Britain is back. That was the concise verdict of Eléonore Caroit, the vice-chair of the French national assembly’s foreign affairs committee. And the optics of Sunday’s crisis talks on Ukraine bore this out, with Keir Starmer at the very centre of the leaders’ joint photo.
“You are back on the scene, of the leadership in Europe,” Caroit told the BBC on Monday morning. James MacClearly, the Liberal Democrat MP who speaks for the party on Europe, was equally adamant, praising the prime minister for taking this chance “to bring us back to the heart of Europe where we belong”.