Labour came to power with no big idea for relations with EU, says former top diplomat

Ivan Rogers, Britain’s EU ambassador from 2013 to 2017, says party’s ideas did not ‘remotely measure up’ to challenge

Labour arrived in power with no big idea on the future relationship with the EU, a former British ambassador to Brussels has said.

Ivan Rogers, Britain’s EU ambassador from 2013 to 2017, said Labour presented “a ragbag of issues” on the EU in its manifesto, which didn’t “remotely measure up to the challenge of the times” and would “make no measurable difference to the UK macroeconomy”.

A decade after Britain’s vote to leave the EU, Rogers said it was “close to incomprehensible” that Keir Starmer , a former shadow Brexit secretary, had sought a single market for goods “an option which the EU is always bound to reject”, because it crosses well-established red lines.

The Guardian revealed last month that the government sent a senior official to Brussels to seek a single market for goods without free movement of people, an approach likened by EU officials to Theresa May’s doomed Chequers plan .

Rogers said: “The EU is no more going to agree to ‘pick and choose’ alignment and divergence for Labour than it was for the previous government.”

One of the UK’s most experienced European diplomats, Rogers resigned in January 2017 after a Conservative party backlash over his advice about the realities of Brexit negotiations. He became a strong critic of Theresa May’s government over what he saw as failure to explain “the real constraints and trade-offs” in Brexit , then later the “diplomatic amateurism” of Boris Johnson.

In an interview with the Guardian, he said Labour came to power “unprepared” without “a serious, thought-through set of propositions” to fix what it called “a botched Brexit”.