There comes a point in a prime minister’s career when foreign travel offers respite from domestic trouble. Even when relations with the host country 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 organise more openly against absent leaders.
Keir Starmer is in transit between those two zones of decline. His position is not yet imperilled by the row over Andy Burnham’s thwarted ambition to run in the Gorton and Denton byelection. But he will be glad that a flight to Beijing puts thousands of miles between him and Labour MPs 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 weaponisation of the party rulebook to block a potential challenger. He would be unwise to neglect how much this stuff matters in Labour.
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, marginalising 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, Starmer felt no obligation to care about internal Labour politics. Nor did he cultivate relationships with those new MPs 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 isn’t 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 European Union, making nice with 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 Xi Jinping, 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 criticise Trump last week, for demanding Greenland with menaces and belittling the role of UK armed forces in Afghanistan. But he never connects individual offences 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 Vladimir Putin, the dismantling of civil rights in Hong Kong and other repressions, but without sounding confrontational.
To the extent that the UK government has a foreign policy doctrine, this is it. Beyond the theatre 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 December. He would use engagement on every front to maximise 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 will 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.
Starmer has often insisted that Britain doesn’t face a geopolitical dilemma when it comes to alignment with Washington or Brussels. Now he says the same about the risk of US displeasure at his courtship of China. “I am often invited to simply choose between countries,” he said in an interview ahead of his trip to Beijing. “I don’t do that.”
Like any balancing act, this works until force is applied from one side or the other. Starmer is already hitting the limit to what can be achieved with the EU from a position of mid-Atlantic ambivalence. Negotiations grind slowly on over topics already agreed in principle – defence cooperation, agricultural imports and so on. But there is not much bandwidth in Brussels for fiddling at the margins of the existing Brexit settlement and vanishing confidence that Starmer has the will to do much more.
On the US side, Trump’s threat of tariffs as punishment for siding with Denmark over Greenland and the derision he heaped on a previously agreed deal over the Chagos Islands serve as a warning: the fruits of sycophancy can be discarded in a presidential tantrum. Constructive cooperation with China is only ever one big spy scandal away from angry decoupling.
Pragmatism is necessary in pursuit of any policy. But for Starmer it is the policy. It is an end in itself – the paramount virtue, held up as superior to rigid dogma, which is fair, but also, less convincingly, as the riposte to any demand for clarity of principle or purpose.
There is a pattern here. Starmer’s promise to Labour when he first sought the leadership was ecumenism between factions. He didn’t think he would have to choose between left and right. Only once he was persuaded that Corbynism was toxic to swing voters did he license its extirpation by the party machine. Even then, he didn’t really win an argument in terms of what was right in principle, he shut it down on the basis of what was electorally practical.
In the 2024 general election campaign, Starmer told voters they could have national renewal without painful fiscal choices. Then he spent a year inflicting pain, saying it was necessary, without describing a cause to make it feel justified.
This approach has failed on the domestic front. It will run out of international road, too. In an age of power bloc rivalries, pragmatic engagement in every direction is a denial of strategic dilemmas, postponing crises not averting them. But that is the Starmer way. He is the politician who avoids politics, the problem-solver who hates to name a problem, the leader whose first choice is never to choose.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
