I am starting to wonder if Keir Starmer is naïve or foolish, or both. Presenting himself as a seasoned technocrat, he has shown himself to be embarrassingly callow in the political arts: first, by announcing in isolation, significant cuts to the winter fuel allowance; second, by so woefully handling the disclosure that he and other senior Labour figures had received a series of freebies; and now – most significantly – by wrecking the government’s relationship with Donald Trump.
In a six-page letter to the US Federal Election Commission on Monday, the former president’s campaign demanded an urgent investigation into “blatant foreign interference in the 2024 Presidential Election in the form of apparent illegal foreign national contributions made by the Labour Party”. Trump and his team are especially outraged by a now-deleted post on LinkedIn, in which Sofia Patel, Labour’s head of operations, declared that she had “nearly 100 Labour Party staff (current and former) going to the US in the next few weeks heading to North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Virginia”, with “10 spots” remaining (“we will sort your housing”).
