The UK and Germany have agreed a friendship treaty aimed at resetting the countries' post-Brexit relations. The treaty comes nearly a decade after Britain's vote to leave the European Union.

Eighty years after the end of the second world war, Mr Merz and Sir Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, will sign a wide-ranging Anglo-German “friendship” treaty. For Germany it marks the first major bilateral agreement since its Elysée Treaty with France in 1963.