Can a Labour prime minister get on with a Republican president?

Published

4 weeks ago

November 9, 2024

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Can a Labour prime minister get on well with a Republican US president? Or a Conservative PM with a Democrat in the White House?

The short answer is yes, absolutely.

There are plenty of examples of a good relationship and close bond between a Labour prime minister and Republican president. And vice versa.

Indeed, some prime ministers and presidents from seemingly opposing political parties have bonded for the simplest or most trivial reasons. Cigars, toothpaste and burgers, for example.

And it’s not always rosy between prime ministers and presidents of the two sister parties. There have been some big fallings out: over Suez, Vietnam and the Caribbean island of Grenada.

But never has a British Labour prime minister faced such special challenges in maintaining the “special relationship” with a Republican president as Sir Keir Starmer does right now.

It’s not just policy differences – on issues such as trade tariffs, Ukraine, Israel, defence spending, Brexit and climate change – that divide Downing Street and the White House right now.

Never before has an incoming president faced such a tirade of brutal insults from senior members of a UK government like those hurled at him by leading members of Sir Keir’s cabinet.

He’s a “racist KKK and neo-Nazi sympathiser”, (David Lammy, 2017), an “odious, sad little man”, (Wes Streeting, 2017) and “a racist misogynistic, self-confessed groper”, (Ed Miliband, 2018). And that’s just a sample.

That’s not all. Last month, the Republican Party filed a legal complaint after almost 100 Labour Party aides flew to the US to campaign for Kamala Harris, alleging “blatant foreign interference” in the presidential election.

Critics, led by the new Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, have accused Sir Keir and his party of playing student politics by picking a fight with the most powerful man in the world. And someone who’s notoriously vindictive.

It was all very different 80 years ago (critics would also say that political leaders were real statesmen back then).

The phrase “special relationship”, describing the alliance between the UK and US, was first used by Winston Churchill in a speech in Missouri in 1946, in which he also coined the phrase “the Iron Curtain”.

That speech was introduced by president Harry Truman, a Democrat, with whom Churchill had attended the Potsdam Conference in 1945 to negotiate the terms of the end of the Second World War.

They were close friends and would write handwritten letters to each other and addressed one another as Harry and Winston. Truman was also the only US president to visit Churchill at Chartwell, his family home.

Churchill also had a close relationship with another Democrat president, Franklin D Roosevelt. Their close bond during the Second World War was described as a friendship that saved the world.

One reason they got on famously was that they were both renowned cigar smokers. Like Churchill, Roosevelt’s cigar smoking was a widely reported part of his public persona after he became president.

But after Churchill’s bromances with Democrat presidents, his Conservative successor Anthony Eden fell out badly with the Republican president Dwight Eisenhower over the Suez Crisis in the mid-1950s.

And it was a Conservative prime minister and a Democrat president with seemingly nothing in common, the stuffy and diffident Harold Macmillan and the charismatic John F Kennedy, that repaired the damage.

“Between them they had rescued the special relationship after the rupture of the Suez Crisis, and done so at a time of uniquely high tensions around the world,” wrote British author Christopher Sandford in Harold And Jack, The Remarkable Friendship Of Prime Minister Macmillan And President Kennedy.

It was the early 1960s and these were dangerous times, rather like now, of course. Back then it was the Berlin Wall, the Cuban missile crisis and threat of nuclear weapons.

“Through it all, the two leaders had exchanged not only formal messages but also a steady flow of handwritten notes, Christmas and birthday cards, congratulations, and, on occasion, condolences,” Sandford wrote.

But it was a relationship abruptly cut short in 1963, by “supermac’s” demise caused by the John Profumo sex scandal and then JFK’s assassination in Dallas just a month later.

“Like many of those who came into the Kennedys’ orbit,” the Washington Post wrote, “Macmillan was enchanted by Jacqueline Kennedy, and she seems to have happily entered into a father-daughter relationship with him that lasted long after her husband’s assassination.”

