The diplomatic moves on the UK’s side feel like they’ve ratcheted up this week. Our newish Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, met with perhaps the most experienced foreign minister in the world, Russia’s Sergey Lavrov, in Moscow today.
The success of her visit was not immediately apparent. Lavrov compared talking to Truss with “a conversation with a deaf person.” But it would be wise to take any public statement from within the Russian government with a healthy dose of scepticism, given the increasing numbers of troops stationed on the border with Ukraine.
Boris Johnson, meanwhile, is flying to Warsaw to meet with the Polish president and prime minister, before spending time with UK troops in the country.
There was also the matter of Keir Starmer meeting Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg in Brussels. Despite domestic disagreements, the Leader of the Opposition is in lockstep with the government over the Russia-Ukraine crisis.
It is also evidence that Labour really is under new management. Had Jeremy Corbyn become prime minister in 2017, the UK’s domestic and economic policy would of course have looked quite different. Higher spending, higher taxes, Chancellor John McDonnell might even have made Rishi Sunak blush.
But it is Labour’s foreign policy from 2015-2019 in which Corbyn was not only present but deeply involved, and where the departure from what had gone before would not only have been stark, but unprecedented.
In Corbyn, Britain would have had a leader not only scpectical of the EU (we’ve been there) but also hostile towards Nato, the United States and much of the post-1945 and 1989 settlements.
His reaction to the Skripal poisoning – when he initially suggested Russia should be handed a sample of the nerve agent so it could “categorically” say whether it came from them – was a window into his world view. That event badly damaged Corbyn’s standing amongst voters not always paying attention to such things.
Do not forget, it was a Labour Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, who drove the creation of Nato. And Clement Attlee who took the decision to pursue a British nuclear deterrent, partly as a shortcut to cling on to something resembling great power status.
Even Michael Foot, often regarded by history as an aged, bumbling man unsuited to leadership, was no pacifist. He supported Margaret Thatcher’s decision to retake the Falkland Islands by force, and Labour’s 1983 election manifesto – which I am at this point legally obliged to remind you was called “the longest suicide note in history“ by Gerald Kaufman – did not propose leaving Nato.
Starmer’s foreign policy is neither new nor particularly exciting. It is mainstream Labour.
Elsewhere in the paper but in the same vein, do read this brilliant piece by Kyiv-based journalist Olga Tokariuk on the chronic anxiety, mass rallies and a desperate hunt for bomb shelters that is life in Ukraine. I promise it is worth your time.
In the comment pages, Sarfraz Manzoor admits that the reason he could buy a home in his twenties is that he’s middle-aged now. He also has a great little bit on the iron law of parent he and his wife are forever breaking: don’t argue in front of the kids.
And finally, when I heard the news that the Museum of London was moving, I half expected an accompanying DCMS press release notifying an ungrateful capital that it was to reopen in Darlington or Blackpool. Mercifully, it is only moving down the road from its London Wall location to a new multi-million pound home in Smithfield.
