Gavin Mortimer

A French soldier was killed on Thursday evening in the Erbil region of Iraq. In announcing the death of chief warrant officer Arnaud Frion, President Emmanuel Macron said he ‘died for France…engaged in the fight against Daesh [Islamic State]’. France has deployed hundreds of soldiers to Erbil – the Kurdistan region of Iraq – as part of an international coalition to fight Islamist terror groups. It is believed a French base was struck by a drone, killing Frion and wounding several other soldiers. ‘France stands with them and their loved ones,’ declared Macron in a social media post. In the fortnight since America and Israel launched their attack on Iran, much has been said and written about the respective merits of France’s and Britain’s military.

It is not just Donald Trump who believes Keir Starmer has failed to channel Winston Churchill. Now Cyprus have given the Prime Minister’s leadership a tongue-lashing. Kyriacos Kouros, the country’s high commissioner to the UK, has drawn unfavourable comparisons between the responses of France and Britain to Iran’s drone attack on the RAF base on Cyprus. ‘The French are coming,’ said Kouros. ‘The least we expect is the Britons to also be present since, as I said, we are not only defending Cypriots on the islands.’ According to the Times, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates are also less than impressed with Britain’s conduct in the Middle East since Israel and the US launched Saturday’s attack on Iran.

As of Monday, migrants arriving in Britain no longer have the right to claim permanent asylum. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has changed the rules so that now migrants will be eligible only for temporary refugee status. Asylum seekers' applications will be reviewed every 30 months, and they could be returned to their country of origin if it is deemed safe. There are caveats. People who have already submitted an asylum claim (100,000 submissions in 2025) are not affected by the new rules. Nor are unaccompanied children, who will continue to receive five years' protection. Mahmood hopes that these new measures will weaken the appeal of Britain to migrants. She has been influenced by a trip last week to Denmark.

It was a weekend of mixed emotions for the European Union. There was the news from Donald Trump that he will impose a 10 per cent tariff on eight European countries in retaliation for their opposition to his plans to take control of Greenland. But on a brighter note, the EU finally signed the Mercosur trade agreement with several South American countries. The European Commission hailed it as the creation of ‘a free-trade zone of roughly 700 million people’, one which they promise will save EU companies more than €4 billion a year in customs duties. Ursula von der Leyen, the Commission president, said: ‘We choose fair trade over tariffs, we chose a productive long-term partnership over isolation.