Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Sir Keir Starmer’s visit to China last week was the first by a British prime minister for eight years. His attendance at a gathering of EU leaders this week is the first since Brexit. When Rachel Reeves went to the Gulf last autumn, no chancellor of the exchequer had been for six years.
So, just to run through those destinations again: the world’s second-largest economy, the largest cross-national single market and a region that accounts for some 40 per cent of all sovereign investment globally. Perhaps the predecessors of Starmer and Reeves had more pressing engagements elsewhere.
Slowly, gingerly, Britain is coming out of a decade of sulking in its room. Whatever his fumblings in the domestic scene, Starmer is the first prime minister since David Cameron to understand the nation’s place in the world, which is that of a mid-sized actor in need of friends — or at least partners of convenience.
Meanwhile, the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch would not visit China “at this time”. (Shall we leave it a full decade, then? That will teach them.) She did not just oppose but also marched against the new embassy of the People’s Republic that is to go up near the Tower of London. If this animus were balanced with a warming towards Europe, the overall thing might hang together as geostrategy, but the Tories do not like the EU either.
So this, as far as it can be made out, is the international posture of the British right: no to Europe, no to China, yes to America but increasingly coyly so, because no one wants to suffer the electoral fate of Canada’s Pierre Poilievre or Australia’s Peter Dutton, both of whom were tainted by association with Donald Trump. As for trade with India, the right is caught between excitement at the opportunities and foot-dragging on behalf of “British workers”.
Which country do the Tories think they live in? If it is a superpower with a GDP in the tens of trillions of dollars, this extreme pickiness about which bits of the world to engage with would make sense. But rumours persist that it is an archipelago of 70mn-ish people whose global clout peaked a century ago.
Badenoch, the exact inverse of Starmer, is showing promise on the home front. She is an improved parliamentarian. While the Tories are stuck in the voting-intention polls, the underlying data is turning. The party has become the most trusted on the economy. A big plurality of voters now say the government taxes and spends too much. She has “lost” colleagues to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK but only in the sense that someone loses gallstones: the party will be better for the short-term ache.
What has not improved at all, not matured an iota, is Conservative foreign policy. For a sense of its weirdness, consider what peer nations are doing. Friedrich Merz is expected to visit China soon, despite Germany having to make up much less diplomatic ground there than Britain does. (Olaf Scholz had been twice and bilateral trade is huge.) Mark Carney went last month and Emmanuel Macron the month before. Was Starmer seriously meant to not go? Britain has real security concerns, but what threats does it face that other north Atlantic democracies have decided are manageable? If the issue is ethical — human rights and so on — what did a near-decade of estrangement from China achieve on that front? Are the absolute monarchies of the Gulf going to be shunned? With which democratic allies, if not the ones right across the Channel, should the UK seek strength in numbers against autocracies?
The coming world, if it is to be one of several big powers rather than just the US, is scary but also mentally clarifying. Most countries will have to take essentially the same approach to foreign affairs, which is a kind of strategic promiscuity. Maintaining different relationships, consolidating none in particular: governments from Canada to Vietnam are going to have to play the roué. Starmer’s recent overtures to Europe and China are just the start — which is why he has so little to show for them — and the Tories are already scandalised. Their alternative? A monogamous love of the US that even then dare not speak its name, at least not while Trump is around to put off British voters.
This isn’t tenable. Yet the conservative movement is boxed in on all sides. It committed to a worldview a decade ago, when the planet was pro-trade, the US was friendly and Europe at peace, and now does not know what to do. The British right cannot seek closer economic integration with its own continent without admitting that Brexit was a stinker of an idea. It cannot defrost the relationship with China without upsetting its own side. It cannot get much tighter to Trump without needling the public. Which leaves what? Getting on really well with New Zealand is not a foreign policy. I fear the Tories are just months away from falling back on that old recourse, that sure sign of conservative intellectual exhaustion through the decades: a pledge to strengthen the Commonwealth.
Starmer is said to prefer the dignity of foreign trips to the hard work at home. Good. Given the state of some of Britain’s key relationships after almost a decade of self-defeating aloofness and unearned hauteur, a prime minister who was not touring the world right now would be derelict in their duties. “Never here Keir”? When those who fling that insult understand that it is high praise, they might be worth electing.