A hot bank holiday weekend, in a resort famed for its white sand beach and its art deco casinos. It sounds like the perfect break for a fun-loving gambler like Boris Johnson.
But as the G7 summit of world leaders convenes in the French town of Biarritz, the new prime minister will be hard at work during three days of talks, schmoozing and photo-ops that marks his debut as Britain’s leader on the world stage.
On the eve of the gathering on the Atlantic coast, Johnson said his main aim as the UK’s first post-Brexit PM was use the summit to show he was leading an “an international, outward-looking, self-confident nation”.
Discussions about climate change, gender inequality, global security and the threat of artificial intelligence will be among the grander themes of the summit hosted by President Emmanuel Macron.
The G7 comprises the US, France, Britain, Japan, Germany, Italy and Canada, as well as the European Union. Macron has also invited the leaders of Australia, Burkina Faso, Chile, Egypt, India, Senegal, Rwanda and South Africa to join a discussion on inequality.
Yet for Johnson the main action could well take place away from the communal negotiating table, as he conducts crucial one-on-one meetings with US President Donald Trump and the EU’s Donald Tusk.
So just what should the new PM hope, or expect, to get out of the long weekend of talks? And what risks will he take to get what he wants?
G5 PLUS 2?
Johnson’s arrival as the new kid on the global block is happening just as some big players are leaving.
This G7 could well be the last one for Canada’s Justin Trudeau, who is behind in the polls ahead of his country’s election this autumn. It will certainly be the last one for Giuseppe Conte, who quit as Italy’s PM last week.
In contrast, Trump’s presence, or rather his absence strategically on many issues, looms large over the Biarritz summit.
In his first G7 in 2017, he announced he was pulling out of the Paris climate change agreement that commits nations to cutting greenhouse gases.
During last year’s meeting in Canada, he walked out early, then tore up the planned ‘communique’ by tweeting that Trudeau was “dishonest and weak”.
What is the G7?
The ‘Group of Seven’ was founded in 1973 to allow the leaders of the world’s seven most “advanced economies” to meet up informally to agree major economic coordination after the oil crisis.
Its current membership is: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Europe, first as the EEC and now as the European Union, has been represented since 1977. Together, they represent 58% of the world’s global net wealth.
Post-communist Russia expanded the group to a G8 but was suspended after its invasion of Ukraine. The G7 is back to representing ‘the West’, though Trump often puts that alliance under strain with his ‘America First’ policy.
Even though China is the world’s second wealthiest country, it is disqualified from the G7 because the International Monetary Fund and other world bodies do not class it yet as an advanced economy.
The bigger G20 group of nations does include China and Russia, as well as India and Brazil, and hosts its own annual summit.
British officials are acutely aware that Macron is himself a former summit ‘sherpa’, and as a key adviser to Francois Hollande spent late nights wrangling over the detailed clauses and subclauses of previous agreements.
In a clear bid to avoid any Canada-style meltdowns by Trump, the French president has decided to ditch the whole idea of having a communique to end the summit.
“We have to adapt formats. There will be no final communiqué, but coalitions, commitments and follow-ups. We must assume that, on one subject or another, a member of the club might not sign up.”
Everyone knew that ‘member of the club’ was Trump. Macron tried to take the edge of things by joking, ”no one reads the communiqués, let’s be honest,”
The UK is still expecting a raft of different texts to emerge from the summit, with possibly a ‘chair’s statement’ from Macron on things like climate change and gender equality. There could well be a ‘Biarritz Declaration’ on things like anti-terror operations in Africa and a new ‘strategy’ on artificial intelligence.
The US President may sign up to some specific statements, but summit veterans say it’s impossible to predict just what he will do on the day.
Having built up a close rapport with Johnson - the pair have had five conversations in four weeks (more than Theresa May managed for nearly a year) - Trump is expecting his new-found friend not to cause him problems this weekend.
Talk of the G7 being replaced by a ‘G5 plus two’ (with Trump and Johnson allying in key areas) is overdone, insiders say. Yet the pair will clearly show how much they’ve bonded, and the PM will not go out of his way to criticise the president directly even on key areas of disagreement.
On Iran, the UK is set to be ultra-diplomatic, aware that Trump won’t budge at the summit from his opposition to the Obama era nuclear deal.
Johnson won’t support America’s policy of applying more sanctions, but in Biarritz there will be an attempt to paper over the differences by stressing shared ‘objectives’ such as stopping Teheran from acquiring a nuclear capacity and countering its ‘aggression’ in the wider region. Fresh moves to resume dialogue could also be made.
Trump’s quixotic approach to which undemocratic regimes he’s prepared to work with has often caused his allies problems since his election. Backing for Hong Kong protestors is likely this weekend, but it’s unclear whether worries over treatment of Russian pro-democracy demonstrators will feature on the President’s radar.
