UK’s Starmer hoping for Biden, preparing for Trump

Keir Starmer, the UK’s new prime minister, was quiet on the question of relations with the US prior to his election, choosing to avoid, in particular, talk of how he would manage a second Donald Trump presidency.

Starmer is a center-left politician – the first to come to power in the UK for over a decade – so his views are hardly aligned with Trump’s. But the US presidential election is a few short months away and, depending on the result, the relationship between the UK and US could look very different on the other side of it.

After the first US election debate, and Joe Biden’s dismal performance, the new British government will be focusing on how to plan for Trump’s potential return to the White House in January 2025. And while Starmer has been silent in public, he and his top team have been preparing behind the scenes for some time.

Before arriving in government they put significant effort into building relationships with figures in the US leadership. This is a well-trodden path for UK Labour politicians and was most notable in the close relationship between Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

Impressively, Starmer and his foreign secretary, David Lammy, have been trying to build relationships on both sides of the aisle. They’ve spoken to Republicans as well as Biden’s Democrats on visits to the US.

Lammy, who was the first black British man to study at Harvard Law School and spent time working as a lawyer in the US after graduating, recently said in a speech the special relationship is “core not just to our own national security, but the security of much of the world”.

Responding to a question about past comments he had made about Trump, he said that the two sides must work together