A Washington visit would help PM win over Trump

In public, Downing Street insists Keir Starmer has a good relationship with Donald Trump.

- ANDREW GRICE

The prime minister and David Lammy, the foreign secretary, have literally dined out on their two-hour dinner with him at Trump Tower last September.

They recall it when the media asks them about relations with the new US president, so we know he offered Lammy a second portion of chicken. Evidence, it seems, that Trump had forgiven Lammy for once calling him a “woman-hating neo-Nazi sociopath”.

In private, UK ministers are less confident all is quite so rosy. They worry that Trump views Starmer as a big-state socialist, wedded to the old order of the EU and multilateral institutions rather than the nation state, and someone who supports a “woke”, progressive ideology.

The proposed deal to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, which Trump might block, is seen in Trumpworld as antiimperialist – even though Labour points out the previous Conservative government began the negotiations.

UK ministers fear the president, not surprisingly, has been influenced by the unflattering picture of Starmer and the Labour government painted by his allies, Elon Musk and Nigel Farage. “They have poisoned the well,” one Labour insider told me. This crude caricature of Starmer is reinforced by American think tanks close to Team Trump, such as the Heritage Foundation.