“The Donald Trump I met,” he told the BBC, “was a man who had incredible grace, generosity, very keen to be a good host, very funny, very friendly, very warm about the UK, our royal family, Scotland …” Gone are the days when Lammy, as a less guarded Labour MP, called Trump a “tyrant in a toupee”.
Last month, Anna McShane of the New Britain Project, a thinktank which describes itself as “progressive”, wrote on the pro-Labour website LabourList: “Starmer must learn from Trump: act fast, prioritise visible change … While his policies remain polarising, the effectiveness of this approach cannot be ignored.”.
In Britain a century ago, Mussolini also “attracted the admiring attention of leading Conservative journals … as well as several newspapers, notably the Daily Mail,” wrote the historian of fascism Martin Pugh in his 2005 book Hurrah for the Blackshirts!
At a press conference after the meeting, Churchill said: “If I had been an Italian, I am sure that I should have been wholeheartedly with you … in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.” In the 1970s and 1980s, many Tories and British rightwing journalists similarly supported Augusto Pinochet’s brutal military regime in Chile, as an anti-communist ally in the cold war.
Yet other, darker and less-examined impulses have also shaped the behaviour of some of our MPs, ministers and political journalists towards rightwing autocrats – both those who have wielded absolute power and those who apparently would like to, such as Trump.
