Starmer: It would be very good to meet Harris and Trump before US election

Sir Keir Starmer said he wanted to meet both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump before November’s US presidential election.

The Prime Minister is in New York for the UN General Assembly and it is unclear whether he will be able to meet the two White House rivals on this trip.

But he told reporters travelling with him: “As far as the candidates are concerned, look, if possible, it would be very good to meet both of them at some stage before the election. We’ll just have to see what’s possible.

“But I’m going for the General Assembly. I don’t doubt that a lot of time is going to be spent on the Middle East and Ukraine”

He said “it will be really important for us to have the conversations with our allies about the situation in both of those areas”.

The campaign schedules of the presidential rivals make arranging a meeting complicated, while it would be diplomatically awkward to meet only one of the potential occupants of the Oval Office.

Sir Keir’s suggestion that he would like to meet Mr Trump before the election came as the Republican candidate was involved in a spat with a senior Labour minister.

In comments reported by the Guardian, border security minister Dame Angela Eagle accused Mr Trump of generating “vitriol” about migrants online which helped to create a space for “overt racism” that has spilled on to British streets

“If you look at some of the memes that he’s using with the wall stuff at the moment, it’s astonishing, quite the level of vitriol that it has created,” she added.

The Trump campaign dismissed the minister’s remarks.

“Nobody knows who this random person is or cares what comes out of her mouth,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told Politico. “Who is she and what does she do?”

Asked about the spat, Sir Keir said: “I think I’ve been absolutely clear where responsibility lies for the disorder on our streets. It lies with the thugs who were carrying out that disorder.

“That’s why I took control of the process to ensure that justice was visited very quickly on their cases.

“I was really clear in my conference speech about responsibility. It lies with those that were on the streets causing the disorder, and I made clear what should happen to them.

“But as I said in my conference speech, we’ve got to distinguish that from the genuine discussion that we do need to have as a country about immigration.

“Because if you just put the two together you do a disservice to people who would never go out on the streets and cause disorder, and do genuinely have concerns about immigration.

“We need to address that.”