As Keir Starmer heads for Washington to meet US president Donald Trump, he embarks on one of the most crucial diplomatic missions undertaken by a British prime minister in years. Wooing Trump on security and trade have emerged as imperatives for the success of his UK Labour government.
Thursday afternoon’s meeting in the White House will be a defining moment for Starmer’s premiership, as well as for wider Europe-US relations and also for Ukraine.
He went straight to the airport following prime minister’s questions in the House of Commons on Wednesday.
There had been nervousness in recent weeks in UK government circles about securing a meeting with Trump – Britain’s prime ministers have for decades been the first leaders from Europe to meet a newly minted US president, a demonstration of their much vaunted “special relationship”.
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Former prime minister Theresa May flew to Washington within a week of Trump’s first inauguration in 2017, the first world leader to visit. Gordon Brown was the first from Europe to meet Barack Obama. Margaret Thatcher met George HW Bush in November 1988 while he was still president-elect.
French president Emmanuel Macron was the first European leader to meet Trump on Monday. Overall, this time Starmer is the sixth world leader in the queue behind those of Israel, Jordan, Japan, India and France.
The prime minister has been keen to strike a phlegmatic tone about Trump’s US in public, while being careful to say little that might upset the president in advance of their meeting.
The only risks he has taken have been to repeatedly call Volodymyr Zelenskiy the “democratically elected president of Ukraine”, a gentle rebuke of Trump for calling him a “dictator”; and also by expressing explicit support at PMQs for Canada, which Trump has mused about absorbing into the US, despite the fact that its head of state is Britain’s King Charles.
The general attitude that has radiated from within Starmer’s Number 10 operation has been to focus on what Trump actually does, and not on what he says.
Only once leading up to his departure for Washington did the generally calm UK prime minister appear irritated by questioning about his US mission.
On Monday, in what was viewed as a clear attempt to ingratiate himself with the US president, Starmer announced a boost in UK defence spending – a key demand of Trump’s. It will be funded initially by cuts to foreign aid, which may also go down well with the US president.
At a press conference later in Downing Street, a GB News reporter asked Starmer if he was “Nigel Farage in disguise” because, the reporter suggested, the prime minister had stolen the Reform UK leader’s policy of boosting the military at the expense of foreign aid. Starmer’s face dropped and he looked annoyed. Farage is the UK politician who is closest to Trump by far. Starmer retorted that Farage was not “patriotic” because he “fawns” over Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Starmer has two over-arching objectives in his face-off with Trump on Thursday afternoon, which is expected to comprise a lunch in the White House and three hours of meetings between officials.
The first is to get the US president to reaffirm support for its nervous European allies through the security umbrella provided by the Nato military alliance, for which Trump has shown little love. Central to this is also pushing Trump to get a fair deal for Ukraine in peace talks with Russia.
The timing of Monday’s surprise UK move on defence spending was widely seen as an attempt by Starmer to gain the US president’s ear. Britain spends 2.3 per cent of GDP (the value of its economy) on defence, above the Nato minimum of 2 per cent but well below what Trump wants.
The previous Tory government promised to increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030, as the UK struggles with sluggish growth and high national debt. Starmer had already committed himself to the 2.5 per cent target but, until this week, he would not give a timeline, preferring instead to wait on the results of a UK defence review.
On Monday, Starmer announced that the UK would hit 2.5 per cent from 2027 and would aim to hit 3 per cent by 2033. This means extra military spending of about £6 billion in 2027 if the change had not been made. US defence secretary Pete Hegseth has welcomed the move.
As he stood behind a Downing Street lectern with the slogan “Secure at home, strong abroad”, Starmer insisted he was unhappy to have to initially fund the move by cutting foreign aid from 0.5 per cent of Gross National Income to 0.3 per cent, which has drawn ire from some on the left of his party. Labour’s former development secretary Clare Short this week suggested that Starmer’s “is simply not a Labour government”.
His second over-arching mission is to secure a UK swerve of trade tariffs that may be levied by Trump on European countries, and which would stifle the UK’s stuttering economy.
Beyond that, Starmer may also seek greater co-operation on trade policy and also on new technology such as artificial intelligence. A wider US-UK trade deal is seen as way off.
