“And you, Mr President, are no Franklin D Roosevelt.” The words must have briefly hovered in Keir Starmer’s mind when he learned that Donald J Trump had been telling reporters “this is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with.”
But of course, Sir Keir did not give voice to his thoughts. When Trump goes low it’s best to leave him there. The alternative, as the old saying has it, is that you both get dirty, and the pig likes it.
You have to assume Trump enjoys it because he tried multiple ways to get under Sir Keir’s skin this past week. You’d think he would be busy monitoring the wildfire consequences of the war he’d just started. But, no, he entertained himself by slagging off the British leader to any passing British journalist who’d listen.
Harry Cole of the Sun, for instance, to whom he rambled on at some length about how cross he was that Britain, at a few hours’ notice, hadn’t immediately offered unequivocal backing to allow US planes to attack Iran from bases on UK territories. What price the “special relationship” now?
Maybe, Trump speculated at the prompting of Cole, Starmer was trying to appease Muslim voters? And then he went off on one about London mayor Sadiq Khan; drilling for oil in the North Sea (“immediately!”); and how Britain was not “not such a recognisable country”.
We don’t need Bletchley Park to know what that’s code for.
Trump had previously given an equally rambling interview to the Daily Mail and topped it up with another tirade in the Daily Telegraph. Britain’s lack of cooperation was, he fumed, unlike anything that had “happened between our countries before.”
What explains Trump’s sudden decision to launch unguided missiles via the medium of the three titles his advisers must know are most hostile to the beleaguered British prime minister?
It’s certainly in keeping with what we might think of as his Corleone instinct to undermine, denigrate or destroy anyone who fails to show sufficient respect. That’s why 218 Republican representatives in Congress have adopted a dorsal recumbent pose. None of them wants to get whacked.
Equally, it’s not clear that the reporters at the other end of the phone pushed back very hard at anything Trump said. That’s not how it works. These were drive-by hit jobs. All that’s required is the ability to operate a recording device and a modest talent for transcription.
It was much the same when GB News was granted an audience in November, when the interviewer, Bev Turner, simply nodded along at, or explicitly agreed with, everything he said. Climate change a hoax? Sadiq Khan a terrible mayor? China doesn’t have wind farms? Whatever you say, Mr President.
He was happy, Ofcom was happy. Job done.
Now, Trump has no sense of history, but others should know better. When he says the present hiccup in the special relationship is unprecedented, he knows not whereof he speaks.
He presumably understands nothing about the Suez Crisis in 1956, when the Eisenhower administration refused to have anything to do with the UK-French-Israeli attempt to topple Egypt’s President Nasser. It ended in humiliation for Britain.
Or how Harold Wilson turned down increasingly assertive pleas from President LB Johnson in the mid-1960s to send British assistance to the US’s disastrous war in Vietnam? LBJ reportedly begged for even a “company of bagpipers”. He didn’t get them. The special relationship survived.
To Margaret Thatcher’s great frustration, Ronald Reagan initially opted to stay neutral when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in April 1982. She was outright enraged the following year when Reagan mounted “Operation Urgent Fury” (ring any bells?) to invade Grenada, a Commonwealth country, without any advance warning. It was a breach of international law and a mortifying affront to British dignity.
The special relationship survived.
The difference in the past was that the grown-ups were in charge. LBJ, Thatcher, Reagan, Eden and Eisenhower may have had strong words in private. Can you imagine any of them calling up the opposition’s tabloids to slag their counterparts off?
To call Trump’s behaviour crazy might, in the circumstances, be a kindness since it suggests the excuse that he is not in full command of all his faculties. But you wouldn’t believe the editorials that sided with Trump, blaming Starmer, not him, for putting the “special relationship” on life support.
Which brings us to Churchill, who was lucky enough to have a political giant in the White House rather than a narcissistic charlatan. His relationship with Franklin D Roosevelt really was special—and some historians note how they bonded over three weeks of late-night drinking sessions in the White House after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
The “special relationship” phrase can be traced back to Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech in March 1946. It certainly has warm words about Britain and America’s shared values. It is equally eloquent about the importance of a united Europe and of working within the framework of international law.
“If the Western Democracies stand together in strict adherence to the principles of the United Nations Charter,” he rasped, “their influence for furthering those principles will be immense and no one is likely to molest them.”
Trump, of course, has a dripping contempt for the UN and its Charter. His Gaza Board of Peace is a forum effectively designed to bypass the UN’s cumbersome universality and legal framework in favour of a hand-picked coalition of the willing.
In Venezuela, the bypass was even less subtle. A US operation that seized President Nicolás Maduro and involved strikes around Caracas amounted to a direct violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force against another state.
Iran completes the pattern. The recent US–Israeli strikes on Iranian targets—carried out without UN Security Council authorisation and widely condemned as unlawful—again sidestepped the Charter’s central rule: force is permitted only in self-defence against an imminent threat or with Security Council approval.
Trump has no time for any of the things Churchill held so dear after the war. His scorn extends to the sacrifice of British lives in supporting the US’s ill-fated occupation of Afghanistan after 9/11. Apparently, the 457 who died “stayed a little back, off the front lines.” This was news to their relatives.
Can you imagine Churchill’s utter revulsion at having to pretend to have any kind of relationship with such a figure, far less a “special” one?
Trump has now announced that he would have to have a say in the appointment of any new Iranian leader. For all the world, it is as if this were an episode of The Apprentice. Yet to some of Fleet Street’s editorialists, it’s Starmer’s fault for insufficient genuflection.
Journalism sometimes prides itself on being the first draft of history. But to even sketch history, you have to know some.
