Starmer’s challenge is to see if usual rules of special relationship still apply under Trump after years of love bombing
Visits by prime ministers to the American president matter much more to us “Brits” than they do to them.
Donald Trump spelt this out in the off-hand way he announced that he had granted Sir Keir Starmer the coveted appointment in his busy schedule.
“We have a lot of good things going on,” the president boasted. “But he asked to come and see me and I just accepted his asking.”
After his phone call with the prime minister, Trump declared “we’re going to have a friendly meeting, very good”. That was before Sir Keir publicly disagreed with Trump’s ruling that Volodymyr Zelenskyy is “a dictator”.
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Trump on Starmer visit
Always assuming that his invitation is not cancelled in a fit of presidential pique, Starmer will find himself proceeding with the utmost caution when he gets to the Oval Office.
Downing Street sources say they are anxious “not to poke the bear” in the full knowledge that previous leaders have endured many awkward moments in their attempts to further a special relationship at away matches.
Starmer will have his work cut out. Since his re-election, Trump has signalled that he has less time than ever for traditional alliances.
Newly inaugurated presidents traditionally send friendly greetings to their territorial neighbours. Trump slapped tariffs on Canada and Mexico and talked about US territorial expansion to both the north and the south.
Historically the UK prime minister has often been the first foreign leader welcomed by a new US president. Trump hosted Theresa May less than a week after he took office for the first time and surprised her when he held her hand to go down some steps.
This year Starmer has already been preceded by the leaders of Israel, Japan, Jordan and Indonesia and will be crossing the Atlantic to pay his respects in the same few days as France’s President Macron.
Donald Trump holds Theresa May’s hand as they walk along the colonnades of the White House in Washington in January 2017. Pic: AP
Thatcher and Reagan’s political romance
Even at the best of times, British officials are prone to exaggerate the closeness of the two countries’ mutual interests.
Harold Macmillan thought he could teach the young John Kennedy a thing or two, as the Greek to JFK’s Roman, but ended up being dictated to by Kennedy on the nature of the UK’s “independent” nuclear deterrent.
One of the wily Harold Wilson’s most significant achievements was refusing to send British troops to fight alongside the Americans in the Vietnam War.
The most celebrated PM/POTUS political romance was between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Indeed when the Falklands conflict broke out in the spring of 1982, I was in the White House briefing room to hear then US secretary of state Al Haig joke with innuendo about the closeness of their relationship.
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher dancing at the White House in 1988. Pic: Reuters
It blossomed after Thatcher won Reagan over to give the UK expedition staunch support, in defiance of the advice from some of his officials.
Even so, Thatcher was unnerved by Reagan’s apparent willingness to consider mutual nuclear disarmament in discussion with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986.
She flew hastily to Washington DC following the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik – “to give Reagan a bollocking” – at least according to the Daily Express reporter in her travelling party.
In 1990 she reportedly told George HW Bush “now George, this is not time to go wobbly” during the flurry of meetings and phone calls which followed Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
Clinton owing Blair and Bush’s love bombing
John Major got off to a bad start with Bill Clinton after Conservative sources tried to help the Republican campaign dig up dirt on Clinton’s time as a student at Oxford. Soon after the US election in 1992, Major flew to the US in the hope of being invited to a face-to-face meeting with the then president-elect. After several days all he got was a phone call from Little Rock, Arkansas.
In spite of their ideological closeness, Tony Blair later said he found it more difficult to deal with the Third Way Democrat Bill Clinton than he did with the “straightforward” Republican George W Bush.
Clinton nonetheless was a key player in bringing about the Belfast agreement. Blair’s greatest success was persuading the president to commit US forces to peacekeeping in the Balkans but he also did Clinton significant personal service.
Blair went on a scheduled visit to the White House at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, just days after the president had made his statement “I did not have sex with that woman”.
At their joint news conference afterwards, Blair allowed all the questions to be deflected to him and expressed his admiration for the president. As they walked away from the East Wing, Clinton put his arm around the prime minister and appeared to say “I owe you one”.
Bill Clinton and Tony Blair during a joint news conference in February 1998 when the president was repeatedly questioned about the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Pic: Reuters
Clinton’s advice to Blair on his successor George W Bush was “hug him close”. But both sides were apprehensive when the Labour prime minister flew to Camp David for his first meeting with the second President Bush.
