Here is a sign of how weak Keir Starmer’s relationship is with the new leader of the free world. Nigel Farage has repeatedly offered to act as a bridge between the UK Labour government and the incoming Donald Trump administration. And for the second time, Farage is celebrating a Trump presidential election victory with the man himself, while the entire British political establishment is out in the cold.
Last time round the relationship’s low point occurred when a disobliging assessment of Trump by the then UK Ambassador to Washington, Sir Kim Darroch, was leaked. Thereafter Trump refused to deal with him and Darroch ended up resigning. This time, things are far worse. Trump was personally aggrieved by reports of the Labour party sending out scores of current and former staff to campaign for Kamala Harris, branding it foreign election interference.
Darroch’s language about Trump, too – ‘inept and insecure’ – pales into insignificance when compared to stuff that leading lights in the Labour party have said about him. That the most notable insults have come from the mouth of David Lammy, the man Starmer has made foreign secretary, is an added source of woe.
In various outbursts made while he was a backbencher building an angry social media profile, Lammy described Trump as a ‘serial liar and a cheat’, ‘a dangerous clown’ and ‘a woman-hating, neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath’. Health Secretary Wes Streeting meanwhile branded him ‘an odious, sad little man’, while Energy Secretary Ed Miliband called him ‘a racist, misogynistic self-confessed groper’. This is not a sound basis for future friendship.
Starmer and Lammy did manage to wangle a personal audience with Trump in advance of the election – a dinner at Trump Tower on 26 September – which is said to have gone quite well and to have ended with an agreement to try and build an effective working relationship. Farage told friends he was pleased to see lines of communication opened in this way, perhaps indicating he had personally encouraged Trump to break bread with the Labour duo.
But since then there has been the storm over Labour’s lending of personnel to Harris. Trump, at Farage’s behest, has also reportedly sought legal advice recently over Labour’s policy of giving away the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. Might the abandonment of that policy be part of his price for not freezing out the UK Government? That would constitute a spectacular embarrassment for Starmer and Lammy and a notable victory for Farage.
Perhaps Starmer will make a human sacrifice of his foreign secretary in order to assuage the new god of the White House. But will that be enough? It is hard to think of two more temperamentally different politicians than the President-elect and the Prime Minister.
Listen to more on Coffee House Shots:
Comments