This week he suggested allowing Vladimir Putin back into the ‘G8’, despite little progress since Russia was expelled for invading Ukraine in 2014. Johnson backed Germany’s Angela Merkel in saying Moscow had to do much more before any readmission, stressing how the UK had suffered too through the Salisbury poisonings.
Again however, Johnson is keen to stress common ground with the US, pointing to Trump’s mass expulsion of Russian diplomats, possibly Theresa May’s biggest foreign policy success with Washington.
On the issue of Chinese firm Huawei and the UK’s 5G network, which Trump has raised in recent phone calls with the PM, Britain’s stance is nuanced. While its managed risk approach remains, it has decided not to proceed yet with any decisions until it becomes clearer how America’s ‘blacklisting’ of the company plays out.
On climate change, neither Johnson nor Macron expect Trump to suddenly sign up to the Paris accord this weekend. Influenced in part by his father’s lifelong links to conservation, Johnson has made ‘biodiversity’ an early priority of his premiership.
Focusing on conservation is seen by some insiders as a smarter way to get Trump’s attention on the environment, by playing to his own calls for ‘clean air and clean water’.
By talking about the need to protect ‘precious habitats’, from the Artic to the Amazon, Johnson’s allies think he can focus also on concrete issues like the US’s own emissions targets, not just global targets in the Paris accord.
Encouraging, supporting and cajoling is how Britain sees its role on Trump and climate change more widely, HuffPost UK understands.
On ‘tech taxes’, which Macron has put on the G7 agenda, the UK may take a similarly unconfrontational approach to Washington. The UK is still consulting on former Chancellor Philip Hammond’s ‘digital services tax’ plan, but it will stress at the summit that it is a temporary, targeted and proportionate move that is still subject to business responses.
It will be fascinating to see if Johnson drops his previous tough language on the issue. During the Tory leadership hustings he attacked “the internet giants, the FANGs – Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google” for paying “virtually nothing” in tax.
Trump’s furious reaction to France’s own unilateral tech tax has been salutary, as he threatened a tit-for-tat tax on French wine imports. Perhaps underlining that the President is just a brasher voice of raw American interests, he has received rare support from Google and Facebook, as well as Democrats.
“You expect a trade agreement with the United States and the UK. It will not happen with your digital services tax. Period. Full stop’,” senator Ron Wyden, the leading Democrat on the Senate finance committee has said.
TRADE TENSIONS
And it’s that post-Brexit trade deal that will be a key issue when Johnson and Trump meet face-to-face over breakfast on Sunday.
It’s no secret that Trump hates multilateralism. ‘America First’ isn’t just a slogan, it’s his political credo. But he does like to do deals and Johnson is hoping that he really can hammer out a UK-US trade agreement in coming years.
Johnson’s own words ahead of the summit were a restatement of May’s worries about the threat of a US-China trade war, with talk of ‘new trade barriers threatening growth’.
And the UK believes there will be thorny issues to sort in any post-Brexit trade deal between London and Washington, HuffPost UK understands.
The need to protect the NHS from US health firms and animal welfare are reasons why Britain wants the right deal rather than a quick deal.
Rather than a series of sectoral deals, suggested recently by national security advisor John Bolton, a comprehensive deal is Johnson’s preferred aim.
Anand Menon, of the UK in a Changing Europe think tank, points out that a recent LSE study found that even if every tariff was scrapped between the two countries, the net benefit was a tiny 0.4% of GDP.
“Scrapping tariffs, which is the easy bit of a trade deal, even though it’s a nightmare when it comes to agriculture, isn’t going to do that much,” he says.
“One of those reasons is just geography. We are big partners but compared to the volume of the EU it’s relatively small. Trade deals take a very, very long time and there are far, far fewer low hanging fruit than there used to be, because tariffs are very low.”
The bigger danger is what Macron warned this week was ‘vassalage’, where Britain becomes reliant on American rather than EU trade, he adds.
“The vassalage point is the anti-democratic point. If we do a trade deal that involves services, they involve agreeing to regulations that by definition have to be supervised by a third party. Any parliament will find it hide to change those rules, or the trade stops. The flip side is Congress is as allergic to that as anyone else.”
Stephen Booth, of the Open Europe think tank, says that there are dangers for Europe too, however.
“It’s not just what a trade deal means economically, a lot of that is overblown. But the issue is one more of geopolitics rather than economics. If I was sitting in Paris or Berlin, if we have a no-deal and Boris Johnson does win a majority, and the the first person he picks the phone up to is Donald Trump rather than us, that’s a problem.
“What Macron and Merkel don’t want to do is push the UK into the arms of Trump. That would be a strategic mistake for the EU to make.
