There’s nothing new about bringing maverick businesspeople into government to give the bureaucratic blob what an unnamed ‘Trump adviser’ was recently quoted as calling ‘a swift kick in the ass’. After all, it was David Cameron who in 2010 hired the now all but unmentionable retail buccaneer Sir Philip Green to find ways to cut Whitehall waste.
But Donald Trump’s conferment of the role of solo global peacemaker on his real-estate buddy Steve Witkoff – who has no known foreign policy or government expertise – takes that idea to a scary new extreme. Take a look on X at a clip of him arriving alone to meet Vladimir Putin and a line-up of Kremlin heavies. When a woman, face unseen, takes the seat next to Witkoff, he turns to her and says: ‘Are you my translator? Are you from the embassy?’ Unbelievable.
To emphasise the point, try imagining a British version of Team Trump. Suppose Alan Sugar – who like Trump achieved fame as a host of The Apprentice – had transitioned, after his brief tenure as Gordon Brown’s ‘enterprise tsar’, into a blob-bashing prime minister. Might we have had Piers Morgan as defence secretary, Mike Ashley on trade talks, Crispin Odey at the Treasury and Bernie Ecclestone eyeballing Putin?
None of them would be wackier choices than the Fox News host Pete Hegseth commanding the Pentagon or anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy in charge of America’s public health. As for Witkoff, he’s been a devoted admirer of the President ever since they met by chance in a New York deli in 1986; Trump had no cash on him, so ‘I ordered him a ham and Swiss’.
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