World leaders must dread their photo calls with Donald Trump.
The incoming US president likes to dominate foreign statesmen physically, pulling them in for hard handshakes, talking over them in press conferences. At a NATO summit early in his first term, he elbowed a couple of prime ministers aside in order to be in the middle of a photo.
How different his body language was with the Prince of Wales in Paris at the weekend. ‘A good man, this one,’ he jokily told reporters, before sitting down with Prince William for an amiable private chat.
Yes, it seems that even the Donald is – at least by his standards – a little subdued in the presence of royalty.
The prince plainly wants to be a statesman in his own right and, according to his aides, the meeting was arranged at short notice.
Though Kensington Palace would never dream of hinting at such a thing, there may well have been a sense that the prince would get on better with the leader of our strongest ally than those Labour ministers who called him every name under the sun before he was elected.
Did they discuss Ukraine, or the prospects of a US-UK free trade agreement? I doubt it. Heirs to the throne are not meant to be political. But the very fact that there was this meeting will have bolstered Britain’s interests on both issues.
‘A good man, this one,’ Donald Trump jokily told reporters in Paris before sitting down with William for an amiable private chat on Saturday
Trump sees Sir Keir Starmer as a woke milksop, a man who kneels for Black Lives Matter and has released violent criminals to free up space for people who have posted controversial or hurtful opinions online. But he views the Crown very differently.
As head of government, a US president deals with the British prime minister. But, as head of state, his counterpart is the sovereign. And this second relationship has been crucial down the years, bolstering the Atlantic alliance at key moments.
The late Queen met all but one of the 14 US presidents who served during her reign, from Harry S Truman to Joe Biden. The only exception – no great loss, it should be said – was the coarse Lyndon Johnson.
These were more than just formal meetings. Queen Elizabeth kept up a lifelong correspondence with Dwight D Eisenhower, for example, among other things sharing a recipe for some scones that he had enjoyed at Balmoral.
Ronald Reagan was as fond of the Queen as he was of Margaret Thatcher and recalled riding with her through the Windsor estate as the highlight of his presidency. Barack Obama, who had written some harsh things about this country before he became president, notably associating Britain with colonial repression in Kenya, was smitten.
‘She is truly one of my favourite people,’ he recalled at the end of his presidency. ‘She’s an astonishing person, and a real jewel to the world.’
The everyday give-and-take between allies rests on much more than personal relationships, of course. But friendship at high levels never hurts.
Trump sees Sir Keir Starmer as a woke milksop, but he views the Crown very differently. The US President-Elect is pictured with William at the UK Ambassador’s residence in Paris
Britain’s status as a major nuclear power derives in no small part from a deal in 1962, in which John F Kennedy overruled his own State Department to share Polaris missiles with us.
Why? Largely because JFK was a committed Anglophile – for all that his wife, Jackie, found the set-up at Buckingham Palace dowdy which, by her standards, it doubtless was.
Will the same magic work on the President-elect? The question now matters perhaps more than at any moment since the 1956 Suez crisis.
We have real policy differences to bridge, especially on defence and trade, and there is no chemistry between Trump and our political leaders.
The incoming US administration has so far defied the worst expectations of those who feared that it would side with Vladimir Putin. Recently, I listened as Mike Waltz, the former Green Beret and the nominated National Security Adviser, gave a superb explanation of Western interests from Europe to China. He did not sound like a man minded to cave in to autocrats.
Yet tensions between our two countries remain. After the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, Britain became Ukraine’s chief military backer, providing the training and equipment that allowed Ukrainians to repulse the invaders from their gates in 2022.
At the time, we were acting in co-operation with the Americans, who wanted a freer hand in the Pacific. More recently, though, Trump and his supporters have suggested freezing the front lines, which would leave Vladimir Putin in possession of the vast territories he has seized by force.
It is the Royal Family, not a Prime Minister elected on barely a third of the popular vote, which represents Britain as a whole. Pictured, Trump greets William at the Notre-Dame Cathedral re-opening earlier on Saturday
Rewarding aggression begets more aggression. If Putin were to come away with a clear win, the West would suffer a Suez-level loss of prestige. Dictators everywhere would be emboldened.
There are people in the Trump team who share this analysis. But there are others who resent spending billions of dollars on what they see as an unwinnable war.
Britain, whose interest since 1940 has been to maintain an US commitment to Europe, aims to keep Trump engaged.
When it comes to trade, things might seem more straightforward. Trump is signalling that he wants to exempt the UK from his proposed global tariff and negotiate a bilateral trade deal.
Such a deal is unquestionably in the interest of both countries. The US is our main trading partner, bigger than our second, third and fourth combined.
Our sensible trade secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, has correctly argued that Britain should aim for the freest possible trade with the US and EU.
But Labour has made such a fuss about the growth hormones used in non-EU cattle and what it calls ‘chlorinated’ (i.e., rinsed) chicken, that it may struggle to agree a deal – especially when Brussels wants Britain to suffer in solidarity with the EU.
The two governments could get an early win by signing into law the chapters that were already at, or near, completion when Joe Biden halted trade talks in 2021, leaving the contentious issues to one side. But that requires an element of goodwill on both sides, a readiness to put the Atlantic relationship above short-term pandering to their domestic lobbies. If anyone can nurture that goodwill, it is the Royal Family.
Trump fondly recalls the monarchism of his Scottish mother, and shows visitors photos of his time spent with the Royals with something that, in anyone else, would look almost like humility.
Which is just as well. Trump does not care for Labour ministers, who have called him everything from a ‘racist, misogynistic, self-confessed groper’ (Ed Miliband, 2016) to a ‘neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath’ (David Lammy, 2018). And he did not take kindly to Starmer’s attacks on Elon Musk – one of his closest associates – in the aftermath of the Southport riots.
I spent last week in Washington, where there was general astonishment that Starmer and Lammy had seen their meetings with their Republican counterparts as a success. ‘Are they that lacking in self-awareness?’ one senator asked me.
But if Trump has little respect for our PM, he sees Britain as a whole in a more positive light. And it is the Royal Family, not a Prime Minister elected on barely a third of the popular vote, which represents Britain as a whole.
The late Queen put it best when, recalling her experience of the Second World War, she spoke of the power of the Anglo-American alliance in defence of freedom. ‘That is the lesson of my lifetime. Administrations in your country, and governments in mine, may come and go,’ she said. ‘But united we must always remain.’
She was right. And, whatever else we may say of him, Trump knows it, too.
- Lord Hannan is President of the Institute for Free Trade.