After Kennedy, the so-called “special relationship” cooled once again during the tenure of Labour’s Harold Wilson and Democrat Lyndon Johnson, when Wilson rejected pressure from Johnson to send British troops to Vietnam.

And even though Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were ideological soulmates, Thatcher was furious when she wasn’t consulted before the Americans invaded Grenada in 1983 to topple a Marxist regime.

Even worse, according to Thatcher allies, a year earlier Reagan had stayed neutral during the Falklands war. Reagan said he couldn’t understand why two US allies were arguing over “that little ice-cold bunch of land down there”.

Long before the accusations of Starmer’s Labour meddling in the Trump-Harris election, the Tories were accused of dirty tricks in the Bill Clinton-George HW Bush presidential election of 1992.

During the campaign the Home Office checked immigration nationality records to see whether Clinton applied for British citizenship while a student at Oxford University to escape the Vietnam draft. It wasn’t true.

Then prime minister John Major issued a grovelling public apology and Clinton was forgiving. In 1994 the “special relationship” received a huge boost when the president took Major to the home in Pittsburgh where his grandfather and father lived and worked.

Then it was back to Washington where Major became the first foreign leader to stay overnight in the Clinton White House. But as well as the flattery, the pair worked closely in the early stages of the Northern Ireland peace process.

Clinton’s political soulmate, of course, was Tony Blair. They were as close as Reagan and Thatcher. But it was with the Republican George W Bush that Labour’s Blair embarked on the defining mission of his premiership, the Iraq war.

George “Dubya” Bush had defeated Clinton’s vice president Al Gore in the bitterly contested presidential election of 2000 and in early 2001 he entertained Blair at Camp David. It was to prove to be a historic encounter.

“He’s a pretty charming guy,” the president gushed at their news conference. “He put the charm offensive on me.” How many times have we heard that said about Tony Blair?

Then it got deeply personal. They were asked if they’d found something in their talks that they had in common. “Well, we both use Colgate toothpaste,” the president replied.

Quick as a flash, an embarrassed Mr Blair intervened: “They’re going to wonder how you know that, George.”

The war was the turning point of Blair’s decade in Number 10. He was branded a liar over claims about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”, he was vilified by the Labour left and it was the beginning of the end for him.

Some years later, the Tory prime minister sometimes called the “heir to Blair”, David Cameron, bonded over burgers with the Democrat president Barack Obama, serving a BBQ lunch to military families in the Downing Street garden.

They seemed unlikely allies: Obama the first African-American president and Cameron the 19th old Etonian prime minister. It was claimed they had a “transatlantic bromance” in office.

The two leaders were often pictured together playing ping-pong or golf, eating burgers or watching a basketball game. “Yes, he sometimes calls me bro,” Cameron once said of president Obama.

Cameron even persuaded Obama to help the Remain campaign in the 2016 Brexit referendum, when he claimed the UK would be “at the back of the queue” on trade deals with the US if it left the EU.

Which brings us, neatly, to Sir Keir and president-elect Trump and the prime minister’s hopes of building a special relationship.

On the plus side, the president likes the UK – his mother was Scottish and he owns two golf courses in Scotland. And we’re told by Sir Keir that the dinner at Trump Tower in September went well. The mouthy Mr Lammy admitted he was even offered a second portion of chicken. “He was very gracious,” he claimed.

On the other hand, neither the prime minister nor the president smoke cigars, like Churchill and Roosevelt did. We’re not sure which toothpaste they use, unlike Bush and Blair, either.

And while the president obviously likes burgers – he famously flipped them in a McDonald’s during the election campaign – and steak, well done, with ketchup, Sir Keir is vegetarian, though he does eat fish.

But if even a stuffy old toff like Harold Macmillan can get on well with the flamboyant JFK and glamorous Jackie Onassis, there’s hope for Sir Keir and that much-vaunted “special relationship”.

