Sir Keir should not emulate Hugh Grant

Telegraph

9 hours ago

His feet had barely touched British soil before Donald Trump started swinging his big stick.
'You better get your act together or you're not going to have Europe anymore,' he lambasted his Western allies after arriving in Scotland to visit his golf courses (not for the 47th president, concerns about second jobs).
'You've got to stop this horrible invasion that is happening to Europe, many countries in Europe… this immigration is killing Europe.'
Setting aside the rights and wrongs of British immigration policy, our beleaguered Prime Minister would be forgiven for feeling a little peeved.
What other American president would have presumed to blend personal and state business so brazenly and deliver such insulting rhetoric into the bargain?
Amid social unrest in Epping, Reform on the march and small boats arrivals up by a staggering 50 per cent, immigration is Sir Keir's Achilles' heel. With his approval ratings at rock bottom, the last thing he needed was a punishment beating from Trump.
Certainly, Sir Keir's backbenchers will be begging him to stand up to the Donald, if only to appease their voters in places like Ashton-under-Lyne, where many may be tempted by the Corbyn-Sultana cult or a Gaza Independent at the next election.
Did Sir Sadiq Khan recommend that the Prime Minister reprise the 20ft Trump 'baby blimp' that he authorised to be flown above Parliament during the presidential visit of 2018?
I wouldn't be surprised. And he wouldn't have been the only one.
In the Left-wing mind, the 2003 romantic comedy Love Actually looms disproportionately large.
This is for the sake of one scene alone. In it, Hugh Grant – whom most progressives, particularly those of a Liberal Democrat persuasion, wish was the prime minister in real life – upbraids the American president at a press conference.
'I fear that this has become a bad relationship; a relationship based on the president taking exactly what he wants and casually ignoring all those things that really matter to Britain,' Grant lectures his opposite number, played by Billy Bob Thornton.
'We may be a small country, but we're a great one, too… and a friend who bullies us is no longer a friend. And since bullies only respond to strength, from now onward I will be prepared to be much stronger. And the president should be prepared for that.'
Forgive me for quoting that Richard Curtis idiocy at such length. But that is precisely what Guardianista-in-chief Polly Toynbee did in a petulant little column before Sir Keir's visit to the White House in February, under the screaming headline: 'Starmer has the backing of Britons to stand up to Trumpism.' I rest my case.
But does he? When it comes to immigration, the opposite would appear to be the case. Although 55 per cent of Labour voters want the numbers to stay the same or go up, polls show that most of the population wishes them very much reduced, with 32 per cent viewing immigration as a 'bad' or 'very bad' thing.
Small boats get people's backs up even more. For all his braggadocio and swagger, the sorry truth is that on this issue, Donald Trump speaks for a greater number of Britons than our own prime minister.
For this reason, Sir Keir would be best advised to tell his backbenchers to pipe down. Trump's big stick has caused the PM enough pain already.
Tweaking the orange tail might play well to certain parts of the gallery but after a year of economic mismanagement, we are hardly able to withstand the tariffs with which Trump would surely retaliate. Whatever Hugh Grant may think.