News story: Foreign Secretary attends November 2017 EU Foreign Affairs Council meeting

We are here on the European end of the efforts to keep the Iran nuclear deal going after what we were doing last week in Washington, trying to make sure that they don’t unscramble it on the Capitol Hill and the White House.

And clearly the effort is all about seeing what we can do to push back on some of the disruptive things that Iran is doing in the region, whilst not throwing the baby out with bathwater and keeping an essential nuclear deal going. The deal whereby Iran pledges not to develop nuclear weapons in exchange for economic co-operation. There will be obviously discussion on the Middle East more widely, the stability of the region. Everybody wants to see for instance a sovereign and independent Lebanon as I said in a statement last night.

More widely than that we got new sanctions on Venezuela – which we, the UK has been leading on, trying to get Mr Maduro to see sense about what he is doing and we’ll be looking at the new European plans for defence and security co-operation. The UK is supportive of these as I often say. We are there as a flying buttress to support the cathedral and we think there’s a lot of promise in the ideas and we’ll be backing them up.