The prime minister is in denial about the trouble that Trump is about to cause
For all his efforts to ingratiate himself with the new US president, Keir Starmer finds himself studiously not invited to the inauguration – unlike other leaders (and Nigel Farage) – and unable to choose between closer trade links with America or the EU. His predicament will soon be made painfully clear, says Andrew Grice
We just don’t know what Trump will do,” one UK minister admitted to me ruefully. It reflected the trepidation inside the government that Keir Starmer’s already difficult job is going to get even harder from Monday when Donald Trump is inaugurated as US president.
Anxious British officials are still trying to work out whether Trump will impose his threatened tariffs of 10 to 20 per cent on all US imports, including from the UK, or whether it’s a classic Trump negotiating tactic to win trade concessions.
One hoped that blanket tariffs will be “a starting point, not an endpoint” – and that tariffs will be applied more selectively on countries and sectors of the economy. The nightmare scenario is a UK-China trade war, leaving post-Brexit Britain exposed as an open economy and dealing a hammer blow to its already fragile growth prospects.
Securing a carve-out from Trump’s tariffs is one of the daunting tasks facing Peter Mandelson, the UK’s new ambassador in Washington. Starmer has not been invited to the inauguration – unlike some world leaders (unusually), and Nigel Farage (inevitably) – but hopes to visit the White House soon.
Starmer is sticking to his mantra that the UK does not face a "binary choice" between the US and Europe and can enjoy the best of both worlds. Unfortunately, Trump’s return coincides with the UK starting to negotiate to “reset” with the EU. The PM will attend an informal meeting with EU leaders next month before formal negotiations kick off at a UK-EU summit.
Starmer’s difficult, perhaps impossible, balancing act will soon become very clear. He will want to show an appetite for a US trade deal, partly to curry favour with Trump, but reducing trade friction with the EU will pull the UK in the opposite direction.
The US, which has lower food safety standards than the UK and EU, will demand access to the UK market for its chlorinated chicken and hormone-fed beef, but a key UK ask from the EU is an agreement on animal and food products. I’m told Mandelson, the former business secretary and EU trade commissioner, warned Liz Truss when she was international trade secretary that a UK-US trade deal including farming “would be like taking a poison pill”. He will probably focus on covering services such as digital, technology and finance.
Trump will seek to draw the UK away from the EU’s rules-based, high-regulation orbit. But to secure a better EU agreement, Starmer is likely to accept dynamic alignment with EU standards – agreeing to follow Brussels rules in future – and a role for the European Court of Justice. The UK will also be in the EU camp on carbon taxes and net zero.
Starmer will play up defence and security cooperation with the US, but some advisers think he will gravitate to the EU on trade as the limitations of trying to "have cake and eat it" emerge.
"Of course we will have to make choices,” one government insider told me. “On trade, we will have to prioritise the EU.”
The case for such an approach has surely been strengthened by the bond market turmoil; it is even more urgent to secure growth to balance Rachel Reeves’s books and persuade the markets the government has a credible plan for growth. The bottom line is that the UK does twice as much trade with the EU than the US.
Some former diplomats have advised Starmer not to be “too needy” in his dealings with Trump. Having watched 10 prime ministers try to hug US presidents close, my advice would be to ban the anachronistic phrase “special relationship”. US officials rightly think every PM is desperate to hear it and so hand it out like a sweetie, but this merely underlines how unequal the relationship is – and it’s even more so under an all-powerful strongman like Trump.
Even the best laid plans can go wrong when it comes to the unpredictable Trump. The Washington embassy, sensing he would win the US election, worked hard to build bridges with Team Trump for two years. But even its worst nightmares did not include Elon Musk becoming the “first buddy”, joining a Trump administration waging war on the PM on X/Twitter, saying he should be imprisoned because of the grooming gangs scandal and discussing how to remove him before the next election. You couldn’t make it up – but Musk did it.
Starmer’s team will need to expect the unexpected, be ready for explosive Trump tweets to detonate at 3am UK time and, when the two leaders meet, for the president to ask the PM to land more tournaments for his Scottish golf course.
Starmer will have to flatter Trump and allow the transactional president to claim he has won whenever they strike a deal. The UK praised his (very real) role, along with Joe Biden’s, in securing a ceasefire in Gaza.
Trump is aggrieved he did not get the credit he deserved in his first term for the Abraham accords, which normalised relations between Israel and several Arab countries. So he will be determined to ensure the ceasefire holds, and to end the conflict in Ukraine.
“He really wants the Nobel Peace Prize,” one diplomat whispered.
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