LONDON — A shrug, perhaps even a flash of dismay. But despite the public insults emanating from the White House, those close to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer say there is little chance he will hit back at President Donald Trump over the Iran war.
The embattled prime minister is still pursuing close coordination with Trump, even after the latest indignity hurled by the president toward London as the conflict threatens havoc on the already stale British economy.
This weekend, Trump reposted a sketch, portraying the British leader as a weakling terrified of his fearsome American counterpart, that aired on the inaugural episode of the new "Saturday Night Live UK."
“Oh, golly,” a fictionalized Starmer frets in his recognizable nasal tones. “What if Donald shouts at me?”
The president shared the skit after weeks of insults and accusations leveled at Starmer for not joining the Iran war.
This was a dramatic turn after Starmer had sought a reputation as something of a Trump-whisperer — even if that went down badly with many Britons at home, failing to win discernible gains over the Ukraine war and Trump’s hostile pursuit of Greenland.
Rather than humiliating Starmer, however, Trump’s recent public criticism may actually give an inadvertent boost to the deeply unpopular prime minister among the anti-Trump British public.
“In Keir Starmer’s view, there’s absolutely no purpose in getting into a public slanging match with the president,” said Tom Baldwin, the former head of communications for Starmer’s Labour Party who remains a key figure in the prime minister’s orbit. “It’s not because he’s in hock to him or that he’s desperate to please him. It’s just not his style.”
Baldwin, who wrote a sympathetic biography of Starmer in 2024, said that the “deep and long-lasting security relationship with America” was “stronger than any one president or, indeed, any one prime minister.”
Starmer “will have shrugged rather than sulked when he saw that the president had retweeted that Saturday Night Live sketch,” said a former senior adviser to the prime minister, who requested anonymity so they could talk candidly about their time in his team.
“He will just say: ‘Well, Trump is Trump,’” the former adviser said, based on his experiences working with Starmer. “If you have a bumpy 24 hours with President Trump, then that’s just part of what comes with his personality.”
Starmer’s quandary offers insight into how American allies struggle to balance their vital military, intelligence and economic ties with the United States, while navigating Trump’s norm-busting foreign policy moves and brusque personal style.
