Don't expect a Love Actually-style moment from the Starmer-Trump meeting

22 February 2025, 20:47 | Updated: 23 February 2025, 01:42

For a prime minister who has spent so much of his time in office out of the country, this week's high-stakes trip to Washington DC may well be the one for which Sir Keir Starmer ends up being most remembered.

At a time when the Western alliance seems close to fracturing over Donald Trump's verbal evisceration of Ukraine and enthusiastic embrace of Russia - the PM's mission is to smooth over those cracks, to advocate for Ukraine, and attempt to bring the White House back around to the European point of view.

Can he succeed in convincing President Trump of the need for the Ukrainians and Europeans to be part of his negotiations with Russia - and commit to backing up any resulting peace deal with American firepower?

Or will he face the kind of humiliation endured by Theresa May when she visited Mr Trump in 2017?

The former Conservative prime minister scored a diplomatic coup in becoming the first world leader invited to the White House after Mr Trump's first election win, and hoped to shore up the president's support of NATO.

While she succeeded in getting a public commitment to NATO - and incidentally, promised to encourage other European leaders to spend more on defence - the image of a domineering president grabbing her hand while she smiled awkwardly is what has gone down in history.

This time the stakes are much higher.

Over the past week, the mercurial new president has pulled the rug from under Ukraine and ripped up the post-war expectation that America could be relied upon as the Western world's protector.

While Mr Trump's insistence that European leaders should spend more on defence and take up the burden of their own security comes as no surprise, his outright hostility to Volodymyr Zelenskyy and apparent embrace of Russian propaganda has blindsided the rest of Europe.

This weekend, Mr Trump has criticised both Sir Keir and President Emmanuel Macron - who will visit the White House three days earlier than the prime minister on Monday - as having done "nothing" to end the war in Ukraine.

Downing Street is maintaining a dignified silence in response. The last thing it wants to do ahead of Sir Keir's visit is to provoke any further ire from the president. It's already charting a difficult course in publicly contradicting the president's description of President Zelenskyy as a "dictator" by making a rapid, supportive phone call and reaffirming Ukraine's "democratically elected leader".

Sir Keir has made three phone calls to Mr Zelenskyy in just over a week and clearly wants to make a point that the UK's support for Ukraine is unwavering, whatever the president says. It's expected the UK will announce an expansion of military support and a package of Russian sanctions to mark the third anniversary of the invasion, which runs counter to Mr Trump's ambition to stop the fighting as soon as possible.