David Cameron will hold his first meeting with the new Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, on Thursday, following concerns expressed by the British government about the effects of a possible Greek exit from the eurozone.
In talks before the formal start of a one-day EU summit in Brussels, the British prime minister will urge his Greek counterpart to reach a deal with his country’s eurozone and IMF creditors.
A British official said: “This is a useful opportunity to hear Tsipras’s plans. The prime minister’s point to him will be: ‘We want to see a swift resolution of this standoff between you and the eurozone partners. And you all need to come together and come up with a plan.’”
The meeting comes after Yanis Varoufakis, the new Greek finance minister, was told by his euro zone counterparts in Brussels on Wednesday that Athens must abide by its bailout agreement.
Cameron, who congratulated Tsipras by telephone shortly after his election victory, does not want to take sides because Britain has little technical involvement with Athens in its negotiations with its creditors. Britain is only marginally linked to the “troika” of the IMF, the European Central Bank and the eurozone as an IMF shareholder.
The prime minister, however, fears the consequences of a Greek exit from the euro, and on Monday he convened an hour-long meeting of the government’s emergency planning committee, Cobra, to assess the situation.
A British official said: “We are not seeking to take sides beyond the point of: ‘You need to get on and sort this out. You have done your 10 days of going round and having talks. You were at the eurogroup [meeting of eurozone finance ministers]and there is another one next week. When are we going to see some resolution and some agreement on a way forward?’”
The prime minister is instinctively more sympathetic to the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, whose finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, has defended the Greek bailout programme. Cameron’s message to eurozone leaders, however, is that they have to sit down with the Greeks and work out a plan.
“They [Syriza] have just won an election on a basis of pledges and we respect that. On the other hand the prime minister would not shy away from saying we have all had to take difficult decisions over the last few years.”
The EU’s 28 leaders will discuss three issues at the Brussels summit:
- New governance arrangements for the eurozone: an interim report drawn up by the presidents of the European Central Bank (ECB), the European commission, the European council and the eurogroup, which was due to be presented to the summit, has not been completed. This means that Mario Draghi, the ECB president, and Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the chair of the eurogroup, will give a verbal update . Britain believes that key eurozone leaders are wary of providing a platform to Tsipras in the absence of a new agreement on Greece’s bailout terms.
- Ukraine: prospects after the talks on Wednesday in Minsk between Merkel, the French president François Hollande, and his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts, Vladimir Putin and Petro Poroshenko.
- Counter-terrorism: Britain has been encouraged by recent EU initiatives on controlling the movement of firearms, doing more to counter radicalisation, taking down extremist material from the internet and sharing conviction data.
