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Keir Starmer may well have gone to bed on Tuesday night hoping to wake up on Wednesday morning to find himself teamed professionally with Kamala Harris – a fellow state prosecutor of the centre-left who happens also to be the leader of both the free world and his country’s closest ally.
His reverie might even have extended to envisage a mutually-beneficial two-term relationship of harmony and even intimacy, not unlike that of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
But shocking (if explicable) as it may seem, Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States for the second time, and with an unimpeachable mandate.
Memories in London of Trump’s first, unpredictable, improvised administration, one which occasioned a difficult relationship between a president and prime minister, and then a portentous pairing of populists, are vivid. But this time, London is prepared.
Two strokes of fortune have enabled Starmer to connect with Trump, something former Conservative prime minister Theresa May was unable to do in 2016. The first was the assassination attempt on Trump at a campaign rally in July. Starmer immediately had the wit to woo, with a phone call to the victim that was much appreciated.
Two months later, with his foot already in the golden elevator door of Trump Tower, Starmer was hosted by the former president to dinner in New York. No photographers were present. It was not a campaign event. It was a meeting that mattered.
The call and the dinner were both enabled by the UK ambassador to the US, Dame Karen Pierce. The adroit “Trump whisperer” indeed owes her position to the fact that, in a diplomatic innovation, the then-president effectively sacked her predecessor.
The embassy has always been central to UK-US relations, and never more so than now. Pierce’s public response to Trump’s victory was immediate and flawless. His re-election means her re-appointment.
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Preparedness, however, does not entirely efface earlier embarrassments.
The Trump campaign made a mountain out of the molehill of Labour members being mobilised for the Harris campaign. And Starmer had already displayed his political inexperience by accusing Trump publicly of lacking humanity and dignity.
More perfomatively juvenile comments from David Lammy, now foreign secretary, though oft-cited, are no more than embarrassing. Lammy’s expansive manner – and Christianity – complements that of many in Trump’s circle, and his relations with vice president-elect J.D. Vance, and Elbridge Colby, likely to have a foreign policy role under Trump, are warm.
Trump, for his bombast, is transactional: efforts to charm don’t work, and neither do insults. He distinguishes between rhetoric and deals. The former matters if it facilitates the latter. And if the prime minister has a defining political characteristic, it’s as a technocrat; a dispatcher of business.
Such apparent fondness for the American will unsettle some in the Parliamentary Labour Party, and much of the wider membership. Starmer may take a lesson from how Harold Wilson trod the tightrope of the Vietnam war: prevented from either supporting or opposing American involvement, he sought instead, impotently, to mediate. Pleasing nobody, Wilson nevertheless kept his party intact.
The new leader of the opposition, Kemi Badenoch, is much more politically aligned with the president-elect. In her first PMQs, she gleefully punched the bruises not only of the foreign secretary’s “derogatory and scatological” remarks, but the equally injudicious signing of a petition against Trump by Labour backbenchers, many of whom are now ministers.
She also called for a free trade agreement. A US-UK free trade agreement was a post-Brexit policy of the previous Conservative government, as indeed it was of the previous Trump administration. But it did not happen, and it’s no more likely now with a president whose favourite word is “tariff”. In some respects, the special relationship is nothing if not asymmetric.
The global view
Unable to stand again, re-elected presidents tend to become “lame ducks”, leaching authority as they limp to the end of their term. This is partly because they usually lose control of Congress, and with the undoubted allure of global statesmanship, indulge themselves in foreign policy.
The essence of the special relationship – close cooperation over defence, security and, especially, intelligence – will endure. But questions arise as to the consequences of the changes in US priorities over the most serious global issues: Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, Iran, China, trade and the climate.
In Trump’s absence, and in loose association, autocratic leaders have risen. The UK may feel need to assume greater leadership – or at least convening – roles, within existing alliances and arrangements including Nato, Aukus (a security partnership with the US and Australia), European Quad (US, UK, France and Germany), and the Joint Expeditionary Force (a UK-led defence and security coalition).
There are already some intelligence concerns, given the president-elect’s record of sharing intelligence with other – hostile – leaders.
Processes endured last time – but Europe wasn’t at war. Britain has been the most reliable supporter of Ukrainian resistance in the security council, or the G7, and this is likely to be the most serious policy difference from day one. Discouragingly for Ukraine, the asymmetry will prevail.
Trump’s expected renunciation of Ukraine may mean further pressure for London to increase defence spending, already a pinch point even before the effects on global economic output of a Trump trade war on UK GDP growth.
Starmer personally will also benefit from relative weakness in European leadership: of the three largest European powers (Germany, France and the UK), French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Olaf Scholz are all too evidently end-term. But Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Italy’s Georgia Meloni may be more to the taste of the Trump administration, and will be able to stomach more than even the most solicitous British prime minister can manage.
The British government shamelessly leveraged Trump’s vanity in his first term. But he has been taken to Churchill’s birthplace, and to his home, and has met Queen Elizabeth II (some aspects of his earlier state visits can’t be repeated).
And King Charles III, a devoted environmentalist, will have to be at his most impartial when faced with a fellow head of state intent on unpicking the global response to the climate crisis.
London’s best personal cards may have already been played. In any case, the neophyte president was probably more susceptible then. Trump’s second administration will be more predictable, and consequential, than his first: greater focus, more intent. This time he, too, is prepared.
There’s a great deal for the British Embassy to do before his inauguration in January. Not the least of its priorities will be to ensure that Starmer is the first foreign visitor to the Trump White House. That phone call in July could well bear fruit.
Martin Farr does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
