Blighty newsletter: Will Britain’s Trump trauma repeat itself?

The fortunes of Sir Keir Starmer’s government will be shaped, perhaps more than any other single factor, by the outcome of in America. You can find the live results tonight, as well as our prediction model and polling, . has . Our coverage focuses on the serious tail risks posed by the re-election of Donald Trump, and argues that the chances of something going badly wrong are, if difficult to quantify, unacceptably high.But while policy under a Trump administration may be unpredictable, history does provide some guidance on what British leaders should not expect: special treatment or a strong concern for their internal politics. Some of Mr Trump’s backers in Conservative circles still insist that he harbours a love of Britain, its late Queen, and its decision to leave the European Union—if only a British prime minister would nurture this affection. Consider his first term and that looks remarkably naive: Mr Trump’s Anglophilia did not run deep enough to deter him from repeatedly destabilising Britain’s government during its worst political crisis since the second world war.In the summer of 2018, with Theresa May’s Brexit divorce negotiations in a toxic deadlock, a despairing British official posed to me a fascinating counterfactual: what if Hillary Clinton had won? For decades America had been a sponsor of stability and economic integration in Europe, and of peace in Northern Ireland. Would a Clinton administration not have tried to shepherd through an agreement between London and Brussels? Would Labour MPs (among them, an ambitious shadow Brexit secretary named Keir Starmer) not heed the gentle encouragement of a Democratic president to pass a deal? Brexit was always going to be painful, but with American intervention, might it have been less volatile? Recall how John Kerry, then-secretary of state, had been on the first plane to London after the Brexit vote to tell everyone to calm down. That question was answered in part by President Joe Biden, who exerted a friendly-but-firm pressure on Rishi Sunak (a successor of Mrs May from 2022-24) to resolve the unfinished business of Brexit with the “Windsor Framework” deal.Instead, Mrs May got President Trump. He spoke of being the Ronald Reagan to her Margaret Thatcher. Then came humiliation: in July 2018, on the eve of a state visit, he declared that Mrs May’s proposed Brexit deal would nix the prospect of an American trade deal. It was catnip for her backbench opponents, with whom his officials were in close contact. Mr Trump would ignore her counsel on the Iran nuclear deal and Paris climate accords, and goad the Mayor of London on Twitter. The American ambassador would diss Mrs May on national radio; the British ambassador would later be forced to resign. As Thomas Wright, now of Mr Biden’s National Security Council, put it at the time, the president “could not have wished for a prime minister who was less demanding or more sycophantic. Trump gave May nothing in return.”Will similar traumas await Sir Keir Starmer if Mr Trump wins this election? He has worked quietly to build ties with Mr Trump: there was a phone call after the in July, and a low-key meeting at the Trump Tower in New York in September. David Lammy, the foreign secretary and frequent visitor to America, has stressed to Republicans that he understands the drivers of the America First movement—living standards and border control—because they fuel Britain’s politics too. Set against that Sir Keir has already become something of a for elements of the American online right; take Elon Musk’s remarkable baiting of Sir Keir over the arrest of rioters, or new tax levies on farmers. Unpredictable, certainly; but no one in Westminster can be naive.