Little British news came out of the Nato summit in Lithuania this week. But that’s the way Rishi Sunak wanted it.
There was a bit more military backing for Ukraine from the UK, in the form of 70 combat and logistics vehicles and a fresh pile of 155mm artillery shells.
But the key metric President Volodymr Zelensky will have been using to judge the UK’s support for his country at the summit will have been how tough Mr Sunak’s language was on Ukraine joining Nato.
The Prime Minister said Ukraine’s “rightful place is in Nato” – a line he would repeat throughout the two-day summit – but failed to offer a timeline for when that might happen. It was a cautious response from Mr Sunak, but not atypical for a Prime Minister that likes to keep a tight ship on any newslines.
Insiders told i that Mr Sunak was given a 100-page briefing last Friday with draft responses to journalists’ potential questions, and surprised colleagues by memorising it almost verbatim.
They described him as “the Prime Minister that doesn’t want to make news”, preferring instead to keep his head down and pop up at pre-planned events, such as yesterday’s Downing Street press conference announcing public-sector pay awards.
When Mr Sunak met President Zelensky in Vilnius on Wednesday morning, he asked for both sides’ aides to leave the room and for the cameras to be turned off, with a dry readout emerging from No 10 hours later.
It wasn’t the first time the Prime Minister has turned observers away. He did the same during a meeting with President Zelensky at the G7 summit in Tokyo in May and at bilateral talks with French President Emmanuel Macron in March.
The Prime Minister’s biggest moment during the two-day summit came amid a bit of banter with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. The British PM handed his counterpart a picture of England cricket players Mark Wood and Chris Woakes celebrating their winning runs at Headingley last Sunday – following a tit-for-tat over accusations that Australia had only won the previous match by cheating.
In return, Mr Albanese gave him a picture of the moment itself – when England wicketkeeper Jonny Bairstow was stumped as he left the crease. Seeing it, Mr Sunak joked: “I’m sorry I didn’t bring my sandpaper with me,” referring to a previous ball-tampering scandal from 2018. No 10 insisted the exchange, which was filmed and put out on Mr Albanese’s social media, was a coincidence.
It was overshadowed by the more serendipitous comedy of the peaceful Luxembourg delegation raising eyebrows after landing on the tarmac in Vilnius in a plane emblazoned with a giant red skull. They later explained that they had chartered a plane used by Depeche Mode for their world tour.
It marked a moment of light relief in a Nato summit dominated by a more serious theme: President Zelensky and his push for Ukraine to join Nato.
Vilnius came out in support for the Ukrainian leader, with blue and yellow draped on every lamp-post and most buildings across the capital city. Ukrainian flags hung from cranes. Buses were emblazoned with the phrase: “While you are waiting for this bus, Ukraine is waiting to become a Nato member.”
While Joe Biden’s parade through the city’s main Cathedral Square in “The Beast” on Tuesday evening did attract a crowd, President Zelensky’s motorcade through the cobbled streets of the Old Town several minutes later saw the city grind to a standstill. People young and old, packed in wall-to-wall against the pretty coloured buildings, screamed as the convoy of blacked-out vehicles rolled past, studded with small Ukrainian flags.
It came hours after Mr Zelensky took to Twitter to scold Nato for its soft language on Ukraine’s accession to the alliance. In a surprise tirade, he described Nato’s failure to offer a timeline for membership as “absurd,” and urged allies to treat Ukraine with “respect”.
For the most part, they did. But as Mr Sunak must have realised towards the end of the summit, the trouble with exercising caution over tricky foreign policy matters is that other people don’t.
The Prime Minister was upstaged by his Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, who raised eyebrows on Wednesday as he suggested that Ukraine should be more grateful for support from allies.
Speaking at an armchair event on the sidelines of the summit, Mr Wallace likened Ukraine’s incessant demands for weapons to a shopping list. He relayed an anecdote from a trip last summer in which he drove 11 hours to visit Kyiv leaders only to be met with a fresh demand for ammunition. “I’m not Amazon,” he told them.
The loose talk from the Defence Secretary dominated the subsequent press conference held by Mr Sunak, in which the Prime Minister stood behind a wooden lectern to explain his “three reasons” why Nato allies should feel “more confident and more united than ever”.
It was a similar approach to his increasingly shaky-looking five key pledges to fix the UK. Mr Sunak said Nato members had “acted decisively to strengthen this alliance”, announced “long-term bilateral security commitments that Ukraine needs”, and said the UK was outperforming its European allies by edging closer to spending 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence.
When the room opened up to questions, Sky News asked Mr Sunak whether he thought he could get away with his careful talk when the Conservatives were more than 20 points behind Labour. The other questions were about Mr Wallace.
Government insiders involved in foreign policy have rejected the suggestion Mr Sunak is overly cautious – pointing to breakthroughs on issues such as the Northern Ireland Protocol and the Aukus submarine deal with the US and Australia, which has angered French officials.
The Foreign Office has repeatedly summoned ambassadors from hostile countries such as Russia, China and Iran for a dressing-down in an escalation of diplomatic aggression. “There is a misconception that when we summon ambassadors it’s just a slap on the wrist,” a source said. “It’s really quite serious, we absolutely haul them over the coals.”
Mr Sunak also believes he can use British soft power to good effect – including by leveraging his own background, as the child of migrants from the Indian community of East Africa, to build stronger links to the Commonwealth after Brexit.
The Prime Minister has told friends that when he addresses leaders from countries which used to be part of the British Empire, they find it harder than in the past to point to historic injustices perpetrated by the UK.
But Foreign Office officials are anxious about another source of soft power, the UK’s international development budget, which has been cut since the pandemic.
An insider said: “People don’t understand that the money we spend on aid gives us huge influence, even though it’s a drop in the ocean of public spending. And we’re still one of the biggest donors – but ultimately there is less money than there used to be.”
In any case, Mr Sunak showed little willingness to talk about foreign policy in specific terms during the Vilnius summit.
And so it was Mr Wallace’s inflammatory comments that were the focus of the articles journalists were frantically filing on the two-hour flight back to London.
By the time the plane landed many had been told to chop them in half, as they arrived to news that Huw Edwards had been named as the BBC presenter alleged to have paid a young person for sex photos. Not a single newspaper splashed on the Nato summit – and that’s exactly the way Mr Sunak would have liked it.
