Donald Trump will privately take “pleasure and delight” in seeing Sir Keir Starmer forced out as UK Prime Minister, experts have told The i Paper.
The US President has long viewed the Labour leader as a “globalist bureaucrat” and is already looking ahead to who will be his replacement, after last week’s local elections became the latest setback for the struggling British leader.
The scathing analysis comes after nearly 100 Labour MPs turned on the Prime Minister. Starmer has so far refused to step aside, but he could soon face a challenge after Wes Streeting resigned as Health Secretary on Thursday and Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham announced his bid to return to Westminster.
Trump sees Starmer as a “wooden, left-wing human rights barrister”, according to experts, and will not rue his political demise. If Starmer goes, Trump is likely to cast his departure as a failure to adhere to the Maga agenda of being tough on immigration and opening up the North Sea for drilling, they said.
Trump’s relationship with Starmer has been under increasing strain since the start of the war with Iran, when Britain denied US requests to use its bases in the Middle East for air strikes. Starmer changed his mind a few days later and allowed UK bases to be used for defensive strikes, but by then the damage was done.
Trump has said Starmer is “no Winston Churchill” and said he had to consult his advisers before making any decisions.
However, last month Trump held out an olive branch, saying Starmer had “plenty of time to recover” from a series of scandals before the next UK general election.
Patrick Basham, an analyst and pollster who runs the Washington-based Democracy Institute, said that the Trump administration would be “privately happy” if Starmer goes.
Starmer is facing a growing mutiny within his Labour Party over recent days (Photo: Toby Melville/PA Wire)“Keir Starmer is, from the White House point of view, a globalist bureaucrat who they lump in with Emmanuel Macron,” he said. “The personal is always important with Trump and I don’t think Trump has ever thought of Starmer as somebody at his level.”
Basham added that the US President will “take a certain amount of pleasure and delight” because Nigel Farage – who has long played up his relationship with Trump – and his right-wing Reform Party’s success in last week’s local elections “may turn out to be Starmer’s death knell”.
Trump’s relationship with Starmer actually got off to a promising start and the pair had a two-hour dinner at Trump Tower in New York in September 2024, two months before the election that saw Trump return to the White House.
Five months later, Starmer again charmed Trump by pulling out an invitation during an Oval Office meeting from King Charles, requesting an official presidential visit to the UK.
In July, Trump said Starmer was following through on Brexit and said that “I really like the Prime Minister”.
Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump with King Charles and Queen Camilla at the White House last month (Photo: AP)But a lot has changed since then, for both leaders, who are seeing growing discontent at home and an increasingly challenging global landscape.
Andrew Hale, a fellow of international relations at Advancing American Freedom, a Trump-aligned think tank in Washington, said that the clash of styles between Trump and Starmer meant there was no love lost between them.
“Starmer is ideologically driven. Trump is not,” he said. “He’s a New York City property developer, he’s an entertainer, he’s not a traditional politician… They’re polar opposites.”
Warren Stephens, the US Ambassador to the UK, has said that whether Trump would be sad to see Starmer go would probably come down to who replaces him. “I can tell you this, I’d be sad to see him go. I get along with him fine. We don’t always agree, obviously, but I like him, and I think he’s a very, very good and decent man.”
Stephens told Tonight with Andrew Marr on LBC that Trump was “stung” and “upset” when Starmer refused to involve the UK in the war with Iran.
At the same time, William Howell, a professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University, said that Trump might draw a different lesson from Starmer’s removal, if it were to take place.
Even though the President and the Prime Minister are from opposite ideological ends, Trump may realise that “any incumbent who fails to deliver a healthy economy stands at real risk of being ousted”.
“Trump may offer advice and level occasional criticisms from the sidelines, but I don’t expect him to lean heavily into British electoral politics,” Howell said. “With gas prices soaring amidst an unpopular war in Iran, he can’t afford to.”
Voters in the US have been put off by rising gas prices following Donald Trump’s war on Iran (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)Still, one unflattering comparison for Starmer came this week from Matt Terrell, a former chief of staff to Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State who has been tipped as one of Trump’s most likely successors.
Terrell told GB News that Starmer had become the “Joe Biden of the UK”. Biden was forced to drop out of his re-election campaign in 2024 amid concerns about his age and mental faculties. His replacement, Kamala Harris, lost to Trump.
According to Garret Martin, a professor of international relations at American University, Trump would likely spin Starmer’s demise in a “self-serving” way, by saying the Prime Minister failed to back the Maga agenda.
“It will be less about what caused Starmer to lose his premiership and more about interpreting it for [US] domestic politics,” he said.
Martin also attributed Starmer’s current unpopularity with Trump to his failure to show enough “obsequiousness”.
The leaders that seem to get on with Trump the most are the ones who have “fawned over him most”, Martin said, with even Nato’s secretary-general, Mark Rutte, lavishing praise on the President.
Meanwhile, Trump offered only a tepid response this week when asked if Starmer should go.
“That’s up to him”, the President said. “My advice to him has always been, open up your oil in the North Sea.
“You got one of the great oil finds anywhere in the world and you’re not using it… open up your oil in the North Sea and get tough on immigration,” he said.
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