How Starmer Is Preparing For Either Trump Or Harris

Since becoming prime minister on 5 July, Sir Keir Starmer has only met with one of the two candidates hoping to be elected president and it was not with his natural Democrat ally Kamala Harris, but Republican rival Donald Trump.

- DAVID MADDOX

The lack of a meeting between Ms Harris and Sir Keir was not a snub from either side but reflects a twin-track approach that Labour has been taking in preparing for the outcome tomorrow for many months now, dating back to when they were still in opposition.

In what always looked set to be a tight presidential race, the Labour prime minister has known for a long time that he faced two very different scenarios from an outcome dependent on a handful of counties in a few swing states.

One was for an ally – who shares a similar legal background, is aligned ideologically and is on the same page regarding the big international issues – to be in the White House. But the other was for a US president with a volatile personality, who would happily rip up international consensus and sees his closest ally in Britain to be Nigel Farage on the hard right.

Getting ready for the first scenario is much easier but preparing for the second has involved painstaking diplomacy and meticulous planning.

Working with Kamala Harris

If Ms Harris wins the US presidency then there is a huge prize on offer for Sir Keir. This has all the hallmarks of being a relationship between a British prime minister and US president not seen since the days of the ideological bedfellows Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, when the so-called special relationship was actually special.

Ms Harris, like Sir Keir, was a prosecutor before entering politics, and the pair take almost identical approaches to the need to build on international legal structures and take on populist nationalism. There is not a frontline issue where they disagree and ideologically they are both too right-wing for their own party activists but sit easily on the establishment social democratic big state left.