The inside story of how Putin torpedoed Starmer’s first big foreign policy ‘tough decision’ moment

When the government plane took off from Joint Base Andrews just outside Washington on Friday evening, Keir Starmer came down to have some small talk with the travelling pack of journalists handing out packs of M&Ms from the White House signed by Joe Biden.

But the smile on his face, easy-going casual look and football banter hid what had proven to be an extremely difficult 48 hours for the prime minister in what had culminated in a diplomatic failure.

The lesson of the excursion was perhaps that it is far easier to make “tough choices” regarding thousands of Britain’s pensioners potentially dying in a cold winter than it is to sort out a rabid dictator Vladimir Putin threatening to use nukes.

Both Downing Street and the Foreign Office (FCDO) staff at the embassy did their best to play down the significance of the trip. But - despite their denials - this meeting of an outgoing lame-duck US president and the recently elected prime minister was mostly about one major issue: whether to allow Ukraine to use long-range Storm Shadow missiles against targets in Russia.

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The decision to allow it was supposed to be made but not announced. Instead, it was delayed for further discussions at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

How do we know this to be true? Well, just days before that US secretary of state Antony Blinken and foreign secretary David Lammy held a joint press conference in the Foreign Office and basically said so. They revealed the help Iran was giving to Russia and told journalists that they were going to Kyiv together to listen to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and others make the case for using storm shadow missiles on Russia territory. They then said that these talks would feed into the discussions with Starmer and Biden on Friday, which Lammy also attended.

All this happened and it was clear to most observers with an ounce of experience that this was a carefully choreographed series of events heading to a “tough decision” which would not only change the course of the war but ensure that Donald Trump, if he is elected, would struggle to reverse Nato support for Ukraine.

The trouble may have been that it was too obvious. Even as the prime minister’s plane took off to Washington Putin was planning his next move to try to stop the decision from being made. Minutes before Sir Keir was due to have an on the record session with the lobby journalists travelling with him the news broke that Putin had warned use of the missiles in Russia would mean his country would be “at war with Nato”.

When this was put to the prime minister his response was a fairly defiant: “Putin started it.”

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He did not seem at all rattled and maintained his air of confidence. Indeed, he then spent much of the session defending his decision to take winter fuel allowance from pensioners and denying Labour’s own research that it would kill 4,000 people. He may be gloomy but at least he can make the “tough decisions”.

But it was always clear that Downing Street had been nervous about the outcome of this trip. This was underlined by the fact that for the first time in many years Starmer had tried to avoid taking the travelling pack of journalists with him for a bilateral meeting with a US President. It was only at the last minute under great pressure that Downing Street relented and took the lobby with him. The impression of not wanting too much scrutiny was there from the start.

Nevertheless, Starmer’s defiance as it rolled out in the British press overnight did seem to fuel anger in Moscow. Everyone woke on Friday morning to the news that six British diplomats had been expelled for being spies from Moscow and Putin was reminding everyone that Russia is a “nuclear power”.

At this point the mood music of the trip changed. Apart from a brief FCDO statement on the expulsions, there was total silence. Lammy, who had been on the flight, and Starmer refused to even give a clip reaction to the unfolding events. There was initial reluctance to even engage with the travelling journalists on what was going on.

Meanwhile, pressure was also growing from Ukraine. Boris Johnson not so randomly turned up at a conference with President Zelensky who promptly tweeted about how the former prime minister always did what was necessary to support his country’s war with Russia. It was a clear message followed by an even clearer one when he tweeted a whole thread on how delays in the storm shadow decisions was costing Ukrainian lives.

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By now the briefing effort from the UK side was going into hyperdrive essentially trying to disavow what Lammy and Blinken had said just days before. This was never about Storm Shadow, there was never going to be a decision, it was all about the prime minister for some time wanting to have a long-term strategic discussion with Biden about Ukraine, the Middle East and China.

It appeared to be a classic sand-in-face strategy to mask what was really happening. Things were unravelling.

The problem with this briefing is that the whole world knows that Biden will no longer be president in four months and a new one will be elected in November. If it really was about long-term strategy there was an acknowledgement he would have to do it all over again when the new president is sworn in. Everyone knows that Biden is a lame duck now and cannot really decide anything. He was even too frail to go through with the one-on-one walk in the White House rose garden with Starmer.

Added to that two of the key UK figures around the table - the UK ambassador Dame Karen Pierce and Tim Barrow, the national security adviser - are also about to leave their jobs.

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The PM arrived with his team, including chief of staff Sue Gray, David Lammy, his director of coms Matthew Doyle and the UK ambassador to the US Dame Karen Pierce, slightly late. By then it was clear that a meeting which was originally due to be two hours had been cut to 90 and was set to be curtailed further. There were no Oval Office niceties either.

After about half an hour journalists were let into the blue room in the White House to see the two sides crammed around a table. Biden was clearly in a bad mood as his scolding of a Sky News journalist for asking a question emphasised.

It turned out that even in the short time there had been a great deal of waffling. Biden was being “a teacher” on foreign affairs and recounting how he had known people like Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for 35 years. What was obvious by then was that no Storm Shadow decision would be made, even unofficially. The line became that the talks would resume at UNGA in New York.

While outwardly Sir Keir looked satisfied on the plane home there was that classic feeling to it that “you had one job” and did not do it. What is not clear is whether it was the UK or US who blinked at Putin’s threats. But one or both did. Now Starmer is in danger of looking tough at home but weak or a ditherer abroad.

All is by no means lost but the prime minister may need to find the same backbone he had with pensioners and, for that matter, arms sales to Israel, for his dealings with Putin.