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UK prime minister Rishi Sunak and his French counterpart, president Emmanuel Macron, will in March attend a UK-France summit, the first of its kind in five years.
Downing Street on Wednesday confirmed that Macron will host Sunak for a meeting to foster bilateral co-operation in areas such as climate and security. The idea was initially discussed by the pair during their first phone call last October.
The meeting, to be held on March 10, is a sign of thawing relations between Britain and key EU partners since Boris Johnson’s departure as prime minister last September.
The relationship between France and Britain has been fraught in recent years with spats over fishing rights and migration, and mistrust between Macron and Johnson.
Sunak hopes to use the summit to build co-operation on tackling migration across the Channel in small boats and to win support for a compromise on the vexed issue of post-Brexit trading rules for Northern Ireland.
Settling the row over the so-called Northern Ireland protocol is key. The issue has brought the region’s Stormont government to a halt with the Democratic Unionist party boycotting the power-sharing executive and assembly until the dispute is resolved.
Sunak and the EU are seeking to resolve the issue before the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday peace accord on April 10. Macron has always insisted that Britain must live up to its obligations under the protocol.
“[The summit] is an opportunity to deepen co-operation between the UK and France in a huge range of areas including security, climate and energy, the economy, migration and shared foreign policy goals,” Sunak’s spokesperson said.
UK-France summits used to be held more regularly, but the two countries have not held such a meeting since Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, hosted Macron at the Sandhurst military academy in January 2018. Britain has had three prime ministers since then.
News of the meeting has been warmly welcomed by some foreign policy experts. “With the previous UK administrations it seemed politically convenient to keep France at arm’s length, or blame the country for some of the UK’s ills,” Sir Peter Westmacott, former UK ambassador to France and currently UK chair of Tikehau Capital, a Paris-based asset management firm, told the Financial Times.
“However, Sunak is a technocrat and pragmatist,” he added, arguing that the prime minister recognised that fixing the protocol required engaging with the EU commission and convincing “key players in Europe . . . of the UK’s good faith”.
Lord Peter Ricketts, former British ambassador to Paris, told the FT that the Northern Ireland protocol could be a “cloud” over the occasion if it remained unresolved.
“France will want to see the outcome on the protocol before committing finally to long-term co-operation on major projects with the UK,” he said.
“This [summit] is of symbolic importance as it signals a willingness to put aside bad blood that may have built up but the test will be whether both government’s can turn good will into tangible deliverable goals and projects in areas such as defence and climate change,” he added.
The Élysée Palace has also been preparing a state visit for King Charles III that may be held in late March. The dates have not been finalised.
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