Mick Hartley

Keir Starmer told the NYT that he likes and respects Trump. "I understand what he’s trying to achieve". Sam Leith in the Spectator sees this as a humiliation for the PM:

Sir Keir, I expect, cherishes his self-image as a truthful person. And there cannot be a human being alive – not even Donald Trump – who will believe that the PM either likes or respects the US president. As for understanding what he’s trying to achieve, I’m not sure even president Trump knows that from one day to the next….

The humiliation is the point. It’s a power kick, a ritual of fealty: if you want something from me (a stay of execution on tariffs; a long-shot chance at averting or delaying the total collapse of the European security order) you need to kiss the ring. The same dynamic is at play in his demand that the governor of Maine issue a ‘full-throated’ personal apology for having had the temerity to defy him, backed up with the threat that federal funding will be withheld from the citizens of her state if she doesn’t.

But the kicker is, surely, that telling this blatant and hilarious lie is what Sir Keir’s job demanded he do. Personal pride would have asked him to grandstand against Trump, but national interest – indeed, the interests of the international community he hopes to preserve intact – asked for flattery. So flattery he supplies. Righteous outrage didn’t get Ukraine’s president Zelensky very far. Sir Keir has seldom seemed more statesmanlike in taking one for the team this way.

Well yes. What else was he supposed to do? He was speaking as the British PM, not in a personal capacity. It would have been absurd and counter-productive – if perhaps honest – for him to say that, actually, he finds Trump an offensive buffoon. Especially for a man as small-minded and sensitive of his reputation as Trump, and given how powerful America still is, and how much we need to keep onside with Washington.

Alex Massie in the Times spells it out:

Sir Keir Starmer has become a strange kind of liar. That is, he is willing to say he believes things nobody can seriously think he really believes. Even more oddly, his lies are sensible ones and we should not wish him to tell the truth or say what he really means. This is an unusual position for any prime minister but it has become a necessary fiction for this one. So much so, in fact, that we should welcome it.

Let me explain. Speaking to The New York Times, and hence to a largely American audience, the prime minister goes all-in on nonsense. Talking about President Donald J Trump, Starmer says: “On a person-to-person basis, I think we have a good relationship. I like and respect him.” Oh, come on. He then says: “I understand what he’s trying to achieve.” Oh, come off it.

Nor is the prime minister done there. The untruths continue. “I think we have a really good relationship. I do believe that he absolutely wants peace in Ukraine. That’s what he is driving at. I do believe he is committed to Nato.” Well, I do not believe the prime minister really believes this and I also believe he does not even expect you, the voters of Britain, to believe it either.

There is no evidence that Donald Trump is committed to Nato and plenty to support the contention that he doesn’t give a bucket of warm spit for the Atlantic alliance. Nor is it in any way obvious that Trump’s vision for an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine has anything in common with the analysis shared by Ukraine’s true friends, that the only acceptable peace deal is one led by, and acceptable to, the Ukrainians themselves. Indeed, all the evidence available to us indicates that Trump’s vision for “peace” requires the dismemberment of Ukraine and the carving up of its assets between Russia and, remarkably, the United States itself.

Starmer’s lies about Trump are so obvious they now have a kind of pantomime quality. We know that the prime minister knows he is not saying what he truly believes. It is a performance and in its way an audacious one….

The lie is important and risky and dangerous and, in the end, perversely admirable. Flattering Trump is unpleasant but more rewarding than telling the truth. The reality is that Trump is a man of negligible moral value whose administration is a shameful exercise in degrading the US on a daily basis. This truth is self-evident and hardly needs to be amplified by the prime minister.

For you deal with the president you get, not the one you dream of. Britain is not Athens to America’s Rome — and never was — but if Britain’s place is to be a kind of bridge between Europe and the US it follows that Britain cannot blow up the bridge itself. If you accept the prime minister’s strategic analysis, you have little choice but to accept his tactical untruths too.

For Starmer is not a newspaper columnist and the King’s ministers are not social media pundits. There is no need for Starmer to say what we know he must truly think about Trump, for doing so cannot advance the national interest. So the fiction is to be swallowed, though it must also be digested without any accompanying illusions….

The prime minister has played a limited hand as well as can be expected but his success is only relative and depends on voters understanding his motives. It is fine to reject choosing between the US and Europe right up until the moment when the bridge collapses. Push always comes to shove and the British people understand that this American administration cannot be trusted. They are not enemies yet but nor are they the friends they were.

For the time being though, Starmer’s noble lies still stand. They are in such plain sight, after all, that they can hardly be misunderstood except — the prime minister must hope — in the Oval Office itself. If you must lie, and sometimes you must, it may be best to lie bigly. This is a strange form of leadership but it is leadership nonetheless.

I very much doubt that Starmer sees any of this as a humiliation. He's a lawyer by training: he's used to this kind of necessary prevarication.