Anyone who relishes the humiliation of Sir Keir Starmer – and I know that in this respect, if only this one, many Spectator readers will make common cause with the supporters of Jeremy Corbyn – was presented with a delicacy this weekend. Here was a humiliation so exquisite, so public and so unrecoverable-from, that you could use it instead of Vermouth to flavour a martini.
The British Prime Minister told the New York Times, with every semblance of earnestness, that he ‘likes and respects’ Donald Trump – and saw that interview blazoned internationally.
‘On a person-to-person basis, I think we have a good relationship,’ Starmer said
‘On a person-to-person basis, I think we have a good relationship,’ he told the paper. ‘I like and respect him. I understand what he’s trying to achieve.’ Sir Keir, I expect, cherishes his self-image as a truthful person. And there cannot be a human being alive – not even Donald Trump – who will believe that the PM either likes or respects the US president. As for understanding what he’s trying to achieve, I’m not sure even president Trump knows that from one day to the next.
There are some people who like and respect Donald Trump, no question. Very many of them voted for him. You struggle to find people who have had extensive personal dealings with him who both like and respect him, though: most of the ones who like him don’t respect him and the ones who respect (or more often fear) him don’t like him. Vladimir Putin, you might put into the former camp; Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz into the latter. The trail of those who have fallen foul of Trump is very thoroughly documented; so are the arbitrary and ego-driven crazinesses of what passes for policy ideas. Even Tucker Carlson thinks he’s an idiot.
But of all the people who could claim to like and respect Trump with any plausibility, Sir Keir Starmer is very low down the list.
Here’s a man who has spent most of his career as a lawyer in general and a human rights lawyer in particular: that is, he is personally invested in the idea that a system of international norms and agreements can restrain the arbitrary cruelty of tyrants. You can disagree in good conscience as to whether international law is coherently theorised or has much to offer the world. But Trump has amply demonstrated over the past few weeks that not only does he not give a hoot for international norms and agreements, he doesn’t think the law should be allowed to restrain executive power even domestically.
What’s more, Sir Keir is a late but ostensibly enthusiastic convert to the Labour movement – which is to say, he’s at least in theory against workers being stiffed, the boss-class running riot over the rights of the labour force and tax breaks being given to the ultra-wealthy. He’ll generally at least claim, when not being interviewed by the New York Times, that he is in favour of things like a welfare state and equal dignity for people regardless of creed, colour or sex. Again, you may think president Trump is a great champion of the common man, and that it’s only his enemies in the fake news media who see him as a greedy chauvinist ignoramus, and that is your perfect right. But do you imagine for a second that’s what Sir Keir thinks? Donald Trump, we can be confident, stands as an incarnation of everything that Keir Starmer detests and abhors.
It is both funny and poignant to imagine Sir Keir mouthing those words, then – giving sincerity the old college try – and knowing at that moment that nobody will believe him, not even the audience of one at whom his remarks were directed. Trump doesn’t care that it’s not true. But he will get a huge bang out of forcing the leader of one of his country’s important allies to perjure himself this way in public.
The humiliation is the point. It’s a power kick, a ritual of fealty: if you want something from me (a stay of execution on tariffs; a long-shot chance at averting or delaying the total collapse of the European security order) you need to kiss the ring. The same dynamic is at play in his demand that the governor of Maine issue a ‘full-throated’ personal apology for having had the temerity to defy him, backed up with the threat that federal funding will be withheld from the citizens of her state if she doesn’t.
But the kicker is, surely, that telling this blatant and hilarious lie is what Sir Keir’s job demanded he do. Personal pride would have asked him to grandstand against Trump, but national interest – indeed, the interests of the international community he hopes to preserve intact – asked for flattery. So flattery he supplies. Righteous outrage didn’t get Ukraine’s president Zelensky very far. Sir Keir has seldom seemed more statesmanlike in taking one for the team this way. What’s the endgame? My guess is: simply the hope that if you can put disaster off for another few weeks something will turn up.
The cliche that a gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth has an obverse here. We’re in a strange and theatrical situation – brought about by the personal style of the current occupant of the White House – where we’re long past conventional diplomacy, and the silky application of half-truths and flattering blandishments to oil more or less stable institutional machinery. The job of the responsible statesman here is to tell a huge fib, and know everyone knows it’s a fib, and read it on the front page of the New York Times. What a state to be in. Even the haters must think, at this stage: poor Sir Keir.
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