Every day, Donald Trump lashes out. Barely a news cycle passes without some new semi-literate outburst directed at Keir Starmer.
Speaking alongside the Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin in the Oval Office yesterday, the US President said that the UK-US alliance “always was the best until Keir came along”. He then turned to a bust of Winston Churchill and said: “Unfortunately, Keir is not Winston Churchill.”
This is now just a part of geopolitical life. For his part, Starmer makes sure not to say anything aggressive in response. He keeps his poise and his dignity. The US President, on the other hand, seems to be undergoing some kind of sustained emotional breakdown.
To be fair, he is experiencing humiliation on a global scale. He has spent the last year insulting his allies. He threatened to invade Greenland and Canada. He suggested he’d unravel Nato. He lashed out against Europe. He slapped tariffs on everyone. Then, almost by accident, he started a war in Iran only to belatedly discover that the regime might close the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation. And now, in a moment of near-perfect moral resolution, he must plead with all the people he has insulted to come save him.
“You don’t have to send me aircraft carriers,” Trump says he told Starmer. “Send me a couple of minesweepers.”
America has never looked more alone. It has never looked more isolated and mad. So day after day, as his dreams corrode into reality, Trump lashes out. And there is no one he lashes out against more than the British Prime Minister.
Trump has learned to deeply resent Starmer, and that alone speaks very highly of the Prime Minister’s judgement. Almost by accident, he seems to have fallen into the most popular policy position of his premiership – opposition to an illegal war in the Middle East, launched unprovoked by deranged administrations in Washington and Jerusalem.
But the thing is, this was not an accident. It was a logical result of Starmer’s convictions.
In most other respects, he remains a deeply flawed Prime Minister. He provides next to no direction for the Government, either in its overall message or in individual departments. He is criminally uninterested in policy or political ideas. He has failed to take the tough financial decisions which would improve the country in the long term. And he has engaged in egregious anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy, all in an attempt to attract Reform voters who he will never actually secure.
But there is a clear area of consistent principle in Starmer’s career and that is international law. He was a human rights barrister. He worked to save people from the death penalty in Commonwealth countries. He was genuinely outraged at the previous Tory government’s dismissive attitude towards the law. So then, when the US asked to use UK bases for offensive operations in a patently illegal initiative, he simply said no.
Instead, in a classic bit of nervous Starmite centrism, he only allowed the Americans to use the bases for defensive operations. It was the kind of position he always falls into, sketching red lines all over the place and then settling into whatever passive posture is tenable by the end of the exercise. Usually, it is a very unpopular position. But this time, as if by a miracle, it was not.
Starmer can come across as weak and flustered. But it must have taken real strength to stand up to the US President. It must have required a sense of determination. Presumably, any number of threats were thrown his way. Possibly Trump threatened tariffs; perhaps he also threatened an end to military cooperation in some areas, or pulling out of Nato, or refusing to help Ukraine. Whatever he said, Starmer didn’t budge on offensive operations. And then later, when the demands rolled in for help with the Strait, he didn’t budge on that either.
It’s hard to think of any recent British leader who would have managed this. Tony Blair certainly wouldn’t – he himself has made that very clear in the statement he put out in favour of the war, demonstrating that he had learned precisely nothing in the two decades since his own grievous mistakes in similar circumstances. Theresa May would probably have become involved. Boris Johnson definitely would. Liz Truss would probably have launched the nuclear deterrent as soon as the phone rang.
Certainly we know how Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage would have behaved, because they told us. Both demanded greater British involvement. Now that they’ve realised how unpopular the war is, both of them have tried to reverse that position without having the basic good grace to admit they are doing so. In Badenoch’s case, this involves the insult of claiming “I never said we should join” mere days after she said “we are in this war whether they like it or not” and asking Starmer: “What is the Prime Minister waiting for?”
If either one were prime minister, they would now be in an impossible position. They would have gone to war without a clear explanation of what they were trying to achieve, because the Trump administration has been unable to articulate it itself. When they were asked what conditions would then allow the UK to exit the operation, they would have been unable to answer.
Most importantly, they would have committed perhaps the gravest sin in international relations: they would have put another nation’s wishes over their own. These two leaders, who love to proclaim their patriotism and denigrate that of their opponents, would have embroiled British servicemen in a war on another nation’s say-so without even bothering to exercise any independent judgement as to its validity.
Blair, to his credit, went to war in Iraq in a bid to try to preserve a multilateral approach to the “war on terror” and to exercise some restraint on the Bush administration. Badenoch and Farage could not even claim that degree of logic or strategic foresight. They would have turned Britain into a vassal state of a lunatic American president.
Starmer has many flaws, but these repeated Trump outbursts speak to his qualities. When the moment came, he made the right decision in the national interest. Doing so involved considerable political bravery. He deserves to be recognised for it.
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