The Ukraine crisis has accelerated a reset of UK-EU relations – but will it last?

“The defence and foreign policy wonks were already comfortable with a closer relationship with the UK,” said Ian Bond, another former UK diplomat, who is deputy director of the Centre for European Reform think-tank. “The problem is what happens in other parts.”

He added: “The thing will be to keep as much as possible of the new relationship at the level of leaders. Macron gets it, I think that when Friedrich Merz becomes German chancellor he will get it.

“If their fishing ministers don’t get it, that’s something which hopefully they will manage domestically, rather than the reset of the EU-UK relationship coming to a grinding halt over how many sand eels Danish fishers are allowed to catch off the Dogger Bank.”

...“A lot is going to depend on what happens with Washington over the coming weeks,” Bond said. “If Trump calms down and stops trying to ensure that Ukraine loses, which is what he seems to be doing at the moment, I can see that traditional British reflexes of ‘we must at all costs protect the special relationship’ kick in pretty hard.

“But if Trump continues to try to destroy Ukraine and to normalise relations with Russia, and keeps threatening to invade Greenland and absorb Canada, I think it’s going to become increasingly difficult for the Brits to pretend that nothing has happened.”