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Cleopatra to America's Caesar. (Carl Court/Getty Images)
The conventional wisdom is that Donald Trump’s election victory is a nightmare for Keir Starmer. Trump not only embodies much that Starmer holds in obvious contempt, but his very presence in the White House captures much of Britain’s essential weakness in 2024. Whatever Labour MPs think of him, the incoming US President has more power to undermine British prosperity — and therefore their own chances of reelection — than anyone else on the planet, including, perhaps, their own leader. Like Cleopatra trying to survive the great imperial power struggles of the late Roman republic, Starmer has little choice but to submit to the new American Caesar and hope for the best.
Despite the inevitable hand wringing in Westminster, however, Trump’s election provides a political opportunity for Starmer that, intriguingly, has not gone unnoticed inside No.10. From a purely partisan perspective, those close to Starmer see Kamala Harris’s crushing defeat not only as a personal rejection, but also as an ideological repudiation of the kind of progressivism she came to represent. In their view, Harris’s brand of “be more woke” liberalism is just as antithetical to the voters Labour needs here as it was to the voters the Democrats needed across the Atlantic.
To understand the tensions at the heart of the Starmer government over its response to Trump’s victory, it is important to distinguish between the historical, organisational and emotional ties between Labour and the Democrats, which sparked Trump’s ire during the presidential campaign, and the divergent political projects taking shape in London and Washington. Those close to Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s influential chief of staff, simply do not look to San Francisco, Washington or Ottawa for inspiration as Tony Blair might have done in the Nineties. Instead, they look to the solid and rather staid social democracies of northern Europe. To understand Starmerism, in other words, look to Copenhagen not California.
The interesting question at the heart of this Labour government, however, is not so much what McSweeney’s vision of a successful Labour strategy looks like — for that much is clear — but how widely it is shared within the wider Labour movement. Beyond a few figures in No.10, who else shares McSweeney’s instinctive eye-rolling alienation with the obsessions and prejudices of North American liberalism and, somewhere in their soul, saw Harris’s defeat as deserved?
Fundamentally, many in Starmer’s No.10 believe that their “project” to remake the Labour Party, which started in opposition, is only half finished. To complete it, the party needs to develop far less instinctive sympathy with the kind of progressivism Harris represented — and far more sympathy with the ordinary concerns of Middle England. If the Labour Party is to be more than a Biden-style interregnum between periods of conservative rule, they believe, the party needs to be shaken out of its comfort zone on many of the issues which cost Harris in the election, from immigration to the wider “woke” wars dominating the post-mortems now being written about why her campaign failed.
Harris’s defeat, in short, is both a portent of what could happen to the Labour Party at the next election and a tool Starmer can use to stop that from happening, though only if he has the political skill to do so. Put bluntly, while President Trump will test Starmer’s diplomatic skills to the limit, his victory could help persuade a reluctant Labour Party that it needs to do far more to reassure voters that it shares their instincts. That, at least, is the theory.
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SubscribeNothing can save Starmer from his own blundering incompetence and arrogance. The man is a “hole in the air”, and having risen without trace, will also sink into oblivion.
The American irritation at having Labour aparatchiks actively working for Kamala in the US is not inconsiderable. It might even remind people of the role British intelligence played in fabricating the Russiagate scam. As far as the economy goes, British weakness is caused by green delusions about energy and climate. And the open immigration shoved down the throats of the British people.
Nothing about pissing your money down a green hole? Everything else is meaningless unless you can fix the economy.
To be fair, there’s plenty of scope for that discussion elsewhere; this article is focused on the Trump-Starmer relationship, both personal and political. As per usual, the author pinpoints the pinch points with precision.
That’s exactly what I’m talking about. When the us starts providing their industry with cheap power how competitive will the uk be? And no it won’t be fair.
The fun will start with tariffs and defence spending. They’re linked. Trump is much more likely to look benignly on trade with Britain, if we start to make serious headway with pulling our weight in NATO.
Reeves didn’t plan for spending on serious rearmament. Either taxes for ordinary people go up, or the NHS can whistle for the promised cash.
For Starmer, there are no good options.
Starmer is no different than Harris, Biden and the dozen or so incompetent leaders pulling down the west. I think they are incapable of identifying their own weaknesses. They are trapped in ideological nonsense that dooms them to failure.