While the Prime Minister sticks with appeasement, even Britain’s most unhinged newspapers are saying it’s time to stand up to Trump.
MIC WRIGHT
At the weekend, Donald Trump sent a letter to the Norwegian Prime Minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, which was copied to foreign ministers across Europe to ensure it ended up being read by everyone. In it, he wrote: “… considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.” It was a typically Trumpian communication, a cross between a toddler’s tantrum and a gangster’s threat.
On Monday morning, Sir Keri Starmer held a press conference in Downing Street. If you made a word cloud of his speech and responses to media questions from that event, the words “pragmatic” and “national interest” would dominate. It was the sound of a small dog yapping; a Hugh Grant in Love Actually cosplayer whose script got destroyed in a rain storm; a long wet fart presented as diplomacy.
“Alliances endure because they are built on respect and partnership, not pressure…” One of the most common arguments about Starmer’s foreign policy is that he is living in the real world, but how can that be when he uses the words partnership, facts and mutual respect in reference to dealing with Donald Trump? In the current version of the ‘special relationship’, Trump’s respect for Starmer is that of a dog for a lamp post.
As Trump threatens punitive tariffs on the UK if it doesn’t acquiesce to Trump’s desire to take Greenland, Starmer’s only solution is appeasement. He’s sure that if he bows sufficiently low, the bully will stop debagging him in the playground. Tomorrow marks the first anniversary of the second Trump administration, but it feels like the Labour government has been bootlicking for much longer.
At the same time, Starmer was offering limp conciliation, The Daily Telegraph, of all places, was publishing a take arguing that the UK should distance itself from the US. Under the headline, Britain must declare independence from America or it will die, Tim Stanley writes:
… I watch the trade war for Greenland with distress and, I’m afraid, pessimism. Yes, Trump must be resisted. It is a question of dignity.
But until we Europeans wean ourselves off America, not just militarily or economically but psychologically, we really cannot function without it and will always surrender. It has dominated us for a long time; we’ve only noticed since the empire that pushed out investment suddenly started to suck it back in, a phenomenon that, again, is not unique to Trump. Joe Biden used subsidies and tax breaks to re-shore jobs in the US, away from the continent.
Elsewhere in the Telegraph’s comment pages, its pet former Labour MP, Tom Harris, argued that Starmer has been humiliated by Trump (and bad luck):
Once seen as the conduit between Trump and Europe, Starmer now stands isolated and humiliated, regarded with suspicion by both the White House and Brussels.
The guy just can’t catch a break
You can frame it like that, but you could also say that if you sit on the fence long enough, you’re going to get splinters, or to abuse an analogy, if you try to ride two horses at once, you’ll end up with the most catastrophic groin strain.
Over at The Times, its political editor, Steven Swinford, argues that Starmer’s strategy is correct because there’s nothing else he can do:
Starmer is hoping that his relationship with Trump, in which he has invested so much political capital, is enough escape the imposition of further tariffs — that and the fact that Trump does not always follow through on his threats.
But at this stage the prime minister has no choice but to take Trump at his word. The stakes, both economic and geopolitical, are simply too high.
The Sun — The Times without access to a thesaurus — takes the same line:
Sir Keir is walking a tightrope between trying to demonstrate strength while maintaining positive relations with the President…
But his caution raises the bigger question: when everyone else is shouting, does staying calm look like strength… or just look like softness to a President who only responds to pressure?
That dilemma doesn’t stop at the water’s edge – it could hit bills, jobs and confidence at home.
And for a PM who wanted 2026 to be about the cost of living, it must be deeply frustrating to find himself trapped in another Trump-fuelled crisis instead.
In The Daily Mail, Andrew Neil, himself in possession of a gargantuan ego, writes:
In the end, the relentless kow-towing, the buttering up of his massive ego, the effusive praise to feed his insatiable narcissism, the knee-jerk genuflection to cater to his whims – it’s all come to nothing.
… the moment Donald Trump thought his European allies were trying to thwart his desire to annex Greenland, he moved to punish them for having the temerity to defy him.
While Starmer is still spouting platitudes about the ‘special relationship’, Neil is using the pages of the Mail to suggest that America is about to shift from being a faithless ally to an active enemy:
In these pages last year, I wrote that we were at a geopolitical watershed. It was no longer just a matter of Europe doing more for its own defence (which was long overdue). It wasn’t even recognising that we could no longer count on America when the chips were down. It was worse than that — the real risk was that Trump’s America would behave in ways that made it the enemy.
… Taking by force a territory belonging to a Nato ally would be a calumny from which Nato as we’ve known it could not recover. It would mark the triumph of conquest by the very country which devised the post-Second World War rules designed to consign ‘might is right’ policies to the dustbin of history. Ripped up by a US President who does think might is indeed right. These are dark times. I fear we’ve not yet seen the worst of them.
For The Guardian, Gaby Hinsliff also argues that it’s time to stop fence-sitting:
Keir Starmer has tried everything to avoid being forced to choose between Europe and the US, and for a country that has burned too many international bridges lately that was the right instinct. He has swallowed any amount of personal mortification and public disquiet in the process, only to discover that whatever Britain gives, Trump always demands more…
… Trump cannot last for ever, and so long as there is any chance of him being succeeded by someone more capable of being reasoned with in 2028, a conclusive final breach with the US makes no sense. The epoch-defining judgment call western governments thus have to make isn’t about the US under Trump, but about whether the US itself is lost to us, for a generation or more. Until that is resolved, the only strategy is to play for time; but plan, all along, for escape.
Of course, in the Financial Times, the angle is all about the markets. Katie Martin writes that Trump’s attempts at grabbing Greenland could destroy trust in US government bonds:
Trump’s bizarre designs on Greenland and his willingness to inflict financial pain on allies will simply bolster that case. The US has squandered its most valuable financial asset: trust. It risks paying a heavy price for this for decades to come.
I’m not sure we can wait that long.
Similarly, it’s probably wishful thinking to hope that Starmer, a politician who is usually extremely influenced by the whims of Britain’s right-wing press, might listen to calls in their pages today for him to put a little more steel in his spine. It’s not pragmatic to back down to the bully every time; it’s cowardice.
This article (Keir Starmer’s Chamberlain Cosplay) was created and published by Mic Wright and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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