Starmer’s careful Trump pitch may be drowned out by Kremlin siren songs

At the very moment that Sir Keir Starmer is trying to salvage whatever may be left of the transatlantic alliance with the US, The New York Times provided the prime minister with a dollop of assistance on Sunday. 

In a glowing profile (“Keir Starmer on Putin, Trump and Europe’s Challenge: ‘We’ve Known This Moment Was Coming’”), the newspaper’s London correspondent wrote that “the crisis has transformed Mr Starmer, turning a methodical, unflashy human rights lawyer and Labour Party politician, into something akin to a wartime leader”. 

The Prime Minister obliged, by invoking Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee in one of three conversations last week with the newspaper. “Many people are urging us to choose between the US and Europe,” Starmer said. “Churchill didn’t do it. Attlee didn’t do it. It’d be a mistake, in my view, to choose now”. 

That may be music to Washington’s ears, and the Prime Minister carefully goes out of his way to praise President Donald Trump. “I think we have a good relationship….I like and respect him. I understand what he’s trying to achieve,” he says, using cadences that No 10’s image-makers will hope resonate with America’s quixotic and authoritarian president. 

But at the very moment the Prime Minister was finding exemplars in Churchill and Attlee, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, who has been leading negotiations with the Russians, rubbished any suggestion that the moment requires Churchillian grit by European leaders. 

In a ninety-minute conversation with former Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson, Witkoff appears to dismiss Starmer’s proposals to deploy the UK’s Armed Forces as part of a peacekeeping force in Ukraine. “What the hell is going on with…Starmer saying we’re going to send British troops?” asks Carlson in the interview published on Elon Musk’s social media platform X.

“I think it’s a combination of posture and pose,” answers Witkoff, describing the Prime Minister’s approach as “simplistic. I think there’s…this sort of notion of we’ve all got to be like Winston Churchill, the Russians are gonna march across Europe. I think that’s preposterous”, says the real estate magnate and golfing partner of Trump who is now, extraordinarily, Washington’s main point of contact with Putin.

Asked whether he thinks the Russians want to “march across Europe”, Witkoff responds “100 per cent not”.

Starmer uses his interview in The New York Times to warn the Americans that Putin has extensive form undercutting diplomatic negotiations, and then failing to adhere to whatever pledges that he makes. “I don’t trust Putin,” the Prime Minister says flatly. “I’m sure Putin would try to insist that Ukraine should be defenceless after a deal because that gives him what he wants, which is the opportunity to go in again”.

But the Trump administration remains utterly beguiled by Russia’s leader, as Witkoff himself demonstrates in his interview with Carlson. “It got personal,” the envoy says of a recent Kremlin meeting at which Putin presented Witkoff with a “beautiful portrait of President Trump from the leading Russian artist” that the envoy was charged with ferrying back to the White House.

In the unlikely event that the portrait proved insufficient to flatter America’s President, Witkoff also reports that after the attempted assassination of Trump in Pennsylvania last July, Putin “went to his local church and met with his priest and prayed for the president…because he had a friendship with him and was praying for his friend”. Witkoff says that when he conveyed news of both the painting and the praying, Trump “was clearly touched by it”.

Elsewhere in the interview with Carlson, Witkoff reveals that he has discussed the partial dismemberment of Ukraine in his talks with Putin. While he is unable to name the five regions of Ukraine that he suggests may eventually be ceded to the Russians, he says Moscow has “reclaimed these five regions. They have Crimea and they have gotten what they wanted. So why do they need more?” he asks rhetorically, in an indication that he rejects the Prime Minister’s fear that Putin has ulterior motives.

Trump, proclaims The New York Times, has “established a rapport” with Starmer and has the British leader on speed dial. One of the Prime Minister’s aides discloses that “Mr Trump occasionally calls [Starmer] on his cell phone…to discuss favourite topics like his golf resorts in Scotland”.

The Prime Minister’s challenge now it to get Trump’s mind off his own personal business empire, and to focus on the threat the British Government believes that Putin continues to pose.