BRITISH Prime Minister Keir Starmer met US President Donald Trump. An opportunity to stand up to the US president’s presidential actions and more or less unhinged statements and remarks that he missed.
 
The British PM had announced huge cuts to Britain’s aid budget two days before meeting Trump, to enable him to increase defence spending as well as to please the US president, who had demanded that Nato-members spend more on defence.
 
“The US is our most important bilateral alliance … So this week when I meet President Trump, I will be clear. I want this relationship to go from strength to strength,” Starmer had told the House of Commons.
 
‘True friends’ who got along ‘famously’

At the meeting with Trump on Thursday, Starmer thanked Trump for his leadership, and told him that Britain and the US “stand side by side still” and have a lot in common. The Prime Minister also insisted that “it is good to know that Britain has a true friend in the Oval Office,” that “this relationship matters more than ever” and that the two countries will “work together” to deliver “big economic wins.”
 
Starmer also had an invitation from King Charles with him, for “an unprecedented second state visit.”
 
Trump, for his part, called Starmer “a special man” and said that “we get along very famously,” even though Starmer was a “tough negotiator.” But the PM initially failed to secure any real concessions over Ukraine or tariffs on Britain. “He tried. We’ll see. We could very well end up with a real trade deal where the tariffs wouldn’t be necessary,” Trump told the press.
 
A lot to criticise

So not a lot of takings for biting his tongue. Because Starmer could have criticised anything from Trump’s withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and the World Health Organisation, siding with Russia at the UN security council and imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court to Trump’s rhetoric and actions in regard to Gaza, freezing US aid to South Africa, removing AI safeguards, restoring the death penalty as “an essential tool,” threatening multiple countries with tariffs, threatening US allies and his statements about Ukraine.
 
The German chancellor-in-waiting, Friedrich Merz, who is known as an Atlanticist, spoke about achieving “independence from the US” after his election victory.
 
Starmer could have said something similar, or done as the fictitious Prime Minister David did in the 2003 romcom, Love Actually, and remonstrated with the US president:
 
“A friend who bullies us is no longer a friend. And since bullies only respond to strength, from now onward I will be prepared to be much stronger,” Hugh Grant’s character said to the equally fictitious US president played by Billy Bob Thornton.
 
Instead, Starmer appeared to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, Tony Blair, who was likened to a lapdog or poodle for the way US president George W Bush addressed him at a summit in 2006, as well as Blair’s tendency to say “yes” to Bush — not least in regard to British illegal involvement in the Iraq war.
 
‘Tyrant,’ ‘threat,’ ‘repugnant’