Starmer’s ‘white lie’ about Biden is a warning sign for Labour
Keir Starmer paid his own tribute to Joe Biden after the president announced he would not be contesting November’s election after all.
“I respect President Biden’s decision and I look forward to us working together during the remainder of his presidency,” the prime minister wrote on X. “I know that, as he has done throughout his remarkable career, he will have made his decision based on what he believes is best for the American people.”
Starmer and the president held one-to-one talks at the White House following the Nato summit in Washington, after which Starmer described Biden as having been “on good form” – a diplomatic white lie that is entirely forgivable in the circumstances. Still, as Starmer watches the enfolding political drama from across the Atlantic, he will be seriously contemplating how his government would deal with a Trump administration from next January.
In the past, an opposition Labour Party has found few problems in blatantly supporting the Democratic campaign in presidential elections, but that task is more difficult when the party is in government and must, for the sake of Britain’s own interests as well as those of the wider free world, undertake to work with whoever wins the White House.
The last time Trump was president, Labour politicians, including the then Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, found it easy and popular to signal their liberal virtues by castigating prime minister Theresa May for inviting the 45th president to visit the UK. The London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, enjoyed praise from his supporters as he told the president that he was not welcome in the UK. David Lammy, now foreign secretary, called Trump a “neo-Nazi” in a magazine article.
All of these student-level attempts at being “right on” mattered little, since Labour at that time was not only not in government but didn’t expect itself to be for many years to come. But that was before the Conservatives’ self-immolation and Keir Starmer’s successful attempts to make the party electable again. Biden’s sacrifice of the prospect of a second term and his likely replacement – as candidate if not as president – by Vice President Kamala Harris may change the entire dynamic of the election – or it may not, at least, not in the Democrats’ favour.
Which would leave the UK government dangerously exposed on the world stage. With Left-wing governments being replaced by Right-wing or even populist governments across Europe, the special relationship between the UK and the US has rarely been as important to a Labour administration. Where will Starmer find his allies if Trump – by his own foreign secretary’s judgment an individual who can be compared with Adolf Hitler – returns next year?
Despite the British political establishment’s adoration of American politics – the faintly cringeworthy practice of back bench MPs appointing a “chief of staff” rather than an office manager gained momentum after The West Wing started being broadcast over here – Britain will play no part whatever in this election campaign. Starmer’s personal opinion of the chief protagonists matters not a jot to the American people, who would rightly resent any attempt by a foreign government to sway opinion one way or the other, even if they noticed such an attempt in the first place.
That does not mean that Starmer doesn’t have a vested interest in the outcome, from a strategic as well as a political point of view. His heart will be with Harris, (or whoever the Democrat nominee turns out to be) and the Trump campaign, even if it doesn’t care at the moment, knows this.
During the Democratic primaries in 2020, Kamala Harris suggested her then rival, Joe Biden, was a racist. Her campaign went nowhere and she was the first candidate to fall by the wayside, securing a total of zero delegates to the Democrat convention. She is now expected to inspire not only the party but the entire country and to hold on to those blue states that Trump needs to turn red in November. Starmer is banking that she has previously well-hidden political skills that will be revealed in the weeks ahead, skills that will see her vanquish forever a man whom she and the political establishments in the US and the UK despise, along with a large proportion of his voter base.
So be it. Starmer’s growing reputation as a prime minister unencumbered by ideology or doctrine will no doubt help his administration handle the fallout from a second Trump victory. Whether the wider party, including his London mayor and foreign secretary, would be quite so equable is another matter entirely.