
Just three days after the five-year anniversary of Britain leaving the European Union, Keir Starmer sat down to a “working dinner” last night with EU leaders in Brussels, at the Palais d’Egmont. While the event was dubbed an “informal leaders” retreat, this was a significant moment: the first time a British Prime Minister has attended an EU summit (in any capacity) since Brexit.
Much will be written about the tensions and opportunities of this “reset” with the EU (think defence cooperation, trade policy in light of a characteristically aggressive Trump White House, and arguments over a free movement scheme for young people), and we are unlikely to get anything solid until the spring.
This lack of detail hasn’t stopped Kemi Badenoch from accusing the Labour government of “trying to reopen the divisions of the past and edge us back into the EU” before Starmer even arrived in Brussels. The Conservative leader (perhaps borrowing from Gordon Brown’s stance on joining the euro circa 1997) has set Starmer “five tests” to “make sure he doesn’t undo Brexit”. These include not paying the EU any more money or accepting any EU rules or the jurisdiction of European courts, and staying strong on fishing rights. In top spot, though, when Badenoch tweeted her list, was “no backsliding on free movement or asylum transfers”.
The Tory focus on immigration is hardly surprising – this is a party desperately trying to rebuild its credibility on one of the key issues that cost it the election, with multiple pollsters finding that Nigel Farage’s Reform has overtaken it in terms of support (in fact, the latest YouGov poll has Reform ahead of Labour too). And a free movement scheme, even if it’s just for under-30s, will be a significant point of contention in any negotiations between the EU and the UK. Obviously the Conservatives want to punch that bruise.
But the Brexit legacy is hardly stress-free for the Tories either. For a start, the polls show increasing levels of “Bregret”, with more than half of Brits thinking leaving the EU was a mistake, including one in six Leavers. (As George Eaton put it yesterday, “the classic Farageiste contention – that elite opinion is on the wrong side of the people – can now be thrown back at Leavers”, although good luck to Starmer if he tries that.)
Brexiteers, of course, will argue that the disappointing polling is because the full benefits of leaving the EU have not yet been seized. But that brings us on to the second reason it’s an awkward topic for the Conservatives, perfectly summed up by the shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel. Last week, Patel defended the record levels of immigration that took place under the post-Brexit “points-based” scheme devised when she was Boris Johnson’s home secretary, rising to 1.2 million in 2021. Challenged on this spike, Patel responded: “Brightest and the best coming to our country? People on skilled work routes and visas? It’s legal migration.”
This is very much not the current Tory line, as a swift statement from Badenoch’s office and subsequent backtracking attempt from Patel made clear. The Tory leader’s whole schtick at the moment is that the Conservatives should be honest about the mistakes they made in office (note: not Badenoch herself). Immigration is top of the mistake list – in particular the “Boriswave” that resulted from Johnson and Patel’s points system for granting visas. It was indeed legal migration, as Patel argued, but it was a level of legal migration that, the Tories have belatedly realised, was interpreted as a colossal betrayal by the Brexit-backing voters Johnson won over so successfully in 2019.
What to do about that sense of betrayal is at the heart of the Conservative paradox. The Boriswave is splitting the party: the Centre for Migration Control (a relatively new addition to the right-wing think tank and lobby group scene) last week suggested the dependents of these migrants could cost the UK £35bn by 2028. There are frantic conversations underway in Tory circles about what happens when that cohort becomes eligible for indefinite leave to remain after five years of living here, and whether this should be a focus of the party in opposition. But if they have those conversations too loudly, people might start to ask who was in charge of using new Brexit freedoms to write a point-based system that appears to have done the exact opposite of what many people voting for Brexit wanted. And Patel is sitting right there on the frontbench.
This leaves Badenoch in catch-up mode. She can’t sack Patel without looking weak (she has said she won’t reshuffle her team before the next election – we shall see), so she needs other ways to send a signal. Robert Jenrick’s big pitch for the leadership was a hard cap on migration numbers. Badenoch emphatically refused to match him – but now that appears to be official Conservative policy (exact numbers TBC). Still, it hasn’t been enough to fend off the advance of Reform in the polls or the battle for airspace.
There remain in the Tory party those who are sceptical that moving closer to Reform, sometimes described disparagingly as the “they’re right about everything but please support us instead” strategy, risks backfiring and that the Tories should try to win back some of the voters they lost to the Liberal Democrats. They won’t do this with five meaningless “tests” designed to scupper the EU reset, or trying to shift attention from the wave of non-EU migration onto European students and young people who might want to temporarily come to Britain.
But it does explain why the Conservatives are in such a tailspin trying to get their own EU policy straight (and, perhaps, why Badenoch is reportedly having to hold crisis talks with her team about the direction of the party and issues of funding under her leadership). It also doesn’t make the tightrope any easier for the Labour government trying to reset the relationship with the EU.
Just to rub this in, this month marks nine years since David Cameron headed off to Brussels to negotiate concessions with the EU that he hoped would enable him to sell continued membership to the British electorate and stop his party “banging on about Europe” for a generation. Both Starmer and Badenoch might want to take note.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: Why doubts are growing over Kemi Badenoch]