Britain must keep Germany very close

A Brexit UK would be wise to seek the closest relationship it can achieve with the EU’s biggest member state

t the end of last week I sat in the spacious and splendidly restored country home of a former prime minister of Prussia, some 50km from the GermanPolish border, and listened to two speeches in English. The first was given by Philip Hammond. The second, a couple of hours later, was given by Boris Johnson. Both professed undying friendship, respect and regard for Germany. Johnson even paraded a hitherto concealed family connection with the city of Stuttgart.

It tells you a lot that, on the day after Theresa May triggered Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, London should send first the chancellor of the exchequer and then the foreign secretary to address a gathering of the British-German political, business and media elites at their annual Konigswinter conference, especially when these occasions were held under the Chatham House rule and the content of the speeches cannot therefore be reported (including, I suppose, Johnson’s Stuttgart connection).

Most of the things this tells you are right and necessary: that Britain knows Germany is the most important country in Europe; that the government sees Britain will not get a satisfactory Brexit deal from the EU 27 without the backing of Germany; that European security, even after Brexit, is dependent on high-level cooperation between Britain, France and Germany. And that, even while Brexit is forcing Britain and Germany apart, Donald Trump’s presidency may be pushing us closer together.

So it made absolute good sense for Whitehall to send two such high-ranking emissaries across Europe to press the flesh and to talk to prominent German politicians and officials in private.

There was, though, a flaw. The German participants were constructive about the Brexit future — in marked contrast, I am told, to the haughtier Gallic attitude at the equivalent Anglo-French colloque held recently in Versailles. Yet even though Berlin was little more than an hour’s drive away, there was no equivalent heavyweight German presence at the gathering. No Wolfgang Schauble, Hammond’s opposite number, no Sigmar Gabriel for Johnson (they met in London this week), and of course, no Angela Merkel either. If the presence of the chancellor of the exchequer and the foreign secretary said a lot about the importance London attaches to Germany, these absences say something about the importance Berlin attaches to Brexit Britain.

Right signal

London’s own goodwill towards Berlin is nevertheless the right signal. Britain can sometimes deceive itself about German attitudes. But the readiness to court Germany, alongside the practical positivity of the German approach to Brexit Britain, was hard to miss in last week’s conference. It felt like a recognition, amid all the huffing and puffing of Brexit, that Britain is still part of Europe, and that many aspects of the relationship could endure if both sides want. If May’s words about Britain not turning its back on Europe mean what they say, a new relationship can definitely be built on the old.

Germany alone buys 9.3 per cent of UK exports and sells us 15 per cent of our imports. Germany is our military ally; just as the UK has 800 troops in Estonia to help ward off Russian encroachment, so Germany has 1,000 in Lithuania. German values embody liberal democratic principles from which Britain has sometimes slipped.

Merkel’s attitude to Europe’s migration crisis from 2015 to 2016 was a striking contrast to David Cameron’s. Her response to Trump’s election emphasised values in a way May’s did not. And neither Merkel’s CDU nor the opposition SPD has run scared of the anti-European Alternative fur Deutschland in the way the Tories and Labour have done with Ukip in Britain.

Germany’s principal concern in the Brexit process is to stabilise and ensure the EU 27 against any wider Brexit effect elsewhere. That will remain the case whether Merkel (still my bet) or Martin Schulz is chancellor after September’s elections. Much hinges on what happens in France in the coming month. But there are no signs that the British government, as distinct from some xenophobes on the Tory backbenches and the goggle-eyed anti-European think tanks, positively wishes to see the EU disintegrate. Officially, the position is quite the opposite. And so it should be.

In that post-Brexit context, Anglo-German cooperation could become the cornerstone of UK European policy, while the airy aspirations of “global Britain” would be merely an add-on, not the morally and politically empty alternative that the prime minister sometimes appears to be advocating.

More than 30 years ago in the pre-Eurozone Cold War era, Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor Nigel Lawson followed a policy of “shadowing the deutschmark”. It proved an ill-starred policy for sterling in the wake of German reunification and the acceleration of European monetary union.

But shadowing the deutschmark was a clear, convergent but autonomous policy. In today’s very different circumstances, after Brexit and amid the Trump uncertainties, Britain’s interests and values require a new form of shadowing of and identification with Germany. Global Britain is just waffle. Hugging the Americans close is more delusional in the Trump era than before. But Britain will still be a European country after Brexit. Shadowing Germany — not blindly and in every way, but generally and in essential ways (which should include more teaching of German) — is the path of the future. It should therefore be the direction in which the compass of British statecraft is reset in the post-Brexit world.

Martin Kettle is an associate editor of the Guardian and writes on British, European and American politics, as well as the media, law and music.