Of course Starmer was right to meet Trump

The prime minister met with one of the two contenders to be the next president of the United States. As headlines go, that should be about as boring as is possible – and yet Keir Starmer is getting flak for meeting with Donald Trump during his recent trip to the USA.

Let’s be clear: to call Donald Trump reprehensible is the understatement of the century. He is a huckster whose string of failed businesses have screwed over thousands of workers. His ‘university’ defrauded customers who enrolled on the strength of the Trump brand.

He screws over his supporters with regular sales of dodgy cryptocurrencies, memorabilia, and watches. He has been adjudicated by a court to have committed rape. He attempted a violent insurrection to overthrow the result of the 2020 election. He deserves every ounce of contempt that he gets.

None of that changes the underlying reality that the prime minister should still meet with him. Despite Kamala Harris’s success in improving the Democrats’ polling numbers, Trump still has a 50% chance (or perhaps better) of winning November’s election. That would put him in charge of what is still the world’s most significant military and diplomatic power. Relationship-building is a must.

This is particularly true for a volatile and fickle man like Trump, who has no real convictions and at most a superficial understanding of world affairs. What is less known about Trump – except by those who follow him closely – is that he is genuinely incapable of handling confrontation in real life. He likes to agree, he likes to tell people what they want to hear, and he wants them to like him in return.

It doesn’t last much beyond any individual encounter, but when Trump is about to meet someone (or has recently met them), he sings their praises and echoes their language. It can be just enough to tip him towards better decisions – or away from particularly terrible ones – in the short term.

That doesn’t translate into longer-term loyalty. Conservative leadership hopefuls who express their hopes Trump will win the election are behaving bizarrely in two different ways at once: firstly, even if Trump notices he won’t really care, and it won’t matter – they will never be prime minister when he is president. Secondly, even most Conservative voters in this country hate Donald Trump. There is little to be gained from actively endorsing him.

Prime ministers, though, have to deal with other world leaders, whether they like them or not. Keir Starmer has to meet with Donald Trump, Italy’s Giorgia Miloni, Hungary’s Viktor Orban and any number of other people neither he nor his supporters would naturally like.

If Starmer refused to try to build relationships with such people he would (rightly) be attacked for failing to represent Britain properly on the world stage. He is just fulfilling an essential portion of his job – and one at which it was suggested he would fail.

Foreign secretary David Lammy was attacked in the media on his appointment, in part because of his previously critical public posts about Trump – but behind the scenes, Lammy and his team had been building up connections in Trumpworld which surely helped grease the wheels for Starmer’s meeting with Trump after last week’s UN General Assembly. Sometimes in diplomacy, everyone can have conveniently short memories.

It is doubtless the case that Starmer and pretty much anyone and everyone he brought into his government would prefer a Harris victory to a Trump one. But government is about hoping for the best while preparing for the worst. Yes, Starmer was right to meet Donald Trump. He’ll meet with worse people than that in the years to come.