Voices: Never mind Badenoch and Farage – Starmer’s real task is dealing with Trump and Musk
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It’s not just Starmer’s premiership at stake here. If the preseident-elect and his billionaire pal become a bigger threat than they already are, UK democracy may also be at their mercy, writes John Rentoul. One thing that Keir Starmer should not do, as he seeks to manage the relationship with the incoming president of the United States, is to leak private details of his phone calls with him.
So it is unlikely that the prime minister was responsible for telling The Times that Donald Trump “veered off on a series of tangents” in their conversation on 18 December. The president-elect said that so many birds were being killed flying into wind turbines in the US that the coyotes were growing fat. If Starmer, or anyone acting on his behalf, did leak it, it could prove quite the misstep.
This is harmless stuff by Trump’s standards, reflecting his known antipathy to “windmills”, as he called them, in a public post on Truth Social yesterday. But the breach of confidence will make it harder for Starmer to engage with the unpredictable fireball coming his way.
So far I have been relatively optimistic on Starmer’s behalf about the challenge ahead. Trump’s threat of tariffs is mostly bluster, because he understands basic economics better than his voters do and knows that duties would stoke inflation at home. As he has just won an election thanks partly to rising prices, he is unlikely to take that risk.
At the same time, Elon Musk’s attempts to interfere in British politics are likely to be counterproductive. Most British voters will react negatively to the world’s richest man – who is unpopular here and who supports an unpopular president-elect – telling them that they should have another election because he didn’t like the result of the last one.
