There is a lot of unsavoury pearl clutching going on amid calls for Starmer’s resignation over the vetting of Peter Mandelson’s suitability for appointment as Britain’s ambassador to the USA. It's all getting completely out of hand. I don’t know if a reasonable person could accuse him of misleading the House of Commons if he himself had been misled by the permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, Ollie Robbins. Statmer is due to make a statement to MPs tomorrow, and I assume we will get closer to the truth then. I should say that Robbins doesn’t believe he did anything wrong. I don’t have any particular reason to support the PM, he’s far too timid on Europe for me, but neither do I think he would have deliberately misled parliament.
Looking at what happened under Boris Johnson, who built a career out of misleading parliament and the country, Starmer looks like a paragon of virtue by comparison. And Johnson is a rank amateur alongside Donald Trump, who never knowingly tells the truth. It will be a travesty if Starmer is forced out, because I can’t see that Labour are flush with potential leaders.
Of course, Mandelson is a wrong ‘un. That was the very reason the ‘Prince of Darkness’ was chosen in the first place! With his record of corruption, he fitted perfectly into Trump’s circle of grifters.
The only good thing about Starmer being forced out is that we will almost certainly get someone more pro-EU, who could conceivably recognise that the present unique circumstances offer a perfect opportunity to ditch the 2024 manifesto red lines. Nobody foresaw the utterly chaotic second Trump term with the moron in the White House, surrounded by hand-picked idiots, seemingly intent on bringing down the world order established after 1945.
In the 2016 campaign, whenever anyone suggested remaining in the EU for reasons of security, we were told that was NATO’s job, nothing to do with Brussels. And by NATO, they of course meant the alliance's biggest defence spender, the USA.
Any pretence now that Trump’s America would respect Article 5 if Russia attacked the Baltic states, for example, has disappeared. He openly derides NATO as a “paper tiger”, echoing Putin’s talking point, and routinely disdains his own allies. Article 5 is essentially meaningless. Europe is finally being forced into becoming a military superpower, however reluctantly that was viewed a few years ago. I think most people in this country now recognise Brexit was a huge mistake and that our place belongs in the EU and in fortress Europe.
I daresay the ever-shrinking minority who still think Brexit was the right choice would have to admit it was a strategic error if Farage ever becomes prime minister and he too fails to make a success of Brexit. That is probably the only thing that might persuade them. The Tories have tried, and now Labour is giving it a go, this time by trying to move closer to the EU. Farage would, naturally, go the other way if he had the chance, and that would fail even more spectacularly.
The best summary of the current state of UK-EU relations that I have read recently comes from Anand Menon, the Director of UK in a Changing Europe, an academic think-tank on EU affairs. Menon writes in The i newspaper that Europe doesn’t care about the UK – we’re deluded. It's a sobering but realistic article.
Both the major UK parties are still suffering from a mistaken belief that Britain should somehow be seen as the de facto leader of Europe, that the EU needs us more than we need them. The one-sided negotiations 2017-2020 should have disabused the UK's ruling class of the idea that that is true, if it ever was.
This isn't to say that Brussels doesn't welcome Labour's current overtures, but having seen off Viktor Orban, the last thing they want is another full-time member of the awkward squad doing the hokey-cokey on the outer fringes of Europe. The EU will demand a hard bargain. They are in no rush. And we will not be getting any special treatment.
For Labour, this is the key lesson from Mr Menon:
"In her recent Mais lecture, Rachel Reeves looked forward to a world in which the UK aligned with a whole host of sectors. Divergence, she argued, should be the exception and not the norm. Once again, common interests were invoked in defence of this argument.
"In the EU, however, this is known not as common interests, but as 'cherry-picking'. The idea that the UK should be able to pick sectors in which it wants to align sparks real opposition in Brussels. Partly because it smacks of British exceptionalism of a kind the EU got all too used to during the negotiations of 2016-2020. Partly too, because there are political reasons.
"There are plenty of governments in the EU who would see any weakening in the principle of the indivisibility of the four freedoms that underpin the single market as an excuse to ask for special treatment for their own countries. What is more, any such weakening would be grist to the mill for the various populist parties – in power or hoping to gain it – who are arguing that the EU intrudes too much into the life of the member states."
It is quite sad that this needs to be said, ten years after the referendum, but I'm afraid it does.
Starmer, or whoever replaces him if he's forced out, should begin the reset by explaining to the British public that if we rejoin the EU, it can't be as a semi-detached member as we were before. Membership isn't just about matters of trade and prosperity, and it's not even about security, important though that is at the moment. It's about community, working with like-minded neighbours to create a better, fairer world for our children and successors.
We need to be totally committed to the European project next time, well beyond the petty political squabbles that we tend to obsess about.
