There comes a point in a prime minister’s career when foreign travel offers respite from domestic trouble. Even when relations with the host nation are tricky, as Britain’s are with China, the dignifying protocols of statecraft make a beleaguered politician feel valued.
Next comes the phase where missions overseas feel dangerous because plotters can organize more openly against absent leaders.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is in transit between those two zones of decline. His position is not yet imperiled by the row over Andy Burnham’s thwarted ambition to run in the Gorton and Denton by-election, but he will be glad that a flight to Beijing puts thousands of kilometers between him and Labour lawmakers petitioning to reverse the party’s national executive committee ruling against the Greater Manchester mayor’s candidacy.
Starmer justifiably thinks the first visit by a UK prime minister to China since 2018 is a bigger deal than some story about weaponization of the party rulebook to block a potential challenger. He would be unwise to neglect how much this stuff matters in the Labour Party.
He is unusual in having reached the top of the party with little experience of the culture, the lore, the unintended consequences that can spiral out from procedural combat.
There was plenty of machination to consolidate Starmer’s position in opposition, marginalizing the left and stitching up candidate selections to recruit a cadre of future loyalists, but that was outsourced to Morgan McSweeney, the leader’s chief of staff.
Once installed in No. 10 Downing Street, Starmer felt no obligation to care about internal Labour politics. Nor did he cultivate relationships with those new lawmakers who would, he assumed, dutifully enact government policy.
New ministers were disappointed by how little they saw of the prime minster. Officials have been surprised by his lack of interest in politics, and not just measured by obsessional Westminster standards. It is not his thing. He cannot be drawn into discussion of ideas. People who have tried say he treats abstraction as indulgence; a bit “wanky.”
That helps explain why Starmer quickly came to like the foreign side of his job. International summitry puts pragmatism in the foreground. Whether the mission is resetting relations with the EU, making nice with US President Donald Trump or, as this week, building bridges with Beijing, there is not much advantage in turning up with ideological baggage.
To a man who sees himself as a master problem-solver, the current global disorder looks like a puzzle consisting of overlapping pieces that might calmly and methodically be arranged to fit the national interest.
This gives him an answer to critics who wish he would challenge leaders who are doctrinally opposed to democracy, such as Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), or just despise it casually, such as Trump. Starmer dismisses the call for “performative” condemnations that would achieve only loss of influence with a superpower.
The prime minister did eventually feel compelled to criticize Trump last week, for demanding Greenland with menaces and belittling the role of Britian’s armed forces in Afghanistan, but he never connects individual offenses into a broader critique of the US president’s authoritarian agenda.
Likewise, Starmer can find some diplomatic formula that implies a rebuke to China over espionage, support for Russian President Vladimir Putin, the dismantling of civil rights in Hong Kong and other repressions, but without sounding confrontational.
To the extent that the British government has a foreign policy doctrine, this is it. Beyond the theater of war in Ukraine and the enmity with Putin, principles are to be declared, but not as obstacles to cooperation.
Starmer spelled this out in a speech last month. He would use engagement on every front to maximize Britain’s interests. He refused to accept that there would sometimes be conflicting priorities.
“We don’t trade off security in one area for a bit more economic access somewhere else,” he said.
He observed that the rest of this century would be dominated by “the US, the EU and China, all interacting with each other,” and that “our future will be determined by how we navigate this dynamic,” but here, too, he did not envisage hard choices or sacrifices.
Partnership with everyone will bring prosperity for all.
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