Why party-loving Karen Pierce is key to reviving Starmer’s relationship with Trump

The morning after Donald Trump’s election, Britain’s top diplomat to the United States posted a photograph of herself wearing a wide-brimmed hat and orange dress, standing next to Trump in the Oval Office — presumably taken during his first administration. “We look forward to deepening our already profound and successful partnership as we deal with the challenges of the 21st century,” she wrote.

Dame Karen Pierce knows diplomacy. So well, in fact, that if the rumours turn out to be true, despite her four-year term ending, Sir Keir Starmer will reappoint her as the UK’s ambassador to the US – a move that will acknowledge just how adept the 65-year-old has proven in the delicate task of handling Trump.

It’s a role that it’s fair to say she’s probably more than happy remaining in, too. In April, she told a party in the gardens of the British embassy at 3100 Massachusetts Avenue that she would have “to be dragged out of here by my fingernails” – despite the fact that David Miliband, Baroness Amos and Lord Mandelson were all tipped for her job. But Pierce has something they don’t: Trump experience.

Born in Preston, Lancashire, she was educated at Girton College, Cambridge, and joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1981. Posted to Tokyo three years later, this was followed by stints in London, Washington DC – as private secretary to the then-ambassador – New York, Geneva, Afghanistan and eventually as the chief operating officer of the foreign office in London.

Her last role before moving to Washington again was as the UK’s permanent representative to the United Nations – the first woman to get the job. It was while Pierce was in that role that Trump described her as “fab” after meeting her.

She’s been called a “convivial figure” by DC politicos – a short woman with an outsized love of sparkly headbands, known for throwing what one writer described as “Pimms-fuelled” receptions. One Foreign Office official talked of her “bubbly, extrovert personality”, but everyone who knows her considers her a serious diplomat who knows her stuff.

The Atlantic magazine crowned her the “guardian of the special relationship” – referring to the phrase first coined by Winston Churchill to describe the close friendship between Britain and America.

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A foreign office official told me: “Karen is the diplomat’s diplomat. She has worked in Washington twice, beginning during George HW Bush’s presidency in the early 1990s where she was chief of staff to the ambassador. She is warm, smart as a whip and is laser focused on UK interests. Her interventions at the UN are the stuff of legend, particularly during the aftermath of the Salisbury poisoning.”

Entering Trump’s orbit was a twist of fate: Pierce’s predecessor, Kim Darroch, was forced to resign after diplomatic cables leaked to The Mail on Sunday revealed he had called the Trump administration “inept, insecure and incompetent.”

Enter Pierce, stage left. She didn’t have to navigate Trump’s presidency for long – it was the end of his tenure – but it was long enough to endear herself to the man most diplomats probably thought was unnavigable.

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After Trump survived an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally in July, Pierce impressed Starmer, fresh from being sworn in as the UK’s new prime minister, by arranging an introductory phone call between the two men – which in turn led to a two-hour dinner meeting.

Should Kamala Harris have won the election this week, Starmer would probably have looked to replace Pierce, according to Westminster insiders, most likely with a career diplomat from the foreign office.

But when Trump won, Starmer needed to reconsider.

The Labour Party hadn’t got off to the best of starts, after all, with past slights such as David Lammy’s tweets calling Trump a neo-Nazi, most of the cabinet signing a petition to block Trump from speaking in parliament and sending 100 or so Labour volunteers to campaign for Harris.

In short: Starmer needs all the help he can get.

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After the fiasco with Darroch, an insider says Pierce “went out of her way to talk to Trump and his team as well as the Republicans more widely. That means that at the moment she is the only British government official he has any serious relationship with.

“He did have dinner with Starmer and Lammy recently; it went well, but since then his team took Labour to court over election interference. Basically, Starmer needs Pierce in the interim at least before finding an ambassador who can deal with Trump.”

Her work maintaining an entente cordiale could even be boosted by shadow diplomacy from an unlikely corner: controversial Clacton MP and Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, who was at Trump’s election party in Florida.

“Certainly, Farage won’t be ambassador, even though Trump suggested him in 2016,” says The Independent’s political editor, David Maddox. “It will be interesting to see if they trust Farage enough to act as a back channel if necessary. I doubt they will, but probably they should. Farage is actually keen that there is a positive relationship between the UK and US, whoever is in power, so he might be more helpful than people realise.”

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The morning of election day, Pierce posted on X, formally known as Twitter, a tribute to Robin Renwick, British ambassador to the United States from 1991 to 1995, whose death had just been announced.

Renwick straddled both HW Bush’s administration and Bill Clinton’s, and Pierce called him one of the UK’s most effective diplomats. “He was my ambassador when I first came to Washington 30 years ago,” she wrote, “and most of what I know about diplomacy I learned from him.”

In an interview he gave to C-Span back in 1994, shortly before the end of his tenure as Britain’s top diplomat in the US, Renwick was asked to comment on the “special relationship” between the two countries.

“People sometimes dream there was a golden era where Britain and America never had any differences,” he said. “We always have had some quite serious differences – of opinion, of national interest – but those have always been enveloped within the fact that both nations depend on one another and a very strong alliance, a very strong security relationship and a very strong economic relationship, which I believe is in very good shape today.”

On 20 January 2025, when Trump is handed the keys to the White House once more, it looks like it’ll be Pierce who will be responsible for ensuring that remains the case.