Rishi Sunak has secured a better deal with Emmanuel Macron than his predecessors could have done

Editorial: The French president seemed visibly relieved to be negotiating with someone realistic about overcoming the problems of Brexit

(Dave Brown)

Rishi Sunak laid it on thick in Paris. “We left the EU, but we did not leave Europe,” he told his new best ami, Emmanuel Macron. Mr Macron was entitled to be a little sceptical of this Brexiteer cliche. One of the sentiments behind Britain’s departure from the EU was the desire to draw a line down the middle of the Channel and to separate our affairs from theirs.

It has not worked, and it cannot work, as Mr Macron tried to suggest, because history and geography mean that not only are the UK and France bound closely together, but that the UK cannot easily separate itself from the wider European family.

The small boats crisis is the most vivid demonstration of this. It was mischievous of the French president to suggest that Brexit was a cause of the problem. In fact, the discovery that it was relatively easy, if dangerous, to cross the Channel, seems to have been made when coronavirus lockdowns closed down much of the usual cross-Channel traffic via the EuroShuttle.

However, leaving the EU has certainly made it harder to deal with the problem. Not mainly because the EU’s Dublin regulation no longer applies to the UK, as it was largely ineffective. But because Brexit has reduced the incentive for France and other EU members to see the UK’s specific problem with the boats as a shared one.

Hence Mr Sunak’s welcome change in tone. He echoed Mr Macron’s phrase about a “new beginning” in Anglo-French relations. He came as close as he could to apologising for the crass so-called humour of his two immediate predecessors: Liz Truss, with her irresponsible response to the “friend or foe” question, and Boris Johnson, who told Mr Macron to “prenez un grip” and “donnez-moi un break” in the row over the Australian submarine contract.

The agreement on small boats fell some way short of what Mr Sunak wanted, but he praised Mr Macron to the skies, spoke of an “entente renewed” and said that “there will be more that we can do”. In particular, he emphasised that “we will always comply with our international treaty obligations”, despite appearing recently to face both ways on the question of UK adherence to the European Convention on Human Rights. It would seem that the prime minister has recognised that Mr Johnson’s negotiating tactic of threatening to tear up international treaties was counterproductive.

The French president appeared to be genuinely impressed to be working with a British leader who was diligent, respectful and pragmatic, but Mr Macron was also wary of being bounced by a good negotiator into a deal that might have been hard to sell to his domestic audience and to other EU leaders.

So Mr Sunak had to put a brave face on his failure to secure an agreement that France would take back irregular migrants who cross the Channel. He presumably tried to persuade Mr Macron that such a deal would be in France’s interest as well as the UK’s, because migrants would no longer be drawn to France as a way of getting to the UK, but the French president has his own public opinion to worry about, not to mention cross-border relations with fellow EU member states.

All Mr Sunak could secure, therefore, was the ghost of that policy: a detention centre in France, part paid for by the British taxpayer, without any clear idea of whom it might detain and what might happen to them afterwards.

Enhanced policing of the French coast might slow down the increase in the numbers crossing the Channel. That is the most that Mr Macron is prepared to do, provided that the UK pays for it. But it is a better deal than Ms Truss or Mr Johnson could have negotiated, and for that we should be grateful.