Bush wanted them to dress casual, and according to the British ambassador, Blair put on some “ball-crushingly tight jeans”. From Bush’s first words about sharing the same kind of toothpaste, Blair was subjected to love bombing.
The two leaders’ relationship remained close, including sending troops side-by-side into Afghanistan and Iraq.
Brown’s bag of CDs, Cameron’s humility and common interests
Through no fault of his own Gordon Brown found himself in the midst of a British media furore after Barack Obama’s team returned a bust of Churchill which had been lent personally to George W Bush by the British Embassy.
The new Obama administration’s ignorance of the usual niceties was further demonstrated when a history-steeped gift to the president from Brown was reciprocated with a bag of CDs.
David Cameron struck a humble note visiting Obama when he described the UK as America’s “junior partner”.
Their alliance backfired when Obama tried to help during the Brexit referendum – warning that the UK would find itself “at the back of the queue” for striking a trade deal with the US after Brexit.
David Cameron and Barack Obama at a NATO summit in 2016. Pic: Reuters
The rapid turnover of prime ministers during Joe Biden’s presidency did not allow any of them to build up a close working relationship. In any case, Biden chose to identify with his Irish, and not his English, heritage.
Until this second Trump presidency, the US and the UK were at least pulling in the same direction, with differing interests but the common assumption that they would back each other up where possible.
Starmer’s challenge is to see if those rules still apply.
Left-right differences can be overcome
Until now, differences of left and right have not mattered much. It was a mere spat when the Reagan administration and the Labour leader Neil Kinnock ended up briefing against each other after the British leader of the Opposition was granted a brief Oval Office meeting before the 1987 general election.
Reagan told Kinnock his unilateral nuclear disarmament policy was crazy and Labour said doddery Reagan had not recognised the shadow foreign secretary Denis Healey.
Kinnock and Labour later abandoned their anti-nuclear policy.
Starmer has got off to a better start than that. He and the foreign secretary David Lammy say they were hosted “graciously” by the then president-elect at Trump Tower in New York City last year.
They will be hoping they can keep it that way this week in the White House.
The last blast furnaces left operating in Britain could see their fate sealed within days, after their Chinese owners took the decision to cut off the crucial supply of ingredients keeping them running.
Jingye, the owner of British Steel in Scunthorpe, has, according to union representatives, cancelled future orders for the iron ore, coal and other raw materials needed to keep the furnaces running.
The upshot is that they may have to close next month – even sooner than the earliest date suggested for its closure.
Read more: Thousands of jobs at risk as British Steel consults unions over closure
The fate of the blast furnaces – the last two domestic sources of virgin steel, made from iron ore rather than recycled – is likely to be determined in a matter of days, with the Department for Business and Trade now actively pondering nationalisation.
The upshot is that even as Britain contends with a trade war across the Atlantic, it is now working against the clock to secure the future of steelmaking at Scunthorpe.
The talks between the government and Jingye broke down last week after the Chinese company, which bought British Steel out of receivership in 2020, rejected a £500m offer of public money to replace the existing furnaces with electric arc furnaces.
The sum is the same one it offered to Tata Steel, which has shut down the other remaining UK blast furnaces in Port Talbot and is planning to build electric furnaces – which have far lower carbon emissions.
These steel workers could soon be out of work
However, the owners argue that the amount is too little to justify extra investment at Scunthorpe, and said last week they were now consulting on the date of shutting both the blast furnaces and the attached steelworks.
Since British Steel is the main provider of steel rails to Network Rail – as well as other construction steels available from only a few sites in the world – the closure would leave the UK more reliant on imports for critical infrastructure sites.
However, since the site belongs to its Chinese owners, a decision to nationalise the site would involve radical steps government officials are wary of taking.
They also fear leaving taxpayers exposed to a potentially loss-making business for the long run.
The dilemma has been heightened by the sharp turn in geopolitical sentiment following Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
The incipient trade war and threatened cut in American support to Europe have sparked fresh calls for countries to act urgently to secure their own supplies of critical materials, especially those used for defence and infrastructure.
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Gareth Stace, head of UK Steel, the industry lobby group, said: “Talks seem to have broken down between government and British Steel.
