Keir Starmer – Britain’s caretaker manager

What sort of footballer would join Manchester United now? Not because it is a fallen giant unable to offer a European stage, but because its revolving door attitude to managers has rendered it inherently unstable.

Players like to know what the manager wants, how he likes his team to play, where the player fits into the formation, what the long-term “vision” of the club under his stewardship is. It’s unattractive to join a club knowing that, within months, the man who signed you up will be gone, replaced by a successor who plays in an entirely different way.

It’s something the European Union is wrestling with as Keir Starmer seeks to “reset” relations with Brussels. Why, officials are entitled to ask, should we use valuable time and bandwidth to come to some sort of arrangement with you when, to be frank, all polls show that you – or a Labour successor – will be gone at the next election and the likely new manager has a rather different interpretation of “reset”?

That’s why the EU has insisted on something that is inevitably dubbed (no doubt to the benefit of its namesake’s over-stoked ego) a “Farage clause” in its talks. It is demanding that any future British government pays significant financial compensation if they quit any post-Brexit deal that Starmer manages to negotiate, as any administration led by the Reform leader – or, indeed, Kemi Badenoch – surely would.

Specifically, the European Commission has included a termination clause that would require the UK to pay a high level of restitution if it chose to exit a proposed EU-UK “veterinary agreement” to remove Brexit red tape for British food and drink exporters.

Reform has promised to overturn any deal and Farage has said he would not hand over any money to Brussels under any deal signed by Starmer. “I would break it,” he told the Financial Times, displaying the same degree of responsibility he has shown throughout both his political and personal lives.

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The very fact that the EU feels it necessary to demand such an agreement shows the pernicious effect that Nigel Farage and Reform are having on the country without even walking down Downing Street. Why, they must think, sign a deal with the caretaker manager when his likely successor will not just tear it up, but do so literally and performatively for a video he will probably post on X?

For a man who devoted most of his political life to redefining Britain’s relationship with Europe, we’ve heard remarkably little from Farage on what path he plans to forge in the event he does become prime minister. Reform’s 2024 manifesto – sorry, contract – devoted precisely 165 words to how the party sees us working with our nearest neighbour and largest trading partner under its leadership.

This amounted to scrapping all existing EU laws on the statute book, abandoning the Windsor Framework -– hugely damaging for Northern Ireland, a part of the UK in which Farage never shown the slightest interest – pulling out of the Horizon science programme for no discernible reason and the almost unbelievably meaningless “Prepare for Renegotiations on the EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement”. What does that mean?

Farage’s previous view on post-Brexit relations was to “rip the plaster off”, trading on World Trade Organisation terms and essentially having no closer a relationship than we have with, say, Peru. Is that still his stance? Or will Reform, once in government, behave as it has in local government and abandon its ideals when they collide with cold, hard reality?

If something which should be as basic as a deal that removes the Brexit red tape faced by food exporters should live or die on a clause bearing Farage’s name, is it any wonder Starmer will not engage in talks to rejoin the EU, or form a new customs union? Seeing the way the political wind in the UK is blowing, why would the EU bend over backwards to a country which thinks such things can be cancelled or resubscribed to, like Netflix? To the Europeans, Starmer must look like Joe Biden: an interval between two Trumps, and destined to be remembered for little else.

Reform is not yet in government but is already wielding power in international corridors. At precisely the time we need to be rebuilding a close relationship with Europe, Reform’s very presence is the danger.