14 hours ago
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After Friday’s calamitous scenes in the Oval Office there were immediate calls for quick answers, new eras and pages of history being turned. Keir Starmer, it seems, is the person now forced to say: hang on, it is a bit more complicated than that.
The hastily arranged gathering of leaders at London’s Lancaster House on Sunday was undeniably dramatic, with the UK prime minister at its centre – including in the group photo, where he stood between Emmanuel Macron and Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
There was also a very real sense of Europe reshaping its defence and diplomatic priorities on the hoof after Donald Trump and JD Vance’s public dressing-down of the Ukrainian president, with Starmer talking of a continent “at a crossroads in history”.
Other countries had signalled a willingness to join the Anglo-French “coalition of the willing” to try to devise their own peace plan for Ukraine, he added.
Yes, Starmer agreed, this was Europe stepping up. But it was not because Trump’s US was now absent. “I do not accept that the US is an unreliable ally,” he told the press conference.
There are easier political paths to tread. Most British voices – including rightwing papers previously hostile to Starmer – appear to agree that Trump and Vance treated their guest abominably and MPs from all sides of the political divide, not to mention voters, would quite enjoy Starmer pointing this out.
His approach has instead been to try to very personally mend the fissure, speaking to both Trump and Zelenskyy after their meeting ended prematurely, and treating the US president as a rational and predictable ally despite the evidence.
“I’ve seen people ramping up the rhetoric and taking to Twitter and saying what they would do,” Starmer told the BBC earlier on Sunday when asked why Trump had been invited to the UK for a second state visit. “Good for them. I’m not that interested in that.”
That is not to say that Starmer has been diplomatically silent. His hug with the Ukrainian president outside Downing Street on Saturday was hugely eloquent.
Perhaps more telling still was the fact that Zelenskyy went from the Lancaster House summit for a chat with King Charles not at a royal palace but at Sandringham, a family residence.
Trump is very delighted with his own invitation, but will also be aware that Zelenskyy received a more personal, intimate and revealing gesture.
It is a tricky balancing act, all the more so given how things with Trump can head south at speed, as demonstrated by the 24-hour gap between Starmer’s cosy Oval Office chat on Thursday and the ambushing of Zelenskyy.
Starmer is once again fated to pretend that such chaos is not endemic in the current White House, largely in the hope that saying it could make it true and that Trump may continue to offer the US’s military and diplomatic might towards the cause of peace in Ukraine.
To a great extent there is little choice. As has been repeatedly noted since Friday, the EU’s combined population and GDP should make it able to protect Ukraine alone. But it would take years or even decades to untangle the mutual US-Europe reliance of Nato. A peace deal with no US security guarantee would probably unravel at speed.
For Starmer personally, there is more to it. As the Labour leader in opposition, he made a virtue of what some complained was uninspiring pragmatism, contrasting it with what he derisively called “the politics of protest”.
There are a lot of people who would have liked Starmer to have protested loudly about Trump. But whether or not his Ukraine plan works, that is not, and was never going to be, the politician he is.
