Zelensky might be the man to save Starmer's failing premiership

Yahoo

03-03-2025

It all had the feel of Tony Blair's greatest hits about it. In Easter 1998, the then Prime Minister sent his own aides into hysterical laughter by declaring to waiting reporters that the peace talks in Northern Ireland demanded no sound bites . . . Oh, and also that he felt 'the hand of history on my shoulder.'
Similarly, after chairing yesterday's successful peace summit of European leaders to discuss the Ukraine crisis, it was Keir Starmer's turn solemnly to tell the nation simultaneously that: 'This is not a moment for mere talk,' and also: 'We are at a crossroads in history today.'
If the Prime Minister felt just a bit giddy at his transformation in the last week from his perception as a luckless, accident-prone vicar in a PG Wodehouse novel to ruthless international statesman and Europe's last, best hope for peace, then he can be forgiven. Even for a Prime Minister who has not had Starmer's run of bad luck since last July, last week was a good one that might well be the basis of his political reinvention and even – who knows? – his salvation.
He has been helped, of course, by President Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance's peculiar behaviour towards President Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office, a scene which fans of 1980s high school romantic comedies will have found familiar. You know the scene: Big Don and JD, the sports jocks who are also the school bullies, pick on the new foreign kid who's just enrolled, but get their come-uppance in the last reel of the movie.
Whether Starmer will play the role of the white knight, the quiet, unassuming figure who humiliates the bullies and rides off into the sunset with the girl of his dreams, to the over-produced rhythms of Peter Gabriel's 'In Your Eyes', who can say? But at this stage in the drama, it is Britain's PM who most qualifies as the good guy. Not only did he start the week by promising a significant boost to UK defence spending – something that Big Don and JD had been demanding of all Europe's governments – but he followed that up with his own visit to the White House in which a genuine mutual admiration between Starmer and Trump was evident.
Starmer will hope that the subsequent stage-managed drama with Zelensky will have done nothing to erode the good will that Starmer banked during his visit, despite the PM making it clear afterwards that he differs strongly from Trump's approach to Ukraine. Given the relative proximities of Europe and the US to the drama unfolding in Ukraine, it is hardly surprising that its nearest neighbours feel more threatened by, and, consequently, more sympathetic to, the victim than to the aggressor.
That Trump seems, for now, to be taking the opposite approach is both confounding and deeply worrying (unless you are Vladimir Putin). But that transformation of Starmer seems to have held fast. He has not listened to the voices demanding that he revoke the King's invitation to Trump to make an official state visit to Britain. He has, carefully and with determination, expressed his sincere support for Ukraine and Zelensky while publicly respecting President Trump and his own priorities.
This is no more than you would expect of any grown-up politician with more to occupy his mind than the cheap and easy virtue-signalling of his critics on the Left. It is likely (though no one can or should confirm) that Starmer finds Donald Trump's personality and style of politics as abhorrent as most decent people do. It is certainly the case that Trump's not-very-veiled threats to abandon Ukraine to the mercies of Putin's jackboot disgust Starmer as much as they disgust anyone.
But Starmer cannot lead Europe through the next difficult months without a productive and positive relationship with Trump's White House. Right now, at the crossroads in history of which the Prime Minister spoke yesterday, he is accepting of the rules of the game and understands that those rules cannot be unilaterally changed.
This is a different Starmer from the one we've watched on our TV and computer screens these last eight months or so. No longer a victim of circumstance or bad luck or ministerial colleagues' ill judgment, he looks and sounds more confident, as if the conviction which seemed to be missing in the first few months of office had suddenly been discovered in the eye of an international diplomatic crisis.
He is not the first British leader to be called upon to play a central role in world events or whose administration is now being judged on metrics that are quite separate from the domestic political agenda. As recent history has shown, he is also not the first Labour leader to risk being undermined by international events.
But leadership means taking risks that others prefer to avoid. The cause of a free, independent Ukraine is a worthy one and succeed or not, Starmer's motivation in tying himself to the blue and yellow flag is honourable and right. Beyond, that, what can we ask of the man?
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