Keir Starmer’s hopes of meeting Kamala Harris before the US presidential election have faded, Downing Street has said.
The prime minister said last month he aimed to meet both presidential candidates before American voters go to the polls on 5 November.
He told reporters who had travelled with him to New York that it would be “very good to meet both [Trump and Harris] at some stage” before the US election. “We’ll just have to see what’s possible,” he said.
Starmer did secure a meeting with Donald Trump while in New York for the UN general assembly in September. He and the former US president had a two-hour dinner, where they were joined by David Lammy, the foreign secretary.
A government source said on Thursday that hopes of arranging a meeting between Starmer and Harris had faded. “We’re obviously a number of days out from the campaign and I suspect both candidates are focused on the election,” they said.
With less than two weeks to go before the poll, Harris and Trump are touring battleground states. Trump has sought to weaponise the links between Labour and the Democratic party in the final stages of the campaign.
In a strongly worded legal complaint filed on Wednesday night, Trump’s campaign accused the “far-left” Labour party of “blatant foreign interference” in the US election.
The letter claimed that volunteering efforts by Labour officials travelling to the US to support Harris and reports of contact between Labour figures and officials on her campaign amounted to “illegal foreign national contributions”.
Downing Street has said any Labour officials who campaign for Harris in the election were doing so as volunteers and were not being reimbursed by the party. Starmer said he had a “good relationship” with Trump that would not be jeopardised by the complaint.
