Trump senses British weakness Keir Starmer will never hold the reins of power

It must be all-so familiar to Theresa May. There she was in 2017, holding hands with The Donald, walking in the White House as the first foreign leader invited to see the new Caesar after his inauguration. Poised to assume her role as the old world’s special envoy to the court of the new emperor, the first question from the British press landed.

“Mr President, you’ve said before that torture works, you’ve praised Russia, you’ve said you want to ban some Muslims from coming to America, you’ve suggested there should be punishment for abortion,” began the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg. “What do you say to our viewers at home who are worried about some of your views and worried about you becoming the leader of the free world?” Smiling, Trump turned to May and asked: “This was your choice of a question? There goes that relationship.”

It was a joke, of course — and a funny one. The press pack loved it. I remember, because I was part of it. As so often with Trump, however, it was the humour of power: the glint of steel visible, even when sheathed inside a joke. What made it so funny, though, was the fact that everyone knew the special relationship was in his control, not May’s — and he was the type of man who could perfectly well jettison it because of some personal grudge. May had done everything she could to secure a good relationship but she was weak and he was strong. For the rest of her miserable time in power, Trump would remind her of this fundamental imbalance.

Eight years later, and the new PM is in exactly the same position. Keir Starmer has done everything in his power to ensure a smooth relationship with Trump. Through his foreign secretary, David Lammy, the Labour Party has formed close links to Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance. Starmer was the first foreign leader to speak to Trump after he came within inches of being assassinated in July. The pair even had dinner in New York during Starmer’s visit to the UN General Assembly in September.

And yet, here we are, the British Prime Minister once again caught in a Trump storm, battered from one side by allegations of election interference and from another by claims that the Starmer operation is involved in a shadowy censorship war against Elon Musk.

The furore began on Wednesday when it emerged that the Trump campaign team had filed an extraordinary legal challenge against the Labour Party’s “blatant foreign interference” after Starmer’s head of operations revealed that 100 current and former party staffers were headed to the US to campaign for Kamala Harris. The letter also refers to a report in The Washington Post claiming that Labour has been advising the Harris campaign on how to win, including Starmer’s most important aide, Morgan McSweeney — an allegation Labour denies.

The importance of this story, however, does not lie in the technicalities of the allegations themselves — whether the Labour Party officials who travelled to the US to campaign for Harris broke US federal laws by doing so, or whether McSweeney has formally offered advice to the Democratic Party. Such details do matter. But what it really shows is that Starmer and Lammy have not learnt from May’s experience and are therefore doomed to the same fate. For as long as they are chasing after Trump’s approval, he will not respect them. Unless they have something of value for him, no amount of schmoozing will alter his fundamental assessment of British weakness.

There’s a salient lesson for Starmer in Trump’s 2015 book, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again. In it he explains how at military school he had to deal with a particularly intimidating teacher called Theodore Dobias. “​​What I did, basically, was to convey that I respected his authority, but that he didn’t intimidate me,” Trump writes. “It was a delicate balance. Like so many strong guys, Dobias had a tendency to go for the jugular if he smelled weakness. On the other hand, if he sensed strength but you didn’t try to undermine him, he treated you like a man.”

Trump, of course, is not really talking about Dobias, but himself. The only people he respects are the strong or the slavishly loyal. And in the British Prime Minister, Trump sees only the weakness of a supplicant. He also knows that Starmer abhors his politics and wants Harris to win.

Like some kind of strange journalistic Russian Doll, however, the story of Starmer’s election “interference” comes with an even odder tale buried within. According to the American journalist Matt Taibbi, the real story is not just that Starmer sits atop a party which is actively campaigning to elect Trump’s rival, but one that also has shadowy connections to an organisation in Washington which is locked in a “disinformation” war with Elon Musk’s X.

Central to this allegation is the “Center for Countering Digital Hate” (CCDH), an organisation founded in 2018 by McSweeney and another Labour Party official called Imran Ahmed. While McSweeney is no longer involved in the CCDH, under Ahmed’s leadership it has become one of the more controversial campaigning organisations in Washington, leading the charge against what it calls “online harms” but which is seen by Musk and many Republicans as little more than a front in a wider ideological struggle for free speech online. Starmer, then, stands accused of not only election interference, but cultural interference.

The online harms the CCDH highlights certainly reflect the concerns of Liberal America, including issues such as “anti-vax misinformation”, “climate change misinformation” and the dangers of the “manosphere”. On the CCDH’s website it accuses social media companies of using algorithms with a “systematic bias towards hate and misinformation” which pose “real-life harms to marginalized communities, minors and democracy more broadly”. In July 2023, Elon Musk also tried to sue Ahmed’s CCDH for “tens of millions of dollars” in lost advertising revenue, but the case was thrown out earlier this year. Bad blood clearly remains.

Much like the attempt to portray the Labour Party as a “foreign interferer”, the attempt to tie Starmer’s government to the CCDH’s ongoing war with Musk is pretty thin. McSweeney left the CCDH in 2020, two days after Starmer was elected Labour leader. What’s more, Trump’s campaign team has described Starmer’s Labour party as “far-Left” when McSweeney’s early involvement in the CCDH grew out of his battle to defeat the far-Left, which, at the time, was in control of the party and mired in allegations of antisemitism.

To the actual “far-Left” in Britain, McSweeney is a malign conservative presence. Indeed, in many ways this is closer to the truth. McSweeney’s operation in No. 10 has little time for American progressive politics, which many of those closest to Starmer in Downing Street see as dangerously out of touch with ordinary voters.

But, as with the furore over Labour activists campaigning for Harris, the real importance of Taibbi’s “British invasion” story lies less in how close the connections really are between Starmer and Harris — tentative at best — and more in the wider allegation that the misinformation movement is structurally set up to advance a Liberal world view at the expense of those who dare to question its most fundamental tenets. And on this score, there is clearly some truth.

Earlier this year, UnHerd discovered that an organisation called the Global Disinformation Index had placed us on what is called a “dynamic exclusion list” of publications that supposedly promote “disinformation” and should therefore be boycotted by all advertisers. Our crime? “Anti-LGBTQI+ narratives”. The evidence for this assertion was the fact that we had published the academic Kathleen Stock who it said was “acknowledged as a ‘prominent gender-critical’ feminist”. Stock’s crime was to assert that biological sex differences exist — a belief specifically protected in British law. While misinformation exists, this clearly isn’t it. Much remains in the eye of the censor — or, indeed, the algorithm.

The moral of this strange modern fable, then, is ultimately one of power. Keir Starmer is learning that no matter how nicely he plays, his government will be buffeted by the wider struggle for dominance currently playing out in the US — not just between Trump and Harris, but between the titans of Silicon Valley and the party establishments in Washington. These are battles with huge stakes, financially and politically, the winners of which will control the world’s most powerful country and the world’s most powerful industry. Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney are mere straws blowing in the wind. The Brits aren’t coming for America. The Americans have already taken Britain.

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Tom McTague is UnHerd’s Political Editor. He is the author of Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016, due to be published in September 2025

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