It looked like the moment Sir Keir Starmer had reached a turning point after spending his first six months as prime minister tumbling in the polls.
He hugged Volodymyr Zelensky close and offered the heroic Ukrainian president support after Donald Trump and JD Vance’s White House ambush.
With work underway to establish and lead – alongside Emmanuel Macron – a ‘coalition of the willing’, it looked like European and other Ukrainian allies were preparing to step up where the US was walking away.
For Sir Keir, things finally looked like they were starting to get better and Labour enjoyed a bounce in the polls.
But, emerging from the Elysée Palace into the Parisian sun on Thursday, the PM once again looked in trouble.
His chancellor Rachel Reeves had just overseen a disastrously planned and executed spring statement, the fallout from which is only growing. And, despite Sir Keir’s insistence otherwise, progress on the coalition of the willing looks to have stalled.
Britain and France remain the only countries committed publicly to stationing troops in Ukraine if a ceasefire is struck, and questions remain about what a peacekeeping or reassurance force would look like.
More concerningly, speaking to The Independent, former national security adviser Lord Ricketts questioned whether it is even credible to claim a force can be sustained in Ukraine without Mr Trump on side.
I sat through a press conference in which the PM was asked what concrete evidence he had for his claim that progress was being made, and the answer appeared to be based more on vibes than any milestones the coalition has reached.
He cited the “broader grouping” of countries than when the coalition got started and a strong “sense of momentum” in talks. The PM also pointed to planning sessions in the UK this week attended by hundreds of military figures to work out who can offer what to the peacekeeping force if and when it is launched.
But another problem for the PM came when I spoke with anti-Putin activist and human rights campaigner Sir Bill Browder. Sir Bill is one of Putin’s fiercest critics, and biggest enemies, and warned the “coalition of the willing is based on enforcing a ceasefire that is not going to happen”. “Putin has given no indication he is going to stop fighting, he is just playing Trump for all he is worth,” he added.
Sir Keir rightly called Putin out for “playing games” and “filibustering” peace talks, warning that the Russian despot cannot be trusted. But it is not the British public that needs to be told, it is Mr Trump, whom Sir Keir seems determined not to upset in the slightest.
Sir Keir’s trip to Paris was an opportunity to take back control of the narrative after the chancellor’s spring statement and show himself again as a statesman on the world stage, bringing the Ukraine war closer to its end.
However, with concrete progress eluding the PM, he will arrive back in London with little to shout about and a lot of difficult questions to answer.
