Trump or the EU – which way should Britain turn?

How does Sir Keir Starmer respond to Trump’s win? The EU has moved fast to put guns before butter. The European Commission has said it is prepared to release about one third of the EU’s common budget for defence, to help fund the war in Ukraine. This will put on hold money earmarked for reducing inequalities between EU member states. Hungary and Slovakia will be hard hit by this switch – both have pro-Putin leaders.

This reallocation of money is a smart move. Trump’s son may enjoy pouring scorn on President Zelensky but Washington as a whole, especially its very powerful military, will not want to be seen as opting out of the war. The Pentagon – and also Trump himself – will not want to appear to give in to Putin, allowing him a free hand in the destruction of a country in which the US has already invested so many billions. China would also take it as a signal of weakness if Trump caved in to Putin.

When it comes to trade policy, Trump’s proclamations about imposing tariffs or cutting immigration to net-zero evidently struck a chord with the US electorate. The rises in the cost of living which occurred during the Biden-Harris administration were of huge concern to many voters. Bidenomics may have pushed up GDP, but persistent inflation meant they didn’t feel any benefit.

Tariffs of any sort will reduce or stop the arrival of low-cost imports into the US, which will only make that problem worse. So the automatic assumption that Trump will opt for full-on protectionism could prove wide of the mark.

And as for the UK’s ability to deal with Trump – well, a foreign ambassador gets very little direct face time with a US president. If a British PM turns up then the ambassador, if they’re lucky, may catch some of the usually inconsequential chit-chat. The idea that the right ambassador will prove critical in dealing with Trump is a nonsense.

Trump welcomed the Brexit vote and called Boris Johnson at the time, rather unusually, “Britain Trump”. But that did not stop Trump imposing swingeing tariffs on Scotch whisky late in 2019.

No other European nation has followed Britain out of Europe and Johnson is now seen internationally as a failed politician forced to resign by his own party, which then went down to a humiliating defeat in the 2024 election.

But Trump did make time to host Sir Keir Starmer and David Lammy, the foreign secretary, for a meal and a discussion in his Florida home. Trump will know that Starmer won the last election, and won big. He likes dominant figures.

Ever the opportunist, Nigel Farage was briefing during the summer that he would make a good ambassador to Washington under Trump. Dream on, Nigel. In Trump’s world view the smoking boozing Brexit loudmouth has delivered nothing. Brexit is seen globally as a failure, and Britain’s persistently dismal economic performance is a painful reminder of how damaging that failure has been. Six Reform MPs out of 650 wouldn’t register on the Trump Richter scale of political significance.

Peter Mandelson would be a much better choice. He is a respected international political networker. He is also close to Starmer’s new National Security Adviser, Jonathan Powell who was Blair’s chief of staff at No 10 and who served in the US embassy in the 1990s.

But not even Lord Mandelson would not have any special influence on Trump. The word “special” in the phrase “special relationship” is much loved by the Foreign Office and BBC diplomatic correspondents. I worked in Tony Blair’s Foreign Office as a minister and was often in Washington. I never once heard a US official use the term “special relationship”. It is a British fantasy that we matter. For someone like Trump we barely exist.

So can the UK turn to Europe? Stella Creasy MP, chair of the Labour Movement for Europe, which is the biggest single interest group in the Commons, wrote a powerful argument in the Observer together with Sandro Gozi, the Italian socialist elected as a French MEP who is close to president Macron. The two politicians argued that the Trump win meant Britain should make stronger efforts to unblock the Whitehall rigidities that stop even a modest reset of relations with Europe.

It looked as if Starmer had taken his MPs’ advice when he went to Paris as the first British PM since Winston Churchill in 1944 to take part in France’s 11^th November Remembrance Day parade on the Champs Elysées. Starmer and Macron discussed their Ukraine policy, which now seems to be aligned.

Macron is especially keen to make progress with international policy. After calling and losing his summer election for the National Assembly, he has little influence on domestic French politics. Having good relations with Keir Starmer, who is seen as the PM who has won the biggest domestic election victory in recent years in Europe does Macron no harm at all.

However this does not mean Starmer thinks Trump’s win means the UK must turn again to Europe, to offset the US’s populist turn. In a recent speech, Rachel Reeves explicitly ruled out the idea of going back on Brexit, and that includes membership of the Single Market. The EU, it must be said, is looking politically frail. Macron has little domestic political credibility. The social democratic German chancellor Olaf Scholz has just fired his finance minister. The German economy is tanking and Scholz may soon be replaced by a more rightwing Chancellor.

Other European leaders have crawled to Trump, like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, the Mussolini heritage anti-gay Italian prime minister who shares Trump’s views on abortion and immigrants. Meloni, as well as the leaders of Hungary and Slovakia, and several other European populists, are now solidly implanted in parliaments and governments across the continent. So it is not clear that Labour can find natural bedfellows in Europe, even if they wanted to.

A great deal will be made of the special relationship, and the theatre of diplomacy between the US and UK will go on. But Trump will do Starmer no favours, and Labour is still too nervous to start building stronger relations with Europe. In short, for now, Britain and Sir Keir are both stuck in the middle.

Denis MacShane is the former Labour Minister for Europe and author of “Brexiternity. The Uncertain Fate of Britain” (Bloomsbury)