No, Starmer not attending Trump's inauguration is not a stain on history

“You can’t mess around in politics and pretend you’re in a student union,” spluttered right wing blowhard Mike Graham on his amusingly-named Talk Radio show Morning Glory this week, fuming at Keir Starmer’s failure to secure an invitation to Donald Trump’s inauguration. Graham added: “It’s a massive stain on British history that our prime minister won’t be there!”

Meanwhile, Paul Cox, a ‘comedian’ and GB News regular was bashing away at the supposed snub on X. “Not inviting Keir Starmer to Trump’s inauguration should make everyone sit up and listen,” he fulminated. “This is not a reflection on the UK, it’s a reflection of the direction the UK is headed under Keir Starmer. Make no mistake, it’s another political disaster.”

So should everyone sit up and listen? Not really… as no British prime minister has ever been invited to or attended a US presidential inauguration.

As the Press Association has reported, no PM, or indeed any other world leader, has visited the States at the time of any presidential inauguration, going right back to when records of visits began in 1874. The agency examined the US State Department’s visiting log for each of the presidential inauguration years from that date onwards.

Not that that stopped Graham doubling down. On X he claimed that prime ministers had attended the inaugurations in “1941, 1961, 1973 and 2001”. But none of these are true.

Winston Churchill remained in London for Franklin D Roosevelt’s 1941 inauguration, what with the then prime minister being quite busy at the time (the records show he spoke in the House of Commons that same day). Harold Macmillan did not attend John F. Kennedy’s in 1961. The pair first met in Key West, Florida, two months later.

Edward Heath was not required to get out the Morning Cloud to attend Richard Nixon’s second swearing-in in 1973, having not been invited, and Tony Blair was not at George W Bush’s in 2001.

A massive stain on British history? Absolutely not. But then Mike Graham has always struggled with concrete facts…