A dash of pomp and a dose of politics are on the agenda during a stopover visit to the U.K. where President Joe Biden will discuss the environment with King Charles III and the war in Ukraine with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
Biden flies to London on Sunday on his way to a NATO summit in Lithuania. He is scheduled to hold talks with Sunak at 10 Downing St. on Monday before heading to Windsor Castle to meet Charles for the first time since the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in September.
“That is an area where the U.S. is a little bit more hesitant than a lot of other NATO allies,” said Julie Norman, co-director of the Centre on U.S. Politics at University College London. “There might be some closed-door discussions about where the U.K. is on that before going into the whole meeting.”
Determined to show unity among Ukraine’s allies, the U.K. has refrained from complaining about failing to secure support from Washington for Defense Secretary Ben Wallace to become the next head of NATO. Instead, the term of current Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has been extended by a year. Biden briefly visited Belfast in April to mark 25 years since Northern Ireland’s Good Friday peace agreement, before spending several days visiting ancestral hometowns in the Republic of Ireland. He irked some in the U.K. by saying later that he’d visited Northern Ireland to make sure “the Brits didn’t screw around.”
For Sunak, standing alongside the American president provides a brief respite from his mounting domestic troubles over a stuttering economy and a fractious party. Like Biden, he faces electoral judgment next year, with a deadline of late 2024 to call a national election. U.K. inflation of 8.7% in the year to May — double the U.S. rate — is keeping millions of people in a cost-of-living squeeze, and the governing Conservatives lag behind Labour in opinion polls.
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