The impetus for the rapport between Keir Starmer and Donald Trump arrived in the wake of an assassin’s bullet.
Gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks fired at Trump, then running as a candidate to be US president, at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania just after 11pm British/Irish time (6pm in the eastern US) last July 13th. A quarter of an inch from changing history, Crooks grazed his target’s ear and killed a man in the crowd. Over the following hours, shocked world leaders sent Trump their best wishes, mostly online.
Starmer, then on just his eighth full day as UK prime minister, was among them. But as he watched footage that night of a bloodied Trump rising triumphantly to his feet, fist clenched in what became a defining image of his election victory over Kamala Harris, the prime minister felt he should do more.
He turned to Karen Pierce, then Britain’s ambassador in Washington. She was respected in Republican circles and, unlike some of her diplomatic peers, had maintained close links with Trump’s allies even after the rancorous end of his first term in office.
The day after the shooting, Starmer headed to Berlin for the final of the Euros football tournament. England would go on to lose 2-1 to Spain, but Starmer would win Trump’s attention and respect.
That afternoon as he travelled to the match, he stopped for a 10-minute phone call with the US politician that had been personally arranged by Pierce. It was the first time the two men had ever spoken. Even Nigel Farage, who portrays himself as Trump’s “best friend” in Britain, had only texted him since the shooting.
Trump was struck by Starmer’s kindness towards him, setting the tone for a political relationship that has stayed warm since, even as glacial winds have buffeted the traditional US-Europe transatlantic alliance. Their rapport was crucial this week as Starmer shuttled between Trump and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, trying to patch things up between them following their public falling out in the Oval Office over the war with Russia. British media have dubbed their prime minister Europe’s “Trump whisperer”.
Writer and former Labour adviser Tom Baldwin, with whom Starmer co-operated last year on a revealing biography, told The Irish Times this week that he has since spoken to the prime minister about that crucial first phone call last July. What was it about that conversation that so endeared the UK prime minister to Trump, the most unpredictable and disruptive US president in history?
“Starmer felt he made a personal connection with him when he spoke about how difficult it must have been for Trump’s family to watch him almost get killed on television,” said Baldwin. “They spoke about each other’s families. That was the moment he felt a different mood down the line, that this wasn’t just two men in politics talking business to each other.”
They met for the first time two months later at the height of the US election campaign. Starmer and his foreign secretary, David Lammy, held a two-hour dinner with the US politician in September at his gilded Trump Tower in New York, when they were in town for a United Nations meeting. Lammy said the dinner went so well, Trump gave them a second helping of chicken.
Lammy had invested separately, and heavily, in courting Trump’s vice-president (then running mate) JD Vance. Starmer, meanwhile, made no effort to also meet Harris during that US trip last September. He was all-in on Trump, who thinks he is a “really nice guy”. Now they speak often on the phone.
Last week they met for only the second time – the first with both in office – in Washington. Amid an air of real bonhomie, Starmer produced a letter from his pocket from King Charles inviting Trump to Britain for an unprecedented second full state visit. The US president almost levitated with glee.
Anand Menon, professor of European politics and foreign affairs at King’s College in London, was unalloyed this week in his admiration for what he sees as Starmer’s stellar job of liaising with Trump.
“Oh God yeah,” he says, when asked if the UK prime minister has been deft in his diplomacy. “But there are still risks for him. If Trump keeps going like this [for example, by displaying unpredictable behaviour over Ukraine] an element of anti-Americanism might creep in on the Continent – ‘you’re either with us or against us.’” Starmer soon may have to manage that dynamic as well as his relationship with Trump, says Menon.
For Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni, meanwhile, her close personal connection with Trump was born in December, weeks after he beat Harris in the race for the White House. They were already politically compatible as fellow radical right-wingers. But Meloni, a cautious operator, had previously maintained an air of neutrality during the campaign – she wanted to also keep a good relationship with outgoing US president Joe Biden, and also with Harris in case she won.
But by December, Trump was the president-elect and Meloni knew who she needed to court. They met for the first time at the ceremony in Paris for the reopening of the Notre Dame cathedral, which was destroyed by fire during Trump’s first term. Meloni tweeted a picture of the pair laughing in a semi-embrace, thumbs up at the camera. Trump said she was a “real live wire” and they hit it off. Meloni is also close to the billionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s closest political ally.
Weeks later, Meloni made a surprise trip to see Trump during the first week of January at his Mar-a Lago resort in Florida. As well as Ukraine, over five hours they also discussed the case of Cecilia Sala, an Italian journalist arrested in Iran after Italian authorities had arrested an Iranian engineer at the request of the US. The Iranians released Sala three days after Meloni met Trump.
Later that month, Meloni was the only European national leader to be invited to attend Trump’s second inauguration in Washington. In February, she was also invited to remotely address the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, a right-wing jamboree where Trump was feted as a hero.
“She spoke out against wokeness and in favour of the family – things like that,” said Daniele Abertazzi, professor of politics at the University of Surrey and co-author of a forthcoming new book on the radical right in Europe, Populist Radical Right Parties in Action.
“There is no political cost in saying such things at CPAC. Meloni knew how to push the right buttons. But she also stood there and told the conference that Ukraine was a victim of Russian aggression.”
