EU: normal disservice resumes

In the past few months, relations between the UK and the EU have been the best they have been since Brexit. Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine reminded the two sides of the need for the world’s democracies to co-operate. Disputes over fishing rights could wait.

It is tempting to hope that relations could continue to improve, especially now that the French presidential election is out of the way. But this is unlikely to happen. This week Bruno Le Maire, France’s economy minister, dismissed the suggestion that fixing relations with Britain will be a priority for Emmanuel Macron’s second term.

In Whitehall there is a recognition that there won’t be a dramatic improvement in Anglo-French relations, given how many of the difficulties come down to the personalities of the two leaders. ‘Boris and Macron is tricky,’ one source tells me. ‘They thought they understood each other. They are both zeitgeist politicians.’

If the government’s plan to redirect migrants to Rwanda fails to deter people from illegally crossing the Channel, the small boats crisis will continue to generate tension between London and Paris. The fundamental problem is that France will never be as concerned about migrants leaving its territory as Britain is about those migrants arriving on its shores.

A bigger difficulty for Britain’s relationship with Europe is that the Northern Ireland protocol is about to return to the agenda. The EU thinks that the UK must be made to abide by what was signed and that allowing London to wriggle out of the letter of its commitments would set a terrible precedent. The British view is that the protocol is causing a crisis for Northern Ireland’s devolved institutions. London’s position has also been hardened by the fact that, as one source puts it, ‘the protocol moderates have been undercut by their failure to make progress’.