A Trump Victory is Dreadful for Starmer and a Catastrophe for David Lammy

Labour’s hubris may have irreversibly damaged our relationship with the sole pro-British US president in decades

As electoral hangovers go, Keir Starmer’s shall be merely marginally less excruciating than that of Kamala Harris.

With precious little going swimmingly for the Labour Government on the domestic front, the final thing the Prime Minister requires is a fresh American president who harbours resentment. Nevertheless, that is precisely what he has received.

During those heady days after Joe Biden at long last and belatedly called time and passed the Democratic Party torch to his vice-president, when polling indicated Kamala was poised to sweep all before her, the Labour Party grew rather giddy with enthusiasm and publicly proclaimed it was lending the Democrats assistance.

Who was bothered if The Orange One took umbrage at the participation of 100 Labour activists and staffers in the presidential election? He was assuredly destined for defeat, and the party would bask in President Harris’s gratitude for the subsequent four years.

Well, “blast”, as they say in Westminster.

Starmer might now contemplate that alongside having to tender a grovelling apology to the once and future President Trump for his party’s ill-conceived bout of amateurish virtue signalling, he faces a more pressing predicament in the form of his Foreign Secretary.

In his perpetual and unfailing desire to curry favour with whichever audience he addresses, David Lammy once characterised Trump as a “Neo-Nazi sociopath”. This sort of pronouncement might be uttered by someone who (a) is a precocious sixth-former in the school debating society, or (b) harbours no expectation of ever sharing quarters with the target of their criticisms.

At present, as Britain’s Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, Lammy serves as our principal representative abroad, including to the United States. Not only has he thoughtlessly hurled a foolish insult at the victor of the 2024 presidential election, but in doing so he has essentially accused the American electorate of selecting someone unsuitable for the most significant elected office globally.

Any arguments that might be advanced in defence of Lammy’s opinion are neither here nor there: our Foreign Secretary must maintain the finest possible relations with our most crucial ally. David Lammy has effectively talked himself out of that position.

We cannot permit any foreign power to determine who serves in the UK cabinet and in what capacity. However, dismissing or demoting Lammy at the earliest opportunity would demonstrate to the incoming administration that Starmer is earnest about mending the damage Lammy, through his juvenile language, has inflicted upon the special relationship.

This Government may not be particularly keen on post-EU “Global Britain”, but given that during Trump’s previous tenure in the White House, he demonstrated considerably more enthusiasm than either his predecessor or successor for offering us a transatlantic trade deal, Lammy’s sacrifice would represent a modest price for smoothing the path to such a breakthrough.

Beyond the immediate ramifications for the Government and its Foreign Secretary, Harris’s mortifying defeat at the hands of a man who, in more serious times, genuinely ought never to have come within shouting distance of the White House, should signal a substantial rethink of progressive Left-wing politics across the democratic West. But shall it?

The lessons were abundantly present to be absorbed in 2016, when an arrogant, entitled Democratic Party crowned Hillary Clinton as their guaranteed winner in that year’s election. After all, who could possibly fail to triumph against someone as disagreeable as Trump? And yet somehow, Clinton’s contempt for working-class Americans without university degrees and her fixation with transgender rights to utilise women’s lavatories in Oklahoma failed to resonate with the electorate. It remained a genuine conundrum.

Eight years hence, Joe Biden could have chosen to accept the inevitability of his advancing years and permitted his party to select a fresh candidate last year, allowing the victor to be subjected to the customary rigours and scrutiny of the primary process.

Instead, he rendered it impossible for the party and the country to choose anyone other than Harris, a woman who, upon standing against Biden for the Democratic nomination in 2020, withdrew from the race without securing a single delegate to her party’s national convention.

It wasn’t merely the method of her becoming the candidate that irked voters; it was her policy platform. Across America – and indeed, across much of the Western world – the curse of woke is wreaking terrible damage to politics and society.

Gender ideology and critical race theory have their origins in the US, but like any virus, they swiftly traversed the Atlantic. Few viral clips on social media proved more damaging to Harris than the one in which she introduces herself to an audience – from behind a face covering, naturally – as “Kamala Harris, she/her”.

It’s not the self-congratulatory smugness that proved irksome; it was the presumption that the cult of the pronoun is now not only obligatory but commonplace. Does she truly not comprehend how strongly ordinary Americans object to such nonsense? Does she not realise that numerous voters associate such language with “taking the knee” and demands by Black Lives Matter protesters to “defund the police”? The entire package is toxic – the language, the smugness and the policies that the White House championed over the past four years to advance the agenda.

Labour, too, must absorb the lessons of a second Trump victory before they venture too far down the same path. For if British voters elected to follow the example of their American cousins, our own politicians would have every reason for trepidation the next time the ballot boxes are opened.

The implications of this electoral outcome stretch far beyond mere personality politics. They signal a profound shift in the Western political landscape, where traditional Left-wing movements find themselves increasingly disconnected from their historical base. The challenge for Labour now lies not merely in managing diplomatic relations with a potentially hostile US administration, but in preventing the same disconnect that has plagued the Democrats from taking root in British soil.

For Starmer, the path ahead appears treacherous. He must simultaneously maintain Britain’s crucial alliance with America whilst preserving his party’s progressive credentials – a balancing act that grows more precarious with each passing day. The question remains whether Labour can learn from the Democrats’ missteps or if they, too, shall fall victim to the same political miscalculations that have now twice delivered the White House to Donald Trump.