SIR KEIR STARMER enjoyed many strokes of luck en route to becoming Britain’s prime minister on July 5th. The diary of diplomacy has handed him two more. On July 9th Sir Keir and David Lammy, the new foreign secretary, left for a summit in Washington, DC, to mark NATO’s 75th anniversary. And on July 18th, just a fortnight into the job, Sir Keir will host a meeting of the European Political Community (EPC), a loose gathering of states in and around the European Union, at Blenheim Palace, a vast Baroque edifice where Winston Churchill was born.

These two events, and the EPC in particular, will give the new Labour government an immediate stage to signal where Britain’s foreign policy will stay the same and where it will shift. They will also reinforce the biggest change of all, to the country’s reputation. Almost overnight an exaggerated image of Britain as a chaotic clown-show—true under Boris Johnson, a bit less so for Rishi Sunak—has flipped to an idealised image of stable government led by a serious-minded centrist.

On most of the foreign-policy fundamentals—principally Nato, Ukraine and the relationships with America and China—there is lots of continuity between the new government and the old. The NATO summit will give Sir Keir an early opportunity to reaffirm Labour’s support for the alliance. Commitment to NATO was an essential part of his project to make the party fit for power again after the tenure of Jeremy Corbyn, his leftist predecessor.