UKAnalysis

Right-wing figures jockey to be UK’s Trump whisperer as Keir Starmer is left to watch from afar

Nigel Farage has the best claim to personify Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with Trump’s US

Nigel Farage and Donald Trump in 2021. Photograph: Getty Images
Nigel Farage and Donald Trump in 2021. Photograph: Getty Images

Britain’s government has shrugged off suggestions that it could be sidelined by new US president Donald Trump, as a parade of its domestic political rivals showed up in Washington for his inauguration while senior Labour figures were snubbed.

A spokesman for 10 Downing Street said prime minister Keir Starmer was “not at all” embarrassed that senior Tory and Reform UK politicians had been invited to the ceremony while Labour heavyweights had not.

Speaking to reporters in Westminster in advance of the inauguration, the spokesman played down the absence of Starmer and his foreign secretary, David Lammy, from the invitation list. He insisted it was “normal” that the only UK government official there was Karen Pierce, the outgoing ambassador.

However, other heads of state such as Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni and Argentina’s president Javier Milei were invited.

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Meanwhile, senior figures on the right wing of British politics lined up to advertise their presence in Washington, as the jockeying began for claims of influence over the new US administration.

Senior Tories including former prime ministers Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, as well as former home secretaries Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, were all invited to the US capital for the event. Truss, for example, was photographed in Washington in an almost-comically oversized blue coat, white blouse and red Make America Great Again cap, channelling the colours of the US flag.

Patel, the only one of the above contenders still involved in front-bench politics as the Conservative party’s shadow foreign secretary, said she hoped the Trump administration would “dust off the plans we had when we were in government for an ambitious trading partnership”. A UK-US trade deal and the swerving of punitive tariffs is the top priority of Starmer’s government in relations with the US.

Sources said Johnson, meanwhile, had held a slew of telephone calls with Trump since his election win, in an attempt to sway him towards Ukraine’s side in its war with Russia. The former prime minister sees Britain’s unstinting support for Ukraine as his legacy from his time in Number 10.

However, despite the cavalcade of Tories playing for influence with Trump, the only real contender for holding the UK’s “special relationship” with the US president was Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK who has been a close ally with the US president since before his first victory in 2016.

“The reason we’ve stayed friends all this time is that I never disclose anything [about Trump],” Farage once told The Irish Times. “I’m a good friend of his. It’s a very private relationship. That’s how I’ll maintain it.”

Farage was the only UK politician invited to all three of Trump’s inauguration balls, as he declared to UK media that he could be prime minister before the US president leaves office in four years. A Westminster source, meanwhile, said the advantage Farage had, apart from his loyalty to Trump, was the fact that the US president prefers to pick up the phone to “big personalities”. With the possible exception of Johnson, Farage is the biggest personality in UK politics, viewed from the US.

Farage has suggested to British media that he would be prepared to give advice on dealing with Trump to Peter Mandelson, the former Labour minister and heavyweight Blairite whom Starmer has appointed as ambassador to the US, replacing Pierce.

Allies of Trump anonymously raised the prospect with British newspapers at the weekend that Trump could refuse to sanction Mandelson’s appointment, as the new administration keeps Labour at arms length. Notably, Mandelson also was not invited to Trump’s Monday ball on the eve of the inauguration.

Senior Labour figures told journalists in Westminster, however, that the British government was confident that Mandelson’s past as a former European Union trade commissioner would help him smooth the way for the economic deals with Trump that Starmer so badly covets.