You know how it goes. One relationship gets messy and suddenly you're texting the old friend you swore you'd moved on from.

Well, for Kyr Starma, that old pal is the European Union.

Welcome to political fix from the Financial Times with me, Lucy Fisher.

Trump has heaped insult upon insults on Stama in the past few weeks. He slammed him

as no Winston Churchill, said Britain's aircraft carriers were mere toys, and told the UK to go get

your own oil from the Gulf. Not exactly the kind of thing you expect from a close ally.

So perhaps it's no surprise, Stama appears to be seriouslying to the EU. And in all that, as local election campaigns heat up and cost of living pressures intensify. With me to unpack it all, our chief political commentator Robert Schimsylisly. Hi, Robert. Hello, Lucy. And our deputy political editor, Jim Pickard. Hi, Jim. Hi, Lucy.

And political correspondent Anna Gross.

Hi, Anna.

Hi, Lucy.

So on Wednesday, Jim, you covered Kirstama's press conference to the nation on the rumbling-on fallout from the Iran crisis. And one of the big shifts from that,

which will clearly have a long tale, was his overt positioning on the EU. Tell us more about that.

So it was another of these press conferences where Kirstam was under a lot of pressure to talk about,

what is the British government doing for British households who are going to be hit by yet more cost of living crisis as a result of fuel prices going up as a result of the war in Iran.

And to that, he doesn't have much in the way of answers at the moment.

But he also used this press conference in Downing Street to talk more widely, to repeat his

insistence that he's not going to be

pushed around by anyone, brackets Donald Trump, although he didn't mention him by name, and also

that there was a war that he didn't want to get sucked into. And in the middle of this event,

he talked about how it's increasingly clear as the world continues down this volatile path that our long-term

national interest requires closer partnership with our allies in Europe.

And it's not a rejection of America, but you can definitely see that Trump's increasingly

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