• 

It is a truth acknowledged by the residents of this small island – with only a nagging sense of embarrassment – that the course of contemporary American history continues profoundly to affect the politics, culture, economy, and society of the United Kingdom.

For in the words of the great British singer-songwriter Billy Bragg, “the fate of the great United States is entwined in the fate of us all” – an inevitable corollary of the fact that “the world we live in is very small”.

It should therefore have come as no surprise that the first official overseas visit made by Keir Starmer as the UK's new Prime Minister gave him a high-end taste of life across the great big pond we call the North Atlantic.

It would appear to have proven serendipitous for Sir Keir that during his first month in power, he was able both to host a summit of European leaders back home and to attend a NATO conference in Washington – although it had been rumored that his predecessor had timed the election so as to avoid the optics of having to host that European meeting, a scenario which might not have appealed to the more ardent Brexiteers among his party’s most voluble supporters.

It was at that Washington conference that President Biden had surprised NATO bigwigs when he’d confused the names of the Ukrainian and Russian leaders. He'd also, during that event, managed to mistake his Vice President for Donald Trump, and had called his chiefs of defense staff the “commander-in-chief” – a role he himself is of course supposed to hold as President.

This came shortly after his catastrophic and sometimes incoherent performance at the first debate of the presidential election campaign – a TV spectacular which extraordinarily succeeded in making Donald Trump sound like the most sensible and rational person in the room.

He'd also during an interview described himself as the first black woman to serve as his nation’s Vice President, apparently believing he was Kamala Harris.

The political fallout from all of this, as we now know, resulted in Mr. Biden being forced to stand aside in the presidential race, and to make way for the Vice President he’d confused with both his Republican opponent and himself.

His campaign team must at least have been relieved that he hadn’t accidentally endorsed the candidacy of Kim Jong Un to succeed him in the White House

But, before Joe Biden had (eventually) agreed to withdraw from November’s contest, the new British premier had embarrassingly been quizzed by journalists in DC as to the American leader’s competence.

He had charitably responded that the US President had been “on good form” and shown himself to be “across all the detail” of the summit agenda.

But, then, if he had any hope of maintaining the much-vaunted ‘special relationship’ between the United Kingdom and the United States, what else (as the BBC’s political editor then asked) could he say?

Apart from the UK’s most wooden premier’s desire to become a real boy, it’s doubtless now Keir Starmer’s most heartfelt wish that Kamala Harris triumphs at the polls this autumn. The alternative for the Labour leader must feel almost unthinkable.

A week after the Washington summit, the Republican Party held its national convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The event took place just two days after the failed assassination of its leader, and his devout followers treated his nomination as their presidential candidate not just as the coronation of a nearly martyred hero of American democracy, but as the virtual anointing of a messiah, a transcendent superman apparently saved by some kind of divine miracle to earn his God-given right to rule again.

Trump had trailed his convention speech as an address that would unite the country, as though his near-death experience (or at least ear-scratch experience) had transformed him into some manner of born-again decent human being.

But, as things turned out, his rhetoric continued to focus on rousing the angry rabble, as divisive as any of his usual efforts to skim the scum off the pond, and to distill and bottle it as a bilious billionaire’s bespoke cologne.

His supporters at the Republican National Convention included two former British Prime Ministers, the multiply disgraced yet utterly shameless figures of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Also in Milwaukee to pay homage at the altar of the immortal Donald was none other than the newly elected parliamentarian and newly appointed leader of Reform UK, the relentlessly self-promoting Mr. Nigel Farage.

Meanwhile, the twice-fired former Home Secretary Suella Braverman had announced that if she were an American citizen she’d vote for Donald Trump, clearly seeing this declaration as an electoral asset in the race to become leader of the British Conservative Party – a race in whose early stages she was forced to drop out.

But, while Sir Keir must be breathing a massive sigh of relief that the Far Right failed to secure its expected victory in France’s recent surprise poll, he will surely be waking up in the middle of most nights in cold sweats at the thought of a Trump triumph in November.

This nightmare scenario has been compounded by the news that Donald Trump has named as his running mate an extremist who last month declared that Mr. Starmer’s accession to Downing Street meant that Britain would become the world’s “first truly Islamist” nuclear power – an insult not only to Westminster but also very possibly to Islamabad.

Yet even Sir Keir’s typically plain-speaking deputy chose to respond with all due diplomacy, merely describing JD Vance’s language as “fruity” and expressing enthusiasm at the idea of meeting him and Mr. Trump in the event of their election.

She was, in short, remarkably restrained, especially given her “no nonsense” personality and Vance and Trump’s predilection for a very great deal of nonsense indeed.

(At the same time, Mr. Vance’s depiction of Democratic Party members as a “bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives” has caused much consternation and hardly enamored him to women, children, depressives, Democrats, or cats.)

The situation in which Keir Starmer finds himself when he next crosses the proverbial pond (as the likes of Nigel Farage still like to call the Atlantic Ocean) may prove to be absurdly uncomfortable, if he ends up obliged to cozy up to a vicious rambling misogynistic narcissist once more ruling the roost in the Oval Office.

But, unlike his unusually timorous deputy, he may at least take some crumb of moral comfort – or indeed of bold advice – from Richard Curtis’s classic romantic comedy Love Actually.

In that popular 2003 movie, a heroic new British Prime Minister encounters a cruel and lascivious American President. To the applause of UK cinema audiences – for this came out at the height of George W Bush and Tony Blair’s so-called War on Terror – the Prime Minister berates that President during a press conference: “I fear that this has become a bad relationship… A friend who bullies us is no longer a friend.”

Two years earlier, Richard Curtis had collaborated on the screenplay for another hugely successful romantic comedy, Bridget Jones’s Diary. As has previously been reported (most often by friends of the Labour leader), the terribly honest and decent hero of that story had originally been based in part upon a dashing young human rights lawyer whose brilliance had taken London society by storm during the 1990s. That man was a certain Keir Starmer.

And so, Sir Keir, in the event of a second Trump presidency, it might be time for you to rise above the sycophantic pond life of Johnson, Truss, Braverman, and Farage, and, instead of embracing the orange devil, strive to become that kind of hero again – the sort that vanquishes monsters and stands up to fight for the lives and rights of the powerless and for what most honest and decent people believe.