Meloni, along with Starmer, has pushed for Europe to maintain close ties with Trump’s White House, even as the US president roils the continent with his unpredictable behaviour such as cutting aid to Ukraine and his growing closeness to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, seen as a threat to Europe’s security.
The Italian prime minister helped her UK counterpart to convene the summit last week of European and certain Nato members held in London on Sunday to discuss Ukraine and Europe’s future security. That morning in advance of the summit, she also met Starmer at Downing Street for a one-to-one, the only European leader to do so. They compared notes on their relationships with Trump.
The night before, both leaders spoke to Trump over the phone, a day after the US president’s disastrous White House meeting with Zelenskiy on the Friday, which ended in a shouting match. Speaking afterwards, Meloni said it was “very important to avoid the risk of the West splitting”.
Meloni has proposed a wide-ranging US-Europe security summit, with Starmer’s full support. She has said their nations must work to “build bridges” to Trump’s Washington.
“Being seen to be this bridge to Trump is very important for Meloni,” said Abertazzi. “A bridge is between two points. But sometimes it seems like now we have two different planets. How do you bridge that? It seems to me like it might be too far.”
Charles Grant, a security policy expert and director of the Centre for European Reform, is one of the best-connected British analysts in Brussels, while he also has strong links to Paris. He says he “isn’t a fan” of the bridge-building [or in this case, Trump whispering] approach to international affairs.
“It can seem vainglorious. It can also be a mistake. Starmer has done reasonably well at it, but not if it ends up lapsing into something where Britain pretends to have this unique relationship with the Americans, because it thinks Europeans are too stupid to understand them properly.”
European unity is more important than bridge-building to Washington, according to Grant. “And Meloni, to her credit, is not undermining European unity in any way.”
While he doesn’t care too much for bridges, Grant says he is a fan, however, of the third European leader who has also tried to be a sort of Trump whisperer, France’s president Emmanuel Macron. He was the first European leader to meet Trump after his inauguration – the two shared a mercurial, but occasionally close, relationship during Trump’s first term from January 2017 to 2021.
Macron visited Trump in the White House two days before Starmer, and the France and US presidents engaged in touchy-feely diplomacy and a textbook display of their famous power handshakes. Macron, however, also corrected Trump when he downplayed the importance of European financial support for Ukraine. Starmer has done similar, but more gently. Both leaders have balanced out their Trump-wooing by also being openly enthusiastic in their backing for Zelenskiy.
“Macron is a supremely self-confident political leader. I am impressed by this aspect of him,” said Grant. “He uses a lot of savoir faire in his relations with Trump. Starmer is perhaps more polite to Trump, maybe even more obsequious. He is much more careful not to say anything that could be construed as criticism. But both have done fairly well at it.”
Grant says it is “up to them [Macron and Starmer]” to lead Europe in its relations with Trump, because Germany’s incoming chancellor, Friedrich Merz, appears to be adopting a different tone. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, also can’t lead Europe’s relations with Trump, because the US president dislikes European Union institutions, says Grant. This post-Brexit reality is an aspect of Starmer’s dynamic with Trump that his Number 10 team play up in private.
“Meloni can also play a useful role. I think it’s right to highlight that Italy has a huge trade surplus with the US, which might become an issue some day in the relationship. But the link between her and Musk is also important. They like each other, or at least Musk certainly likes Meloni,” says Grant.
The trio of European leaders vying, and frequently co-operating, to be Trump whisperers seem an odd grouping when set side by side.
There is Starmer, a stodgy, emotionally constipated social democrat falling down with political problems at home, but who appears to have found his calling as a transatlantic statesman in recent weeks. Baldwin says that despite Starmer’s reputation for eschewing the personal side of politics, his methodical cultivation of a close connection with Trump is fully in line with what he knows of him.
Meloni, meanwhile, is an adherent of the sort of radical nationalism that ought to make her an ideological bedfellow of the EU-sceptic Trump. Yet somehow, she has emerged as a defender of European unity while at the same time remaining close to the US president.
“I feel the moment will eventually come when she must choose between them,” says Abertazzi. “She will go for Europe because Italy must. But she’ll still massage Trump’s ego.”
As for Macron, the effervescent centrist whose domestic political career has floundered, he can still make a valedictory contribution by helping to shape the future security of the European continent. He has even floated the idea of using France’s nuclear weapons as a shield for Europe.
[ Micheál Martin should follow Macron’s playbook for handling TrumpOpens in new window ]
While admiring Macron’s diplomatic skills, Grant spies the potential for tension between him and some of the other Trump whisperers. For example there is a clear gap, he says, between Macron’s evangelism for complete European strategic autonomy on security and Starmer’s insistence that a US security guarantee in Ukraine is the only way forward.
There may also disagreements on how European money is spent on buttressing defence, with Macron wanting it to all to be spent through EU entities. “There is potential for disruption there. But overall, I think Starmer and Macron are still appreciative of each other’s virtues,” says Grant.
A France-UK plan to convince the US to sign up to a Ukraine peace plan that deters Russia remained at the whim this weekend of the disrupter president, Trump.
But whatever noise Trump makes in Washington, whatever he does next, there will still be a trio of patient European leaders lobbying him gently by whispering quietly in his ear.
