LONDON — A Labour government would “have to make it work” if Donald Trump once again becomes president of the United States, the party’s leader Keir Starmer said.
Starmer is streets ahead of Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in U.K. opinion polls ahead of an expected general election next year.
But Starmer’s center-left party is unlikely to be an easy fit with Trump, should he clinch the Republican nomination and go on to beat President Joe Biden in a head-to-head next year.
Speaking to the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast, Starmer said of a potential Trump presidency: “We have to make it work. That doesn’t mean that … we would agree on everything, but we have to make it work.”
He added: “I think one of the things about being a leader is you don’t get to choose the other leaders around the world. That is the job of democracies … But in a grown-up world, you have to make that relationship work.”
It comes after Starmer told POLITICO’s Power Play podcast that a Trump victory would not be his “desired outcome,” and that there was a “great deal of concern” Trump may change the American position on Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“That’s why it’s very important that progressives hold together in difficult circumstances as I laid down before, because the probably most immediately impacted area if there is a change of government — change of presidency in the U.S. will be Ukraine and the position in Ukraine,” Starmer said.
Should they both triumph next year, Starmer and Trump wouldn’t be the first keepers of the much-hyped U.K.-U.S. “special relationship” to seem miles apart.
Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair found himself in lockstep with Republican President George W. Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and played a key role in supporting the war in Iraq — a decision for which many on the left of his party have never forgiven him.
