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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Sir Keir Starmer’s visit to China last week was the first by a British prime minister in eight years. His attendance at a gathering of EU leaders this week will be his first since Brexit. When Rachel Reeves went to the Gulf last autumn, there had been no chancellor of the exchequer for six years.

So, just to run through those destinations again: the second largest economy in the world, the largest cross-national single market and a region that accounts for about 40 percent of everything. sovereign investment all over the world. Perhaps the predecessors of Starmer and Reeves had more pressing engagements elsewhere.

Little by little, Britain is emerging from a decade of repression in its chamber. Whatever his jitters on the domestic scene, Starmer is the first prime minister since David Cameron to understand the country’s place in the world, which is that of a middle-sized actor who needs friends – or at least partners of convenience.

Meanwhile, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch will not visit China “at this time”. (So ​​shall we abandon the whole decade, then? That will teach them.) He not only opposed but also marched against the new embassy of the People’s Republic going up near the Tower of London. If this animus is balanced with a warming towards Europe, the whole thing might come together as geostrategy, but the Tories don’t want the EU either.

So this, as much as possible, is the international posture of the British right: not in Europe, not in China, yes in America but more excited, because no one wants to suffer the fate of the election of Pierre Poilievre in Canada or Peter Dutton in Australia, both tainted by association with Donald Trump. As regards trade in India, the right is caught between excitement over opportunities and foot-dragging for “British workers”.

What country do the Tories think they live in? If it was a superpower with a GDP of tens of trillions of dollars, this extreme choice of which parts of the world to engage with would be justified. But rumors persist that it is an archipelago of 70 million people whose global power peaked a century ago.

Badenoch, the exact opposite of Starmer, showed promise on the home front. He is a good parliamentarian. While the Tories are stuck in the polls on voting intentions, the underlying data is changing. The party became the most trusted of eCONOMY. Many voters now say the government pays and spends too much. He has “lost” colleagues in Nigel Farage’s Reform UK but in the sense that someone has lost gallstones: the party will be better off for a short-term illness.

What hasn’t really evolved, hasn’t matured one iota, is Conservative foreign policy. For a sense of the strangeness of this, consider what peer countries are doing. Friedrich Merz is expected to visit China soon, although Germany will have to make much less diplomatic ground there than Britain. (Olaf Scholz has been twice and the bilateral trade is GREAT.) Mark Carney went last month and Emmanuel Macron the month before. Is Starmer serious about not going? Britain has real security concerns, but what threats does it face that other north Atlantic democracies have decided to manage? If the issue is ethical – human rights and otherwise – what has the nearly decade-long disengagement from China achieved on that front? Will absolute monarchies in the Gulf be avoided? To which democratic allies, if not those across the Channel, should the UK seek strength in numbers against autocracies?

The future world, if it is one of many great powers than the US, is scary but also enlightening. Most countries should take the same approach to foreign affairs, which is a kind of strategic prostitution. Continuing various relations, nothing consolidated in particular: governments from Canada to Vietnam had to play roué. Starmer’s recent outbursts in Europe and China are just the beginning – so he has little to show for them – and the Tories are already scandalized. Their alternative? A monogamous love in the US who nevertheless dare not speak his name, at least not while Trump is around to alienate the British electorate.

This cannot be sustained. However, the conservative movement was fractured on all sides. It is committed to a world view a decade ago, when the planet was pro-trade, the US was friendly and Europe was peaceful, and now it does not know what to do. The British right cannot seek closer economic integration with its own continent without admitting that Brexit is a stinker of an idea. It cannot destroy relations with China without disturbing its own side. It can’t be tough on Trump without the public needing it. What are leaves? Fixing New Zealand is not a foreign policy. I fear the Tories are months away from returning to the old way, that sure sign of decades of conservative intellectual fatigue: a pledge to strengthen the Commonwealth.

Starmer is said to have preferred the dignity of foreign travels to the drudgery at home. Good. Given the state of some of Britain’s key relationships after nearly a decade of self-defeating vanity and unearned hauteur, a prime minister who doesn’t travel the world today could be remiss in their duties. “Never here Keir”? If those who reject such an insult know that it is high praise, they may deserve to be singled out.

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