Being Prime Minister is a lot like being a Premier League manager.
At any given moment tens of thousands of people are watching you convinced they could do better. Even as he announced the concessions he’d wrestled from France, Keir Starmer knew he was in for a kicking.
The most accomplished magician, hypnotist or confidence tricker (or maybe a combination of the three) couldn’t convince the French to take back every small boat arrival. But within moments social media was awash with fantasists demanding he does exactly that.
After years of trying, Britain finally has a returns agreement with France. The bromance with Emmanuel Macron is starting to pay off, three years after Liz Truss said she was unsure if the President was a “friend or foe”.
Predictably though it wasn’t long before Nigel Farage was on social media declaring it a “humiliation”. It will be frustrating for a No10 team who know that securing any sort of returns deal with France was like swimming against the tide.
French President Mr Macron has the far-right breathing down his neck, threatening to sweep him and his team out of office. Is it helpful for him to be seen to be helping Britain solve its migration crisis when it means people remaining in France? Of course not. That point would have been made many times during the talks.
In a burning cauldron at the British military’s Northwood Headquarters, there were some combative words for the Reform UK leader – who spent the day on the Channel photoing small boats. The PM lashed out at the “performative politics of the easy answer” and added: “While we’ve been working hard on getting a returns agreement, others have been taking photos.”
Mr Starmer’s critics will sneer at the small number of people who will be returned – a reported 50 a week. But he will point out that he came to office with nothing, and seemingly no prospect of France agreeing to anything.
Mr Macron went further, saying Britons were “sold a lie” when they were told Brexit would make tackling illegal migration easier. In fact the opposite is true, he said.
He pointed out that when Britain was in the EU, it had access to a legal mechanism called the Dublin Agreement. This gave it a legal framework for returning migrants to the first country they entered. But that is no more, Mr Macron said.
It’s hard to picture Mr Farage getting anything other than a firm “non” if he tried to come to some arrangement with France. So here the Government is, trying to sort out an inherited mess with an ally who can only bend so far.