Seven UK prime ministers in a decade. And now, another resignation. Sir Keir Starmer announced his departure on Monday, marking the latest upheaval in a post-Brexit political landscape that the European Union once watched in shock but has since come to accept as a permanent roller-coaster.
Ten years after the UK voted to leave the bloc, the country has “collapsed inwards”, in the words of Katya Adler, the BBC’s Europe editor, splintering into years of political crisis. From Brussels, the merry-go-round of British leadership – with its nostalgic carousel of painted horses and French chanson music at the Sacre Coeur – seemed a fitting metaphor for a nation circling the same divisive questions.
“Sir Keir Starmer resigns as UK PM, seventh leader since Brexit vote; EU reviews July summit.”
Starmer’s Labour government had launched a fresh attempt to tear down post-Brexit red tape and boost Britain’s ailing economy, reopening the fraught debate over how close the UK should edge to Brussels. But with his resignation, the initiative now hangs in the balance. Brussels said on Monday it was reviewing whether to go ahead with a summit planned with the Starmer government for late July.
Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator during years of often bitter Brexit talks, knows all about dealing with British instability. Now a centre-right MP and former French prime minister, he is expected to run in France’s upcoming presidential election. From his compact office adjacent to the French parliament, Barnier struck a pragmatic tone.
“We have to deal with this situation and respect it,” he told the BBC. “There will be a (new) UK prime minister and we will work with them. Look at what happened during the (Brexit) negotiations. I faced in four years four different UK negotiators. That was also a situation of instability, but we… deal with it.”
During those fractious talks, Barnier famously printed a coffee mug emblazoned with “Keep Calm and Carry on Negotiating”, a cheeky twist on the British wartime slogan. Today, that motto may prove more useful than ever. While EU partners once described the UK parliament as the bloc’s most stable and venerated, they now accept the turbulence as a fact of life.
Yet the EU itself is hardly a picture of calm. France and Germany, the bloc’s biggest players, are grappling with their own domestic political storms. Still, the question remains: does UK volatility impede the negotiations Starmer launched? Brussels assumes talks will continue under his successor, but the fate of the July summit – and the potential for a reset – is now uncertain.