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Sir Keir Starmer can make history at his meeting with Donald Trump this week – but only if he shows Churchillian strength and stands up for Britain and Europe.
That is the message of the UK’s leading political biographer Sir Anthony Seldon in the eve of the Prime Minister’s trip to Washington on Thursday.
Sir Anthony said Sir Keir’s visit could be his “finest hour”, a reference to Winston Churchill’s famous speech in 1940 when he rallied the nation to defy Hitler.
Sir Keir must pledge to go even further than he has already in ordering a major increase in Britain’s defence spending – as demanded by president Trump.
But he must also promise to end the ‘”feebleness” of Europe and show it is powerful enough to be a “challenge and threat” to both America and Russia.
Writing in The Independent, Sir Anthony said: “Trump understands strength. He despises supplicants and weakness.
“The United States and Russia have been feeding off the feebleness of Europe.”
To do so, Sir Keir would have to make it clear to Mr Trump that Europe and the EU could be “remodelled” and made much stronger.
That included boosting UK defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP – compared to Sir Keir’s existing promise of 2.5 per cent – and going ahead with plans to let Ukraine join the EU.
Sir Keir’s promise for Britain to be a “bridge” between the US and the EU would not work if Europe continued its current “desperately weak” condition, argued Sir Anthony.
“Talk of being a bridge to the EU won’t impress if it’s a bridge to a soggy nothingness that is sliding into the mud.
“But if it’s a bridge to something that promises to be solid, proud and principled, well that’s a different matter.
“A remodelled Europe would, as Trump would understand, become a significant challenge to United States, a threat indeed, as it would to Putin.”
Sir Anthony praised The Independent’s campaign to oppose Trump’s assault on democracy and truth.
“Would that more media outlets were taking the strong stance of The Independent in standing up for Churchillian moral values in the face of its widespread abandonment on both sides of the Atlantic,” he wrote.
And he backed this newspaper’s criticism of right-wing figures in the UK who have failed to denounce Trump’s attack on “dictator” Volodymyr Zelensky, deriding them as “fellow travellers” of Trump.
Sir Anthony denounced the “stomach-churning triumphalism and glee” of right-wingers in Britain to Mr Trump’s victory which has led them to claim that “Trump is right and Zelensky wrong”.
They were “words that will sit uncomfortably in the light of history”, he said.
“The term “fellow traveller”, in use in the Cold War to denote left-wing followers of the Kremlin line, has now been appropriated by the right.”
Britain had been “living in a fools” paradise in its thinking about the US, said Sir Anthony.
“It is a purely transactional, not an emotional relationship. Starmer should remember that it was only self-interest that propelled a reluctant United States into joining the allies in the First World War in 1917 and the Second World War in 1941.
“Washington has been most impressed with Britain since the 1950s when it has been the bridge to the EU.
“Britain, even outside the EU needs to lead Europe. Yet Europe and the EU are desperately weak.
“No one is better placed than Starmer to end the victimhood and to take fate into our own hands. To make history.”
Sir Keir must lead a drive to forge a stronger Europe and EU, he said.
“The Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the election of President Trump, offer another of those sliding doors moments in history of untold potentiality,’ wrote Sir Anthony.
It was up to Sir Keir to seize the moment, he concluded.