Keir Starmer's 'nightmare' Trump victory

Donald Trump is celebrating his presidential win, but it is going to be a "howling nightmare" for the UK government, said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer.

While Keir Starmer has congratulated the president-elect on his election victory, the "truth universally acknowledged by officials in private" is that "a second Trump presidency will be a clear and present danger to the UK's most vital national interests".

No 'overnight love affair'

Let's not forget that David Lammy, now foreign secretary, once called Trump a "neo-Nazi sociopath", said Tom Harris in The Telegraph. And when polling suggested Kamala Harris "was about to sweep all before her" 100 current and former Labour Party staff headed to the US to campaign for the Democrats. Nobody cared that "The Orange One" was outraged as he seemed like a "dead-cert loser" at the time. "Well, 'oops', as they say."

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Nigel Farage has offered to lend Starmer a hand in mending relations. "It won't be an overnight love affair," the Reform UK leader and Trump ally told the i news site. "It will take time, and perhaps it'll take a degree of humility from the British government."

Making the 'cogs turn more easily'

The new Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch told the Commons yesterday that an apology was in order for Lammy's "derogatory and scatological references", to which Starmer pointed out that he and the foreign secretary had met Trump in New York for dinner in September, describing it as a "constructive exercise". A No. 10 spokesman later said the PM would "of course welcome a visit" from Trump to the UK in the future.

While the US and UK leaders might not share the same "worldview", said Victoria Honeyman, professor of British politics at the University of Leeds, on The Conversation, a friendly rapport certainly "makes the cogs turn considerably more easily". Trump and Starmer's relationship "does not have to be stormy". In the end, the UK government will have "no option" but to work with Trump "as best they can".