Labour's New French-speaking Europhile Special Adviser
The role of the Special Advisor to a Minister or a Shadow Minister has so far escaped serious examination by the academics and think-tankers who examine modern British politics.
This may be about the change with the appointment of Ben Judah as the Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s special advisor.
So far Sir Keir Starmer has not had to worry too much about foreign policy. In contrast to 1997 when Labour and much of the broader liberal foreign affairs community allied to many in the United States were angry and depressed by the Tory government’s and EU’s soft-soaping of the Serbian autocratic Slobodan Milosevic – a Balkan Vladimir Putin before the KGB agent took over Russia – there are no sharp divides between Labour and Tories on most international issues.
Sir Keir Starmer remains part of the western democratic consensus including and Lib Dems on Gaza and the invasion of Ukraine.
There is no difference between Labour, the Government and the LibDems that a fast rejoining of the EU is politically impossible in Britain especially that decision has to go through the sieve of a referendum.
No Labour or LibDem spokesperson, let alone a Tory, wants to draw attention to the fastest 5-year decline in trade for Britain since Johnson’s hard Brexit was imposed. The US Nobel Laureate, Joe Stigltiz, may describe the UK as one of the “sick men” of Europe but there is no electoral mileage for a future Foreign or Defence Secretary in proclaiming Britain’s shrinking status, influence and economic or reduced diplomatic and military clout in the world.
But now David Lammy, Labour effective Shadow Foreign Secretary, has taken a political gamble by appointing one of the smartest Anglo-French international policy anaylsts and writers on the left as his Special Advisor.
Ben Judah, 36, has an impressive record writing on French as well as European Union politics. The commitment to Europe is in his DNA as his father, Tim Judah, writes for the Economist and NYRB on the Balkans and France.
Tim Judah is married to the writer, Rosie Whitehouse, whose mother was a Jewish resistante, a Maquisarde who was sent by the de Gaulle to build a resistance movement in south west France in 1944.
Their son, Ben fluent in French, was educated at the Lycée Charles de Gaulle in South Kensington. He grew up in the Balkans during the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo as Tim Judah produced the best book-length reporting on the region that is a still a bleeding wound in Europe’s south-east flank.
Ben Judah later worked for the US Atlantic Council where he interviewed and wrote about French President Emmanuel Macron trying to situate and explain the young French president to the largely mono-lingual US-UK foreign policy establishment.
Ben Judah’s latest book “This is Europe. The Way We live Now” (Picador 2023) is 500 turnable pages about the stories of today’s Europeans constantly on the move. It is foreign reporting far removed from the worthy, sturdy, wordy works of establishment foreign correspondents and professors.
It moves from Ireland to Istanbul, two dozen life stories, told in vivid sharp words. We learn of the star school student in Romania who gets a European scholarship to go an Atlantic College in Italy. It will lift her out of impoverished misery. But she money she gets does not extend to buying the air fare. To raise it she finds someone who gives her money in exchange for posing naked on the Internet.
Or the fear that European lorry drivers have in England where lorry park robberies are the worst in Europe. Or the African migrants desperate to get to France and willing to walk over the freezing snow and glaciers of winter-time Italian Alps. Some don’t make it and their bodies are found when the ice melts in the spring.
This not about the EU but gives the lie to the idea of a super-state Europe. On the contrary Europe remains a hotch-potch of nations and the EU has little if any authority or power to enforce reform, end trafficking, and relentless exploitation of workers especially the undocumented ones who will never turn back as long as there is no hope in the countries where they were born.
Ben Judah’s commitment to Europe is strong. But he knows the United States and is no starry-eyed Brussels insider. He is a very powerful, Euro-knowledgeable addition to Team Starmer. The problem is that Europe is more than France (though don’t tell any French political or official that.)
Macron has been involved in major rows with Germany on how to handle Putin. He has threatened to close France’s borders with Italy to staunch undocumented immigration from people fleeing poverty or repression in the failed states on the south and east of the Mediterranean. He has largely withdrawn France as a military force in the Muslim region south of the former French colonies of Algeria, and Tunisia. Into this vacuum has stepped Russian soldiers dressed in mercenary uniforms but clearly controlled by Moscow under Putin’s orders.
Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak built a reasonable relationship with Macron based on giving him lots of British money in the hope he would better police the dunes on the French coast-line between Calais and Dieppe.
But France cannot provide what Starmer (and Sunak) wants – namely a privileged cherry-picking status for Britain that will lessen barriers to trade and travel but not accept reciprocal obligations under EU laws. France has just one vote out of 27 at the European Council, the body which decides EU policy towards its recently departed member state, the UK.
So while Ben Judah will provide a welcome, refreshing, pro-EU engaged Francophone and Francophile addition to Starmer’s tiny number of advisors who speak European languages and actually know how EU politics works he won’t be able to unlock a new post-Brexit relationship. Between the UK and Europe. That is what the Germans call a ChefSache – politics that only heads of government can undertake as it requires serious decisions and an ability for forging public opinion around new thinking on Europe after eight wasted years on Theresa May’s fantasy that a politics of “making Brexit work” was ever remotely possible.
Denis MacShane was a Labour MP for 18 years and Minister for Europe and the United States under Tony Blair. His latest book is “Labour Takes Power. The Denis MacShane Diaries 1997-2001.