Rishi Sunak will meet Joe Biden on Thursday for his first bilateral meeting with the US President – but what happens at ‘bilats’ behind the choreography? 🖋️ youngvulgarian
Another classic tends to be a variation on the theme of “raised concerns about human rights issues in…”, when a UK minister meets someone from, say, China or Saudi Arabia. It isn’t hard to imagine that, in those cases, the minister in question wasn’t as forthright as Morgan. In short: a lot of bilats are meetings that, really, could have been an email.
It would be easy to conclude that bilats are mostly uncomfortable if not downright useless, but that would be missing the point. In a way, the actual meetings are a red herring: what really matters is everything else. The very fact that they take place, for example, creates a number of deadlines that cannot be ignored.
If you’re a secretary of state, you may wish to discreetly inform your counterpart that your prime minister feels tremendously strongly about a seemingly random issue, and will never budge on it. If you’re prime minister, you may have to confess that your benches will simply not be swayed on a topic that may seem uncontroversial to outsiders.
Well, in theory anyway. In practice, a lot can go very wrong – or very right – in mostly unpredictable ways. “Of course the politicians love that, they’ll say, ‘Oh that was a brilliant meeting, thank you Arthur!” and you just think, ‘Oh you utter twat, you’ve just ruined my life.'”
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