David Lammy was visiting Washington last May when he realised Donald Trump was likely to win the presidential election. The soon-to-be foreign secretary held meetings with the Democrat and Republican campaigns – and found himself admiring the latter.
The slickness and professionalism of Trump’s 2024 operation, with its sharp messaging making inroads with black and Hispanic voters, seemed a far cry from his shambolic 2016 campaign. By comparison, Joe Biden’s appeared backward-looking and focused on attacking Trump’s record, while lacking a compelling narrative of its own.
Fast forward eight months, and Trump is days away from being inaugurated as president for the second time after an emphatic victory. Government figures are hopeful the groundwork that Keir Starmer and Lammy laid with Trump – including their two-hour dinner in New York in September – has put them in good stead, but they will be peering through their fingers on Monday after he takes office.
They know there is one thing that will appeal to Trump: the royal family.
In December, Prince William scrambled at the last minute to attend the reopening of Notre Dame in Paris once it became clear Trump was going to be there. The prince met the president-elect for 40 minutes at the British embassy – long enough to annoy the French, according to a UK source.
“One of the most influential people in my view could be King Charles,” a former senior diplomat who has spent considerable time with Trump said. “Someone has to handle the relationship with Trump – I know he really loved the queen – and he has said he likes Charles.”
Another senior diplomat said: “If you talk to anyone who was around the palace at the time … you’ll hear that no one was as deferential and polite as Trump during his state visit.”
Starmer is open to organising a second state visit for Trump, where he could be invited to address parliament for the first time.
The grandeur and displays of ostentatious wealth that the royal family provide may appeal to Trump, but will do little to change his policy platform. Whitehall officials are war-gaming a range of scenarios including the impact of punishing tariffs on the highly exposed UK economy and changes in US engagement with international institutions such as the UN and Nato.
Monday would be “a bit of a watershed moment”, one Labour insider said. “So much is being kept on hold until after then.”
Top of the government’s concerns is trade. Trump has vowed to impose blanket tariffs on US imports. Ministers hope that because Trump is most exercised about the US trade deficit with the EU and China, the UK might be spared the worst of them – and that any tariffs could be lifted in an early US-UK trade deal focused on the services and technology sectors. Sophia Gaston, a senior research fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said ministers had identified bilateral trade relations as a way of setting “a positive tone of early engagement”.
This is crucial after a series of setbacks to the political relationship. Since August, the tech billionaire and Trump ally Elon Musk has waged an online vendetta against Starmer and repeatedly called for the overthrow of his government. In October, Trump’s campaign made a formal complaint of election interference about Labour officials travelling to the US to campaign for Kamala Harris. And in the autumn, several Trump allies criticised the UK plan to cede control of the Chagos Islands, where there is a UK-US military base, to Mauritius. Having tried for weeks to finalise a swift deal before Trump’s inauguration, Downing Street said on Wednesday it would wait for the new president to come in – a delay the government does not deny came at Washington’s request.
Critical to achieving the UK’s objectives in Washington will be two Blair-era figures: Peter Mandelson, the former EU trade commissioner chosen as Starmer’s ambassador to the US, and Jonathan Powell, Blair’s former chief of staff who is now national security adviser and negotiator for the Chagos handover. Both are highly experienced operators with established networks in Washington DC, but one senior Foreign Office source said they had so far struggled to get people there to answer their calls.
Having been labelled a “moron” by one of Trump’s key campaign aides, Mandelson has begun a charm offensive to win over Republicans sceptical of his doveish stance towards Beijing and the client list of his advisory firm, Global Counsel. In an article for Fox News on Friday, Mandelson heaped praise on Trump’s “great skill as a political campaigner” and said the UK was “hungry to trade more and innovate more with America”, particularly in tech. He also said that “the Chinese government I have observed intensively over the past 20 years … now directly challenges western governments and our values”.
Robin Niblett, a former director of Chatham House, said: “The UK’s positioning has been quite astute so far. Keir Starmer has teamed up cleverly with Giorgia Meloni on migration. As far as relations with Trump go, Britain is currently in a much stronger position than Germany. But I wouldn’t use the last three or four months as a predictor of the next six – on Ukraine, on tariffs, it is going to become a lot more difficult for Starmer to navigate. Nothing means anything until we get out of the phoney war.”
In particular, the government’s desire to perform a balancing act between the US, EU and emerging powers such as China is going to be tested. Simon Fraser, the chair of Chatham House, said: “Keir Starmer said the UK would not have to choose between the US and EU but if there is a trade war between the EU and US, we will be faced with choices. Trump is going to increase pressure on the government on areas including defence spending and China policy, and is going to make the management of the EU relationship more difficult.” Experts question how the UK government would respond if the US asked it to impose tariffs on China or sought to push through a settlement in Ukraine that did not secure it against further encroachment from Russia.
Laura Chappell, who leads on international policy for the Institute for Public Policy Research, said: “If the government is serious about trying to secure the UK’s national interest and trying to be a progressive voice on the international stage, they need to be crystal clear which objectives they most care about. The UK will need well-defined and collectively agreed priorities to help it to find a way through the likely unpredictability of Trump mark 2.”
