London —
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer – buttoned-up, lawyerly, reserved – is not a man prone to effusiveness. But when he sat next to US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office last February, he began to speak like his host.
“This is really special,” said Starmer, as he brandished a letter from King Charles III inviting Trump for a second state visit to Britain. “This has never happened before. This is unprecedented… This is truly historic – an unprecedented second state visit.”
Starmer’s uncharacteristic gushing showed how his government planned to handle the US president in his second term: play to his penchant for flattery and royalty, and hope to reap rewards – from a lower tariff rate than that slapped on the European Union, to continued US support for Ukraine.
For some time, that strategy has proven rather effective. But now it appears to have faltered. Although Trump has berated all America’s allies for their reluctance to assist the United States militarily in its war with Iran, he has singled out Starmer with vitriol. “This is not Winston Churchill we’re dealing with,” Trump said on March 3. On Monday, he suggested Britain was no longer “the Rolls-Royce of allies.”
Given the venom of Trump’s broadsides against Britain, a growing number of lawmakers are questioning whether it would be wise for Charles to visit the US this spring. Although the state visit has not been confirmed, the king has widely been expected to travel to Washington, DC, in April, to celebrate the 250th anniversary of US independence.
“The last thing that we want to do is have His Majesty… embarrassed,” Emily Thornberry, a Labour member of parliament, said Tuesday. “I think it needs to be thought through very carefully as to whether or not it’s appropriate to go ahead now.”
“I suspect it would be safer to delay it,” Thornberry said on the BBC’s flagship morning radio program.
Trump’s feud with Starmer began when Britain initially refused the president’s request to use its military bases in support of the war with Iran, which Starmer understood to be illegal.
Starmer did, however, join the defense against Iran’s retaliation after British military assets in the Middle East came under attack.
Since then, Trump has both mocked Starmer’s apparent offers to help and berated him for not doing more.
On March 7, when Trump claimed that Britain was “finally giving thought to sending two aircraft carriers to the Middle East,” he told Starmer not to bother. “We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!”
On Monday, after Britain and others balked at Trump’s appeal to help secure the Strait of Hormuz, Trump said London’s reluctance to send warships to de-mine the waterway was “terrible.”
The US president claimed that when he asked Starmer to send assets to help reopen the strait, the prime minister said he would need to discuss the options with his team. Trump said he replied: “You don’t have to worry about a team… you’re the prime minister; you can make a decision… It’s very disappointing.”
Trump’s disparagement of Starmer has shown the limits of Britain’s strategy of flattery, according to Peter Westmacott, who served as the British ambassador to Washington from 2012 to 2016.
“Starmer has spent 18 months trying to manage the relationship by not rising to the bait and dealing in private,” Westmacott told CNN. “He doesn’t have a huge ego himself… He tries to use calm and reason and arguments that will appeal to Trump. But it clearly doesn’t always work, and you never know what he will say the next day.”
Despite his growing rift with Starmer, Trump signaled this week that he is soon expecting to receive King Charles for a state visit. At a news conference at the White House on Monday, Trump said once his “magnificent ballroom” was built, it would be used during visits from foreign heads of state.
“We have, as an example, the King of the UK – I would say King of England – who is a great guy. He’s coming in very soon,” Trump said.
The next day at a bilateral Oval Office meeting with Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin, Trump told reporters that Charles would visit “very shortly.”
Trump’s unpredictability could affect the British government’s decision on whether to recommend the king press ahead with his state visit. While Downing Street will not want to risk subjecting the monarch to Trump’s frequent rants against Britain, neither will it want to risk angering the president by abandoning the plan.
Still, said Westmacott, “there could be a moment when the government decides that the risks of going ahead are greater than the risk of causing offense to Donald Trump.” That latter risk would be reduced, he added, “if the two governments were agreed that it made sense to postpone.”
Asked Tuesday whether the British monarch’s state visit should go ahead, a Downing Street spokesperson declined to discuss future royal engagements and stressed that the details of the visit “haven’t yet been confirmed.”
Although Starmer has faced criticism both abroad and at home for his perceived abundance of caution over British support for the US war against Iran, many of his domestic opponents have since reversed their positions.
Nigel Farage, the leader of the upstart Reform UK party and an ally of Trump, initially said: “The gloves need to come off. We need to accept that we’re part of this, with the Americans, with the Israelis.” But after realizing that Trump’s war is intensely unpopular, Farage has since said Britain should not get involved “in another foreign war.”
Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, also at first supported joining the US-Israeli offensive. She, too, has since backtracked – and even defended the prime minister from Trump’s attacks.
“I’m Keir Starmer’s biggest critic. He’s done a lot of things wrong,” Badenoch said Tuesday. “But I also think the words that were coming out of the White House were wrong. It’s very childish, this war of words and these spats. They might think that they’re entertaining, but… it’s just unseemly.”
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