President Trump paid the British Prime Minister a series of compliments, something which Sir Keir Starmer had previously said was enough on its own to debar an individual from leading the United Kingdom.
British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer had a two-hour dinner with former U.S. President and present Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Trump Tower in New York on Thursday night. What exactly was discussed at the dinner, which was also attended by Britain’s chief diplomat and prominent Trump critic David Lammy was not disclosed, beyond the anodyne: “longstanding friendship between the United Kingdom and the United States and the importance of continuing to develop the strong and enduring partnership between our two countries”.
Hours before the meeting a British journalist asked President Trump what he thought of Sir Keir, and President Trump paid the left-wing British politician a series of compliments, including that he is “popular” at home, which while very charming is not exactly technically correct. Trump said: “I am going to see him in about an hour so I have to be nice. I actually think he is very nice. He ran a great race, he did very well. It’s very early but he is popular.”
This leaves Starmer in something of a quandary, given he had previously made clear his opinion that anyone thought highly of by President Trump isn’t fit to be Prime Minister. He had said, for instance, in 2019: “An endorsement from Donald Trump tells you everything you need to know about what is wrong with Boris Johnson’s politics and why he isn’t fit to be Prime Minister.”
In any case, the UK’s left-wing Labour government is now on what Politico calls a charm offensive to make sure it has good relations with the United States, whoever should be in the White House next year. As Starmer said yesterday before his dinner with Trump: “I’m a great believer in personal relations on the international stage. I think it really matters that you know who your counterpart is in any given country, and know them, you know, personally, get to know them face to face.”
While building bridges with the Trump team may seem like a more urgent mission, given they represent a political philosophy and worldview with which the left-wing British leader has very little in common, it is notable the Harris team could not find time for Starmer during his New York trip. Indeed, this week’s visit is the second to the United States for Sir Keir in a month and he was snubbed for meetings by Kamala Harris on both occasions, rubbishing his team’s earlier assertion that they either wanted to meet with both candidates or none.
The meeting with Trump came in the face of a barrage of criticism of the former President made by Starmer and his close allies in recent years. Beyond Starmer’s emphatic previous position that having a relationship with Trump should disqualify individuals from high political office, his deputy David Lammy — who was present at the dinner — had called Trump a “woman-hating, neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath” and a “dangerous clown” in 2018.
But not all barbs were so historic. Just this week, Starmer’s newly appointed Minister of State for Border Security and Asylum Dame Angela Eagle blamed Trump for creating an “astonishing” level of vitriol in comments about “toxic anti-immigration, anti-immigrant rhetoric”.
Speaking on Thursday after his comments in praise of Sir Keir, Donald Trump also namechecked ‘Mr Brexit’ and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, a long-time ally of the former President. He said, taking a dig at Britain’s First Past the Post electoral system which saw Reform UK take a healthy share of the national vote but a very disproportionately low number of Parliamentary seats: “I think Nigel is great, I’ve known him for a long time. He had a great election too, picked up a lot of seats, more seats than he was allowed to have actually. They acknowledged that he won but for some reason you have a strange system over there, you might win them but you don’t get them. Nigel is a fantastic person.”
While Starmer might not otherwise care to be discussed in the same breath as Farage, someone with whom he could not be said to have much in common, it is at least in part down to Mr Farage’s efforts that the UK Labour team has a relationship with the potential next President of the United States at all. As Farage had said in July of wielding what influence he has with the Trump camp in the British interest: “the fact that he [Lammy] is now reaching out to the Trump team… they asked me about it, the Trump team asked me about it.
“I said ‘yes do speak to David Lammy, even if our politics are different, our relationship with America in a world that is closer to global conflagration than it has been in 60 years is crucial’.”
