Flying start Lightning trip begins reset of relationship with Europe

It felt like a deeply symbolic, even cathartic, moment on Saturday lunchtime as, on take off from Stansted, the pilot carrying the new foreign secretary, David Lammy, banked the government plane with the Union Jack livery sharply leftwards across the sodden and half occluded fields of Essex and towards Europe.

- Patrick Wintour

For the first of what is likely to be innumerable overseas trips, Lammy had chosen Destination Europe, and Operation Reset. It was intended quite literally to be a flying start as he hurtled from his first cabinet meeting down the M11 and a flight to Berlin, Stockholm and Bydgoszcz, close to the pastoral family home of the Polish foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski.

The lightning weekend trip is only the first leg of what may prove to be a long and painful journey reconstructing a relationship with Europe after the eight fractious years of Brexit, albeit a relationship with boundaries. For though Lammy in Berlin said he wanted to put the Brexit years behind us, Labour remains rigidly committed to staying outside the EU, the single market and the customs union. Britain is returning to Europe, but as a changed country seeking cooperation, not union.

It is a delicate operation, involving complex trade-offs, and it may not work. In Brussels at a time of rising European nationalism, there will be fears it cannot be perceived to be granting any concessions to a country that fled the EU. In the UK the Conservatives, anxious for redemption as Boris Johnson has already written, accuse Labour of taking the UK back down the road to EU "serfdom".