weeks before any real talks begin, with London likely to need to make the first move.
Good political relations are not guaranteed by friendships and people knowing each other, but it certainly helps. This week, Minister of State Jennifer Carroll MacNeill took a call from her newly appointed British counterpart, Welsh Labour MP Stephen Doughty.
The two know each other well from the British Irish Parliamentary Assembly, and an official St Patrick’s Day visit by Carroll MacNeill to Cardiff last year. “When Stephen called, we spoke as people who knew each other for some years,” she says.
Such warmth has not been normal in recent Anglo-Irish relations, with most Irish ministers from the period having difficulties with Conservative counterparts. Often the conversation struggled because ministers from both sides had so little in common, with one minister remembering a pause broken by a British colleague congratulating Ireland for having “large cows”.
The Irish Government spent a decade ensuring London did not put a hair’s breadth between Dublin and the European Commission, and it will not do so now. “The relationship is an EU-UK relationship, and Dublin is not an interlocutor,” says Carroll MacNeill. “Nevertheless, I think it’s fair to say that Europe will often look to Ireland for its perspective. It is also true to say that Ireland wants to see the UK do well, and it wants to see the EU-UK relationship to be as positive and fruitful as possible.”
In the year and a half since the Windsor framework settled Northern Ireland’s post-Brexit arrangements, engagement between the EU and the UK has been less political and more technical. “We want Brexit to be boring, we want EU-UK relations to be relatively boring,” says one EU official.
Working together on sanctions targeting Russia had helped rebuild the damaged trust between Brussels and London, which hit rock bottom during the height of Brexit talks.
There will be some areas where agreements benefit the EU, and others that gave London more of what they want, says Cloos. “In fisheries, we need the British waters, access to it, we are in a weaker situation ... If they do not show a minimum understanding that here the EU needs a good solution, then they cannot expect the EU on other issues to accommodate British interests.”
The view is shared by another EU official who has worked on the Brexit fallout for several years. “The challenge is to find the balance in the relationship, and some of these things are more wanted by the EU, some of them are more wanted by the UK, so I think they would have to be seen in the round,” he says.
During the election Starmer ruled out any notion a Labour government would rejoin the EU’s single market or customs union, which restricts what can be done.
Nick Thomas-Symonds, the new UK minister for EU relations, says his job is to “reset the relationship” with the EU. “I am at the centre of that with the prime minister’s authority,” he says. “I really do think there is a shared interest in easing trade.”
The UK wants to do more bilateral deals with EU countries, but also deals with the union itself, says a foreign office official. Britain is not looking to peel countries away from the pack. “We won’t seek to split them or play them off against each other,” he says.
Starmer’s declaration that Britain would never leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is seen as a significant contributor to the climate of improving relations, according to diplomatic sources from European nations based in London. However, others note that when it comes to Britain’s desire for a better trade deal, it has to reveal what it will give the EU in return.
A spokesman for the European Commission says it will consider proposals from the UK “with an open mind”. The commission, which is the executive arm of the EU, in April signalled that it was open to an agreement allowing young people to move between the EU and the UK, to work or study, for up to four years. Labour and the Conservatives rejected the idea.
So far there are signals that Labour has raised the issue of a UK-EU veterinary agreement in early contacts with Dublin, though Dublin has not engaged on the detail. An agreement would ease Northern Ireland-Britain trade hiccups caused by Irish Sea border checks under the Windsor framework, but Labour’s desire for a deal is centred not on Northern Ireland but, rather, on practical problems facing British food exports and imports. Equally, there is no prospect that Labour will reopen any part of the framework, one of the few solid achievements of Rishi Sunak’s term in No 10.
The reality is that the rest of the EU is not talking about the UK frequently, or at all, so Dublin may have an occasional role to explain London’s concerns in the corridors of Brussels.
However, the question of immigration will lie as a shadow across all diplomatic relations in the years ahead. On Sunday, Taoiseach Simon Harris suggested that Starmer understood that there were Common Travel Area rules to deal with abuses, such as large numbers of refugees drifting over the Northern Ireland Border. “When I made that point in the past, it was contested,” he said.
No refused asylum seekers are likely to be sent back to the UK quickly, however, since a narrative about Labour accepting such returnees would be toxic in the current British political climate.
Few in Dublin believe possible an EU-UK agreement on the wider issue that would allow for the return of immigrants who land in England back to France. The lack of such an agreement will have implications for Dublin’s hopes to close off the Northern Irish route for people claiming asylum in the Republic, even though an agreement already exists but is not being used.
Overall, Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, says much will depend on how “scared” the Labour government is of the Eurosceptic right-wing media at home.
It will come down to “whether it feels strong enough to ignore what is absolutely bound to happen should we make any move towards more economic co-operation with the EU, which is the Tory-supporting press suggesting that they are somehow reversing Brexit,” he says.
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