Politics

Sir Keir Starmer to unveil ‘plan for change’ – what is it and why now?

Published

3 hours ago

December 5, 2024

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Sir Keir Starmer to unveil 'plan for change' - what is it and why now?

After five months in power, even the most loyal cabinet members would quietly admit it’s been a rocky run for Sir Keir Starmer and Labour.

The prime minister’s personal polling ratings have tumbled from a +7 in the post-election honeymoon to -29 now.

Many pensioners, business owners, entrepreneurs and farmers are angry, and between the Downing Street power struggles that became front page news, rows over freebies and the first cabinet resignation, it can at times be hard to pinpoint what this government is about and trying to achieve.

Politics latest: Starmer comes under attack over ‘convicted fraudster’ ex-minister

Starmer won big in the summer but is struggling to punch through.

Thursday is a serious attempt to change that. Because this is when Sir Keir will give you, the voter, the nuts and bolts of what to expect in the first half of the ‘decade of renewal’ he has long talked about.

You will be getting a series of “mission milestones” from the prime minister to give you clear markers on which to measure this government and Whitehall – a sharp navigation tool for a government that has been somewhat buffeted by side winds since taking office.

From Thursday onwards the “plan for change” will be, as one person in the top team puts it, the Northern Star of Starmer’s first term in office.

What it looks like will be a checklist of what the government wants to achieve and when it comes to the next election day, you will be able to judge whether Labour have delivered or not.

The pledges will be hung around the missions for government that Sir Keir set out in opposition in February 2023 which then formed the backbone of his manifesto.

In a nutshell, these five missions (a sixth, to tackle small boats was introduced in May 2024) were to turn the UK into the fastest growing economy in the G7, improve the NHS and cut NHS waiting lists, launch a new border security command to drive down small boat crossings, make Britain a clean energy power, safer streets and improve opportunities for all through improvements in childcare, schools and further education.

Turning missions into milestones

On Thursday, those missions will be turned into a set of milestones for this parliament.

The PM hopes it will help voters better understand what he wants to achieve to improve their lives, while giving us all a checklist to hold the government to account.

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Number 10 also wants these “measurable milestones” to galvanise delivery in Whitehall and force reform, be it through the use of artificial intelligence and tech, re-organisation, and efficiency savings.

I’m told there will be two elements to this.

The first part of what the PM will outline is about fixing the foundations – economic stability, secure borders and national security. Within that, the prime minister will make a clear commitment to reduce net migration and reduce small boat crossings.

The second part will be the mission milestones: For the NHS, there will be a pledge to carry out 92% of routine operations and appointments within 18 weeks by March 2029, a target that has not been hit for almost and decade and will require the current 6.7 million waiting list to be halved in the next five years.

Pledge for thousands more police officers

There will be a new promise for 13,000 police officers on the streets with every neighbourhood having a named, contactable police officer in their community, dealing with local issues.

There will be pledges too on early years education and recommitment that all electricity will come from renewables and nuclear by 2030.

On the economy, the prime minister will pledge to improve living standards, as the more abstract mission to have the fastest growing economy in the G7 is made, to quote one government figure, “real for people around the kitchen table”.

Labour know all too well what happened to their US sister party the Democrats when they talked in broad terms about growth rather than telling voters what it really meant for their pocket, so you can expect the ‘growth commitment’ to be turned into some sort of disposable income target.

No migration mission milestone

As I understand it, there will not be a “mission milestone” on migration, which could well raise eyebrows on Thursday given that the prime minister explicitly added tackling small boats to his missions in the run-up to the election.

Five missions became six first steps in the general election campaign as Labour put tackling small boats on the same footing as the other long-term mission with a pledge to set up a new border command to drive down illegal crossings.

At the time, it was seen as an admission from the Labour opposition that they needed to give voters an offer on small boats and illegal migration. To not include it in the “milestones” on which Starmer is prepared to be measured by the public may well raise questions.

