From the Coalition of the Willing to the Bayeux Tapestry: how France and the UK renewed their vows

Helen Drake and Pauline Schnapper argue that the rebuilding of interpersonal ties has been integral to the recent improvement in Franco-British relations.

The resilience of the Franco-British couple is quite something to behold. In 2026, one long decade on from the UK’s referendum decision to leave the European Union, France and the United Kingdom are drawing ever closer. Already in May 2025, France and the UK had finalised plans to exchange priceless, historical artefacts: the Bayeux Tapestry would come to the British Museum, which would lend its own Sutton Hoo Treasures to museums in Normandy. The British Museum’s exhibition is expected to draw record numbers of visitors, such is the appeal of the tale it has to tell of the centuries of entwined Franco-British history.

Yet Brexit had pulled at the fabric of that relationship, unravelling diplomatic certainties and routines and fraying interpersonal trust. Indeed, during those Brexit years, Franco-British bilateral relations were variously strained, fractured and frozen, and cross-Channel contacts dwindled. No summits were held in the five years between 2018-2023, and not only because of Covid restrictions; diplomats were barred from speaking to each other following the crisis over AUKUS, and the people-to-people and trade links that had for so long characterised the bilateral relationship were now hindered by Brexit constraints on the free movement of goods, services and people. The cordial personal connections typical of diplomatic exchange between heads of state and government gave way to bad-tempered if not downright rude personal exchanges, reaching their nadir during the Covid pandemic when UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s puerile humour landed very badly with his French counterpart President Emmanuel Macron, and when vaccine nationalism stoked mutual hostility and derision.

In 2026, the picture could not look more different. Barely a week goes past, it seems, without a decision or development drawing the two countries into a closer and tighter embrace. Already in 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine triggered a hasty assembly of a ‘coalition of the willing’, where Paris and London jointly led 34 countries to prepare for a possible deployment of troops on the ground in the case of a ceasefire.  Following the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024 and the chaos this unleashed, France and the UK have not only initiated new forms of collaboration but have also carefully unpicked some particularly knotty obstacles in the path towards closer bilateral cooperation, including at UK-EU level.  This is the context, for example, of the UK’s grudging willingness to rejoin the EU’s Erasmus scheme (previously popular with French students) and, most recently, to expedite legislation allowing for dynamic alignment with certain EU trading standards.

Work to repair and celebrate the fabric of Franco-British ties had in fact started to take shape before the international environment imploded. In 2022, ephemeral UK Prime Minister Liz Truss’s decision to attend the first meeting of the European Political Community (EPC) in October 2022 in Prague, an initiative of French President Macron, was a first step. Following her departure from office, Rishi Sunak cleared the ground for the signature, in 2023, of the Windsor Framework on Northern Ireland by the UK and the European Commission, a development which itself explicitly paved the way for the first Franco-British summit since 2018, held in Paris on 10 March 2023 (at which, amongst many other things, the two sides reached an agreement to revert to pre-Brexit immigration controls on school visits from France).

In September of that same year, France hosted a state visit by King Charles III to France and, in the following April, the two countries ceremoniously celebrated the 120th anniversary of the Entente Cordiale, a set of agreements first concluded in colonial times. Keeping up the pace, in July 2024, the freshly-elected Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his French counterpart President Emmanuel Macron agreed to hold a summit in July 2025 to be preceded by a state visit to the UK by President Macron, hosted in Windsor Castle by King Charles III. In the Joint Declarations of that 37^th UK-France Summit, held on 10 July 2025, the French and British leaders committed themselves to the ‘delivery’ of significant initiatives in the fields of ‘defence, energy, industrial cooperation’, including a refresh of the 2010 defence agreements to cover nuclear and conventional fields, especially cyber and hybrid warfare. Challenges inevitably remain, notably in the context of tightening immigration law on both sides of the Channel, but the capacity and willingness to address them is tangible.

What accounted for the speed and depth of repair to the Franco-British relationship? Shared interests were clearly substantial and pressing, but left gaps in the overall picture. With reference to 14 high-level interviews conducted with diplomats and officials close to the relationship between 2020 and 2025, we propose a number of supplementary observations. We saw that both the practice and the culture of the relationship were disrupted, first by the shock result of the Brexit referendum itself; then by the tenor of the negotiations on the Withdrawal Agreement and TCA, which led to a breakdown in trust and diplomatic normality between the two governments; and of course, in time, by the phasing out of the intra-EU diplomacy that had involved routines of regular diplomatic interactions at different levels, alongside agreed procedures and means of communication.

We observed that the restoration of the relationship occurred not only as a result of shared interests (especially security of all kinds) and the continuity of institutions (especially in intelligence and defence) but via the creation of opportunities – these partly due to the passing of time, and also to the changing of personnel at various levels – for interpersonal contact, the refraining from incendiary language, the creation of friendly gestures and the recognition and repairing of the deep historical, sentimental fabric of the relationship. These viewpoints offer a more complex understanding of post-Brexit bilateral relations, and point to the possibility that the Franco-British relationship has every opportunity to thrive along as-yet uncharted lines, with signs of both sides having learned the lessons of the importance, to diplomacy, of the humanity of international society.

By Professor Helen Drake, Institute for Diplomacy and International Affairs, Loughborough University London and Pauline Schnapper, Professor of Contemporary British Civilisation at the University of Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle.

For a longer discussion of the themes in this blog, see Drake, H. and Schnapper, P. (2026) ‘Franco-British Bilateral Diplomacy After Brexit, 2020–2025: Mending the Ties That Bind’. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.70113. Selected wording in this blog is duplicated from that article.