Frontline manoeuvres with GI Don and Private Keir

The leader of the free world and his brother-in-arms kept their cool under some hostile press fire

- Sean O'Grady

As a last gesture of military solidarity during the Trump state visit, the Red Devils, the British army’s world-class parachute display team, put on a show. They descended on Chequers, as if to capture it, symbolically carrying both a union flag and the stars and stripes as the president, the first lady and the Starmers observed the operation from the doorstep of the enchanting Tudor mansion.

Then, rather less welcome, the diabolical special forces of the British and American media rushed into the press room, ready for their own assault on the two leaders. Surrounded by chandeliers, oil paintings and some exceptional wood panelling, it was an incongruous battlefield.

There they waited, and waited, and waited, digging in, during a phoney war phase. Upstairs, Keir Starmer and Donald Trump were regrouping, organising their own tank traps, preparing defensive lines along the most vulnerable sections of their common front: Mandelson, Epstein, green energy, Gaza, immigration, free speech, and so on.

It was time well spent by the president and the prime minister - the best part of an hour in one-on-one conversations with no one else present. They could afford to slow things down, and they did. There was an obvious agreement that, whatever their differences, neither would dump on the other just to give the hacks a story. Both men, after all, have much shared experience in facing a hostile press and, both facing their own domestic challenges, much cause to stick together.