Britain and France have agreed for the first time to co-ordinate the use of their nuclear weapons in the face of an “extreme threat” to Europe. Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer are also in the final stages of agreeing a migrant returns deal, which will allow 50 small boat migrants a week to be sent back to France from the UK. The Houthis have sunk a cargo ship in the Red Sea, killing four crew members and taking several hostages. The Iran-backed rebel group say they attacked the Liberian-flagged Eternity C – with sea drones and missiles – because it was heading for an Israeli port. It is the second ship they have sunk in a week. Royal Mail has been given the green light to scrap second-class letter deliveries on Saturdays from the end of this month, and will now only deliver them on alternate weekdays. As one X user put it: “Might as well start sending out those second-class Christmas cards now.”

The fate of Europe depends on Britain and France

Two things stand out from Emmanuel Macron’s state visit, says Janan Ganesh in the FT. First, what a good sovereign King Charles is proving – he is adept at “ceremonial niceties”, and keeps all the “architecture criticism and anti-modern quackery” to himself. Second, “the fate of Europe rests in large part on Britain and France”. If Germany and other Nato members keep their military spending promises, Russia may eventually face a Europe “too formidable to test”. But the Bundeswehr has seen no action for more than a generation, and given historical sensitivities it’s unclear whether Berlin would ever deploy troops to the eastern front. Poland spends an exemplary share of GDP on defence, but that GDP is far smaller than Britain’s or France’s. The Italians and the Spanish, protected by “distance and mountain ranges”, view Russia with a cosseted “equanimity”.

In peacetime, the Paris-Berlin relationship was “unambiguously the most important”. On a war footing, “there is just no doing without the UK”. Its armed power, its intelligence assets and what defence types call its “strategic culture” cannot be bought off the shelf. Britain is the biggest military donor to Ukraine after the US. And for all the bickering – “a peacetime luxury” – the similarities between Europe’s two nuclear-armed states are remarkable. The two countries have near-identical population and GDP; each has a “disproportionately huge capital” (a result of being unified for centuries longer than Germany or Italy); each lost an empire at around the same time. And whereas much of postwar Europe declared it had “transcended such archaic things as hard power”, Britain and France never did. A Europe in which security is paramount gives two decline-haunted countries another “shot at the big time”.