For its part, the prime minister’s team has been at pains to stress these new milestones are not an attempt at a reset, but rather a continuation of the mission-led government Sir Keir has been talking about for over 18 months, from opposition into power.

PM unbothered by critics

Insiders say the milestones are the “obvious next step” which Sir Keir and his team were always going to take and follow the processes that have characterised his ascent to the leadership and style of opposition: logical, methodical follow through of ideas he’s been working on.

Those who work with Sir Keir say he tends to be unbothered by the criticism and views it as the rough and tumble of getting on with it as he ploughs ahead with this plan.

But there is an acknowledgement in all of this that to have any hope of holding his fragile and shallow coalition of support together, then Starmer needs to take on, as one government figure put it, “the tsunami of cynicism”.

This cynicism has imbibed our politics in recent years on the back of broken promises around migration, NHS waiting lists, compounded by partygate and the Truss mini-budget that did for the Tories and for any residual trust in politics too, they said.

Tackling Farage and Reform

Sir Keir’s election strategists Pat McFadden, who now runs the cabinet office at the heart of government, and Morgan McSweeney, who now runs Downing Street as the PM’s chief of staff, know that deliverables are their route to being able to answer the populist and insurgency politics driving the rise of Nigel Farage and Reform.

Former cabinet minister Harriet Harman pointed out in our Electoral Dysfunction podcast that if the story of the 2024 election was Reform eating into the Conservative vote, the battle of the next one will also be driven on whether Labour can hold off the party in strongholds such as Wales, Scotland and parts of the Red Wall where Reform came in second in dozens of seats.

If you look at council by-elections since the general election, argues Baroness Harman, Reform have gained 10 points, while Labour have lost 10 points and the Conservative party has stayed put.

Nigel Farage has made no secret of his desire to start taking votes off the new ‘establishment’, the Labour government.

Sir Keir is clearly alive to the threat, as just days after Donald Trump’s victory in the US election the prime minister said the economy and borders were his two top priorities in government.

These are the battlegrounds on which the Tories and Reform will try to fight them, with the former badly damaged on both and the latter now trying to take lumps out of Labour.

Risk in setting milestones

“There’s more at stake than losing the next election,” one senior Labour figure opined to me the other week. “People thinking we cannot fix problems is the real risk for all progressives. If people don’t believe politics can improve things it will only feed more into the politics of division and hate.”

There is also a risk in setting milestones. Too soft and they become meaningless, too ambitious without a concrete plan to deliver them, and you set yourself up to fail. “We have to prioritise and know the route map,’ explained one government figure. “We might not hit it,” they added, acknowledging the jeopardy.

What about Sunak’s targets?

You might remember Rishi Sunak’s five targets – halve inflation, grow the economy, reduce debt, cut waiting lists and stop the boats.

At the time of the general election campaign, we went through these line-by-line in the Sky News Battle for No 10 leadership interviews, and Mr Sunak had to tell a live audience that on NHS waiting lists, stopping small boats and falling debt, he had failed.

He promised the public “no tricks, no ambiguity” and owned those failures before being given the verdict at the ballot box a few weeks later.

When I asked Sir Keir in Rio at the G7 summit what the essence of his leadership was, he said: “I want working people to be better off. I want people to feel the impact of our policies in their pocket so that they can enjoy life in the way they want to, with themselves and their family.

“The basic security is that working people want a decent wage that provides for them in their family. Education allows their children to go as far as their talent will take them, a health service that’s there when they need it. But in a nutshell, it’s about making working people feel better off, and I am determined that that will remain my focus.”

Thursday’s milestones will be built around that central goal to make people better off, in their pockets, and in their lives – be it better schooling for their kids or better access to the local GP or hospital, or cleaner energy.

Tangible pledges on which the prime minister can be measured. It may not be a reset but, if Number 10 gets it right, it has the potential to be a fresh start for a prime minister who has failed to make his mark with the electorate since he won that election.