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”).
On Tuesday, Trump’s campaign co-chair, Susie Wiles, went further, alleging that [“t]he far-left Labour Party has inspired Kamala’s dangerously liberal policies and rhetoric”.
In response, the Prime Minister, speaking to reporters while flying to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Summit in Samoa, insisted that Labour “has volunteers, [they] have gone over pretty much every election. They’re doing it in their spare time”, and that this would not jeopardise his future relationship with Trump if he is elected president on November 5.
It was callow of Starmer to permit Labour staff to take part in this presidential election
It is true that British parties often have become involved in past presidential elections. Bill Clinton was initially furious with John Major in 1992 for helping George Bush Sr’s campaign investigate his past as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and records in his memoirs that he “wanted the Tories to worry about it for a while”. But Major and Clinton went on to collaborate closely, not least over Bosnia and Northern Ireland.
Tony Blair’s team, meanwhile, was closely aligned with Clinton’s election campaign, and New Labour drew much of its inspiration from the New Democrats. But when Clinton was succeeded by George W Bush, Blair ensured that he was no less close to the Republican president – especially after 9/11.
The problem for Starmer is that Trump – self-evidently – is like no other president or presidential candidate before him, and it reflects poorly upon the PM that he does not seem to grasp this.
Yes, he had dinner with him at Trump Tower last month, and David Lammy has been deftly cultivating J.D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, for months. But all that is irrelevant now that Trump believes that Starmer has crossed him.
It is not hard to imagine Elon Musk, prodigious donor to the Trump campaign and self-styled “Dark MAGA” fanboy, pouring poison into the ear of the Republican candidate about Starmer, with whom he has been publicly feuding since the race riots in August. As violence erupted, Musk posted on X – which he owns – a series of inflammatory tweets, including the ludicrous claim that “civil war is inevitable”. Downing Street, quite rightly, condemned this provocation.
But it was callow of Starmer to permit Labour staff to take part in this presidential election, or at least to imagine that Trump would not retaliate. This is a permanently enraged populist whose principal plan for his second term is to take revenge on his enemies.
For disloyal Republicans like Liz Cheney, he has proposed “Televised military tribunals”; for Mark Zuckerberg, life imprisonment “if he does anything illegal”; for the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, the death penalty; and show-trials for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
It is no longer possible to dismiss all this as mere rhetoric. In this campaign, Trump has defined himself as a crusader for revenge. As he told a Republican gathering in March 2023: “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution”.
For the PM – and for this country – the present furore could have very practical and damaging consequences. Even before the row, Trump was (at best) indifferent to Nato, keen to let Putin have his way in Ukraine, and scarcely interested in advancing the US-UK trade deal that we so badly need. If he wins, this episode will have tangible consequences, and it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe otherwise.
Starmer had better pray that Harris wins.
Matthew d’Ancona is a London Standard columnist