“The penny is dropping that they may not be able to rely on the UK parliament to avoid no-deal. You would think the EU would start to get a bit more concerned not just in terms of the practicalities of trade between the UK and EU but what it means more fundamentally for the UK’s relationship with Europe on security and other things if it goes badly.”
EUROPE CALLING
Macron knows what it’s like to be Trump’s newest best pal, having initially hosted him to great fanfare in Paris, and then to fall out with him over big issues.
For his part, the US president has been vocal in saying Brussels has treated the UK badly over its Brexit aspirations.
“They have not treated the UK very well,” he said this week. “That’s a very tough bargain they’re driving, the European Union. That’s a very tough bargain. And I think that UK has the right man in charge right now — the right person in charge, in the form of Boris.”
Trump has in fact praised Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, for driving a hard bargain with America.
Juncker won’t be present in Biarritz as he has had emergency surgery, but European council president Donald Tusk will be. It’s a measure of the EU’s global economic clout that it has not just five member states at the G7, it always has two of its own chiefs too.
Johnson is due to meet Tusk face-to-face for the first time on Sunday afternoon when they sit down for their own ‘bilateral’ meeting.
No.10 is not ramping up expectations for the meeting securing a major breakthrough. However, there is quiet optimism that Tusk, like Angela Merkel and Macron this week, will at least start the process of listening to Britain’s new plans to come up with an alternative to the controversial Irish ‘backstop’.
Tusk famously said in February that there will be a “special place in hell” for “those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan of how to carry it out safely”.
At the time, it was widely seen as an attack on Johnson and others who lead the Vote Leave campaign, a team that is now firmly entrenched in Downing Street.
Normally an Anglophile who liberally references British pop music, Tusk has just a few months left in post but has made clear since Johnson came to office that he wants real detail not just warm words from No.10 about a new deal.
Still, the main target for Johnson is the October 17 EU summit and there are hopes that detailed practical discussions can get underway next week with Brussels, without anyone calling them ‘negotiations’.
Anand Menon says: “The EU would love us to come up with a solution, they just don’t think we will. That’s what Merkel’s ’30 days’ was really about. Time is a massive factor.”
But with all sides now gearing up for a no-deal Brexit on October 31, the idea of a series of ‘side deals’ being struck to avoid chaos is overdone, he says.
“If we have walked away from the table with no deal and caused tremendous damage to some member states, the idea they will go ‘lets do them a favour’ strikes me as fanciful.
“They’ll certainly do stuff to help themselves and in helping themselves they’ll help us, on freight, on air transport, but the notion they will sign deals is fanciful. You’ve also got to ask, why would they help Boris Johnson in a general election campaign?
ELECTION TIME?
Stephen Booth adds that that a snap election looks like the only way of actually giving Johnson the majority he would need to get a US-UK trade deal agreed anyway.
“A trade deal is more talk than substance, in the short term at least. It’s hard to see how you could get another EU deal through parliament, but there’s the same question mark as to whether you’d get a US trade deal through this parliament either. I would think you would need a new parliament to get a US deal done given the government’s majority.”
And for some in the Johnson camp, it’s the prospect a snap poll that is the real backdrop to this G7 summit.
No matter what agreements are struck, what press conference gaffes are made, images of a new prime minister rubbing shoulders with big global players are sure to be used as fodder for election campaign videos.
If anyone had any doubt that an election is as much on Johnson’s mind as Brexit, he took time out of his G7 summit prep to stage a visit to Sarah Wollaston’s seat in Totnes on Friday. With Wollaston having defected to the Lib Dems, it’s a prime Tory target and the PM went walkabout with the new Conservative candidate to ram home his point.
Earlier this week, he previewed his mini-tour of Berlin and Paris with a new video, with red-white-and-blue, patriotic imagery overlaying his speech on the steps of No.10.
Biarritz won’t be a holiday. But it will more than ever be about politics than policy.
JOHNSON’S G7 DIARY
Saturday
Bilateral meeting with Canada’s Trudeau
‘Family photo’ of leaders
Dinner to discuss foreign policy and security
Sunday
Breakfast meeting with President Trump
Plenary of leaders on the global economy
Meeting with EU’s Donald Tusk
Plenary session with UN secretary general and other world groups on gender inequality, poverty
G7-Africa partnership on security, anti-corruption and girls’ education
Meeting with India’s Narendra Modi
Expanded ‘family photo’ then working dinner with other non-G7 leaders including Australia, India, South Africa
Monday
Breakfast meeting with Australia’s Scott Morrison
Meeting with Egypt’s President Sisi
Morning session on climate change and biodiversity
Meeting with Japan’s PM Abe
Working lunch on digital challenges including AI and data protection
Press conference