For Remoaners, Starmer has just committed the ultimate betrayal
Against all odds, this dreariest, unluckiest of Prime Ministers has somehow succeeded where so many of his predecessors failed and pulled off a landmark US-UK trade deal.
How Rishi Sunak, for whom high profile Brexit wins proved frustratingly elusive, would love to have been able to announce something that sounded this good. As for Boris Johnson, who prided himself on 'delivering Brexit,' he would surely have swapped his trademark blond mop for a buzz cut to deliver this.
On the face of it, it is an extraordinary triumph for Downing St, stunning all those who struggled to imagine Donald Trump doing Starmer any favours. After all, the two men could hardly be more different. Behind one set of negotiators was a dull, grey technocrat whose yearning for closer relations with the EU might have derailed all this.
Behind the other set was the magnetic, mercurial, swashbuckling Trump, who despises Brussels and wants to teach its leading lights a lesson.
Yet there they both were today, playing footsie across the Pond, gushing about how the deal they have struck makes the Special Relationship stronger than ever. What a coup!
From the leader of a political party whose MPs, activists and grassroots supporters almost all detest Trump, the spectacle must have been a tremendous shock.
Leading Labour figures like Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who not so long ago labelled the US President a 'neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath', and the UK's ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson – who once described him as a 'bully' and 'danger to the world' – may have spent the last nine months desperately trying to gloss over these old insults, but we all know what they really think.
As for Labour backbenchers, few bother to conceal their contempt for the occupant of the White House. As their great leader dispensed with all formalities today, addressing the President affectionately as 'Donald' not once; not twice; but an astonishing eight times; many will have been cringeing and praying for him to stop.
However, that fleeing discomfort pales into insignificance relative to other adjustments they, and the rest of the Left-leaning Establishment, must now make. For as of today, their dreams of rejoining the EU are now well and truly over.
On this front, the small print of today's deal does not matter a jot. Whether it turns out to be 'so good for both countries', as Trump cheerfully proclaimed, or whether the master deal maker has stitched us up, there is now absolutely no going back. In landmark deals with both India and America, Starmer has cemented our departure from the UK. We are now on a very different path.
For the many die-hards who have spent years trying to derail or reverse Brexit, it is quite a blow. That it is game over, for them, thanks to Starmer is a particularly nasty surprise. They had every reason to hope he would help. A staunch Remainer himself, the prime minister has spent much of his Premiership trying to rebuild ties with the EU. Earlier this year, he thrilled Remainers by becoming the first British prime minister since Brexit to attend an EU meeting in Brussels. Downing St has repeatedly indicated that he wants to 'reset' the UK's relationship with the bloc. All this has raised hopes among Remainers that he and his EU friends would conspire to create 'Brexit in name only'. This week's deals have put paid to all that.
It will take some time to identify the various winners and losers in these agreements.
Amid all the jubilation, already there are signs that some UK sectors will lose out. (Amid a deluge of cheap US agricultural products, for example, our own biggest food export – salmon – of which a quarter goes to the US, now faces a ten per cent tariff. Previously, it was zero.).
If it does turn out that we have been shafted, there will be one great consolation: Remoaners will be among those Trump has put out of business.
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