Cameron was right to visit the creaking, gaudy court of Trump

DONALD TRUMP’S gaudy, gold-plated palace at Mar-a-Lago is a court, where the Florida king treats his visitors as supplicants, not deal-makers.

- Sarah Baxter

His mantelpiece is stuffed with the trophy heads of penitent critics who have had to swallow their pride and appeal for his help. Sometimes Trump grants favours but more often he collects scalps. One of these now belongs to the Foreign Secretary. But never mind. Lord Cameron was right to try to persuade Trump to help Ukraine.

Lord Cameron, a Tory grandee who used to meet the late Queen regularly as prime minister, reportedly charmed Trump with whimsical memories of her, but walked away empty-handed. I’m sure Trump didn’t care a jot that Lord Cameron called the former US president “protectionist, xenophobic, misogynistic” in his memoirs. More likely it made Cameron’s act of atonement seem all the sweeter. But on Brexit, Russia and Ukraine, they couldn’t be further apart.

As Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon queen of Congress, put it undiplomatically: Lord Cameron can “kiss my ass”. Trump will have felt exactly the same about our “globalist” foreign secretary. To add to the snub, Mike Johnson, the weak, embattled Republican speaker of the House, declined to meet Lord Cameron in Washington yesterday. Yet there was some point to the Foreign Secretary’s Mar-a-Lago visit. Ukraine desperately needs Congress to release $60 billion in further aid to Ukraine.

Volodymyr Zelensky, under huge military pressure from Russia, said starkly on Sunday: “If the Congress doesn’t help Ukraine, Ukraine will lose the war.” As Lord Cameron said in Washington: “Future generations are going to look back on us and say, ‘Did we do enough?’”