Starmer is falling into the EU’s trap 

No doubt Keir Starmer wants us to think he is being ‘grown up’ in accepting an invitation to dinner at an EU summit. But it is actually the reverse: he is behaving like a toddler in danger of being enticed into a stranger’s car by a bag of sweets dangled out of the window.

As the Times reports this morning, Emmanuel Macron views him as a supplicant who is desperate to beg to be allowed partly to re-join the EU because Brexit has failed and immiserated the UK economy. The French president intends to take every advantage and to finish the job that wasn’t quite finished during the Brexit negotiations: to try to snare Britain within the EU’s regulatory orbit, and to tie our hands behind our backs when it comes to trade deals with the rest of the world.

Macron might have convinced himself that Britain’s economic slump is down to Brexit – ignoring the obvious evidence that France is not doing much better than Britain and that the German economy, which is entering its third year of recession, is doing far worse.