“My advice to government is: please, Jonathan Reynolds, Business Secretary, get back round that negotiating table, thrash out a deal, and if a deal can’t be found in the next few days, then I fear for the very future of the sector, but also here for Scunthorpe steelworks.”
British Steel declined to comment.
UK
Prince Andrew’s Pitch@Palace branded ‘crude attempt to enrich himself’ as Chinese spy documents set to be released
Prince Andrew’s efforts to make money from his Pitch@Palace project have been branded as a “crude attempt to enrich himself” at the expense of “unsuspecting tech founders”, as new documents may shed more light on what he and his team have been attempting to sell.
Today is the deadline for documents to be released relating to Prince Andrew‘s former senior adviser Dominic Hampshire and his interactions with the alleged Chinese spy Yang Tengbo.
In February, an immigration tribunal heard how the intelligence services had contacted Mr Hampshire about Mr Yang back in 2022. Mr Yang helped set up Pitch@Palace China, a branch of the duke’s scheme to help young entrepreneurs.
The alleged Chinese spy, Yang Tengbo, has links with Prince Andrew
Yang Tengbo. Pic: Pitch@Palace
Judges banned Mr Yang from the UK, saying his association with a senior royal had made Prince Andrew “vulnerable” and posed a threat to national security. Mr Yang challenged that decision at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC).
Since that hearing, media organisations have applied for certain documents relating to the case and Mr Hampshire’s support for Mr Yang to be made public. SIAC agreed to release some information of public interest. It is hoped they may include more details on deals that he was trying to do on behalf of Prince Andrew.
So what do we know about potential deals for Pitch@Palace so far?
In February, Sky News confirmed that palace officials had a meeting last summer with tech funding company StartupBootcamp to discuss a potential tie-up between them and Prince Andrew relating to his Pitch@Palace project.
The palace wasn’t involved in the fine details of a deal but wanted guarantees to make sure it wouldn’t impact the Royal Family in the future. Sky News understands from one source that the price being discussed for Pitch was around £750,000 – there are, however, reports that a deal may have stalled.
Photos we found on the Chinese Chamber of Commerce website show an event held in Asia between StartupBootcamp and Innovate Global, believed to be an offshoot of Pitch.
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Who is alleged Chinese spy, Yang Tengbo?
Documents, released in relation to the investigations into Mr Tengbo, have also shown how much the duke has always seen Pitch as a way of potentially making money. One document from 21 August 2021 clearly states “the duke needed money at the time, and saw the relationships with China through Pitch as one possible source of funding”.
But Prince Andrew’s apparent intention to use Pitch to make money has led to concerns about whether he is unfairly using the contacts and information he gained when he was a working royal.
Norman Baker, former MP and author of books on royal finances, believes it is “a crude attempt to enrich himself” and goes against what the tech entrepreneurs thought they were signing up for.
Read more:
Who is Yang Tenbo?
Virginia Giuffre says she has days to live
Emails between Andrew and Epstein revealed
He told Sky News: “The data given by these business people was given on the basis it was an official operation and not something for Prince Andrew, and so in my view, Prince Andrew had no right legally or morally to take the data which has been collected, a huge amount of data, and sell it…
“And quite clearly if you’re going to sell it off to StartupBootcamp, that is not what people had in mind. The entrepreneurs who joined Pitch@Palace did not do so to enrich Prince Andrew,” he said.
Rich Wilson was one tech entrepreneur who was approached at the start of Pitch@Palace to sign up, but he stepped away when he spotted a clause in the contract saying they’d be entitled to 2% equity in any funding he secured.
He feels Prince Andrew is continuing to use those he made a show of supporting.
He said: “It makes me feel sick. I think it’s terrible – that he is continuing to exploit unsuspecting tech founders in this way. A lot of them, I’m quite grey and old in the tooth now, I saw it coming, but clearly most didn’t. And a lot of them were quite young.
“It’ll be their first venture and you’re learning on the trot, so to speak. So to take advantage of people in such a major way – that’s an awful, sickening thing to do.”
We approached StartupBootcamp who said they had no comment to make, and the Duke of York’s office did not respond.
With reports that a deal may have stalled, it could be a big setback for the duke – especially with questions still about how he’ll continue to pay for his home on the Windsor estate now that the King no longer gives him financial support.
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