Keir Starmer is about to discover how irrelevant he really is

Telegraph

26-02-2025

Keir Starmer's visit to the White House this week is fraught with risk and could easily turn into a humiliation. One of the most unpopular and least impressive British prime ministers in decades, Starmer will be meeting with a revolutionary US president who doesn't suffer fools gladly. Donald Trump could not be further away in both style and substance from his British socialist counterpart, and in terms of ideology the two leaders are worlds apart.
While Starmer remains slavishly wedded to the UN, International Criminal Court, the European Convention on Human Rights, and – strikingly – the European Union post-Brexit, Trump thinks in terms of nation-states, national sovereignty, and reining in supranational institutions. In many respects, Starmer is the embodiment of the out-of-touch elites who were swept out of power with the fall of the Biden presidency.
President Trump succeeded in pulling off an emphatic election victory last November with a stunning Rocky-style fightback. In marked contrast, the dull and politically lifeless Starmer is already on the ropes in Britain and sinking fast in the polls. Britain's Prime Minister often looks and sounds like a startled deer in the headlights, struggling to adapt to a new world with a self-confident America at the helm, and a Right-ward political shift across much of Europe.
Starmer's supposedly big pledge this week to increase defence spending was met with total indifference in the US. It stands to reason: it's a miniscule shift that's come far too late to shift the dial. His pledge to raise Britain's defence contribution to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027 isn't going to wow a US administration that is already talking about the need for European allies to think about elevating defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP ahead of the Nato June summit in the Hague.
If Poland can invest over 4 per cent of its GDP on its own security while also helping millions of real refugees from war-torn Ukraine, why can't the UK, the world's sixth-largest economy, do the same?
The notion that Starmer can act as a 'bridge' between the United States and Europe is also facile. If anything, the UK is deemed in the US to be one of the worst offenders in Europe on everything from defence, to draconian restrictions on free speech, to mass migration.
Starmer, in short, will come to the United States as a near total irrelevance. There can be no doubt that thanks to his ultra woke Left-wing government, the UK has a serious image problem in America. This was dramatically highlighted in JD Vance's powerful Munich speech, where he singled Britain out, arguing that 'free speech, I fear, is in retreat'.
While paying superficial lip service to the partnership with the United States, Starmer has been recklessly trying to curry favour with the European Union, increasingly shifting the UK back into the orbit of Brussels in a slap to the face of the 17.4 million Britons who voted for Brexit in 2016. It is extraordinary that the United States now has a president who appears to be far more committed to the preservation of British sovereignty than the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom itself.
At the same time, Sir Keir has been actively undermining both British and American interests with his incredibly dangerous proposed handover of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, which many in Washington believe will place the long-term future of the US base of Diego Garcia at grave risk. Members of Congress are now blasting the Chagos deal as a gift to Communist China, and a huge insult to the United States – and with good reason. If the Labour Government decides to move forward with ending British control over Chagos, in the face of mounting US concerns, it will be immensely destructive for the Special Relationship.
My advice to the Prime Minister as he heads to the Oval Office is to ditch the ghastly Chagos surrender, listen to perfectly legitimate US concerns over free speech in the UK, drop the woke, virtue-signalling language, and work with the United States on advancing a trade deal that creates jobs and increases prosperity on both sides of the Atlantic. He should also be standing up to Communist China instead of kowtowing to Beijing.
The distinctly uncharismatic Keir Starmer is barely known in the United States outside of the Washington Beltway. But he should still do his best not to embarrass himself in front of the world's superpower when he meets with president Trump on Thursday.