Ivan Rogers on the UK-EU relationship

The UK in a Changing Europe Podcast

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4.3 • 105 Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

The first post-Brexit UK-EU summit on Monday 19 May was heralded as a key milestone in UK-EU relations. But what exactly did it achieve? To analyse this in-depth, director Anand Menon is joined by Sir Ivan Rogers, former UK Permanent Representative to the EU, who, in Anand's words, "knows more about the EU than anyone in the world." They discuss what it is like negotiating these deals behind the scenes, why the Defence and Security Pact is important for the UK but a little lacking in substance, the overreaction of parts of the media and political right, what the agreements signed actually mean in terms of dynamic alignment, why energy negotiations were a surprising win, and, crucially, what comes next now that leaders have paved the way to what are likely to be highly difficult and technical negotiations with our European partners. Listen now for everything you need to know about the UK-EU summit and the future of the UK-EU relationship..

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, everyone. Welcome to this latest installment of the UK and a changing Europe podcast.
0:10.4	Delighted today to be joined by none other than Ivan Rogers, former senior Treasury Mandarin,
0:16.3	British permanent representative to the European Union, knows more about the European Union than anyone
0:20.9	else in the world. So we're going to quiz him a little bit about what's been going on,
0:25.0	particularly with regard to the summit at Lancaster House that took place recently. Ivan, welcome.
0:30.3	Thanks very much for inviting me, Anand. I certainly don't know more about the European Union than
0:34.7	anybody in the world, but... Well, we can discuss that.
0:37.5	I mean, before we get on to the important stuff about the summit, seeing as I've got you
0:43.3	and you've done these things before, I'm just fascinated by what goes on.
0:48.3	And also, you know, we've known this summit was coming for a long time.
0:51.3	We've known the Labour government wanted a reset since before the election. And yet I can't shake the sense that they kind of ran out of time. Why?
0:58.9	Well, of course, inevitably, above all at the political level, but even to some extent at the
1:03.6	Mandarin level, you're only really focused on deliverables and outcomes when you're fairly
1:08.5	close to the wire, certainly at prime minister level, that's very understandable. And so it concentrates the mind, bear in mind as well at the European end,
1:15.7	there are multiple other things which look more important than the UK relationship. However
1:19.3	much commission and council have invested quite a bit of energy in this, it's not absolutely
1:24.2	top of mind in capitals or in Brussels. And then, of course, as you know,
1:28.0	it's the internal negotiation on both sides, really, that matters at least as much as the
1:33.5	external negotiation with each other, and you've got to combine the two. So there'll be a huge
1:37.3	amount of internal negotiation about where we can go, what we can offer, what we're prepared
1:41.3	to do, what our bottom lines are. That's very tortuous in the
1:44.7	27, inevitably. That's the world I used to inhabit, because you've got to reconcile the interests of
	...

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