The Prime Minister has taken a friendly approach to dealings with the US President – showering him with gifts and compliments and granting him an unprecedented second state visit in October – but a new poll found just one in seven
Brits want Keir Starmer to be more critical of Donald Trump – and think Trump’s second term will be bad for the UK.
The Prime Minister has taken a friendly approach to dealings with the US President – showering him with gifts and compliments and granting him an unprecedented second state visit in October.
But a new poll for the Mirror found just one in five people think Trump’s second term in the White House will be good for the UK.
And nearly half said they wanted the PM to be more critical of him in public.
A plurality of respondents (43%) think Trump’s second term will be bad for the UK, compared to one in five (20%) who think it will be good.
More than a quarter (27%) think it will make no real difference. At the same time, nearly half of respondents (47%) think Starmer should be more critical of Trump with around one in seven (15%) thinking the opposite.
In May, when he announced he’d secure the first draft trade deal with the Trump White House following the US President’s unprecedented tariff announcement, Mr Starmer argued: “I know people along the way were urging me to walk away, to descend in a different kind of relationship.
“We didn’t. We did the hard yards. We stayed in the room. I think the workforce here would say to you in very loud terms… ‘thank goodness that you didn’t walk away from negotiations.'”
But there have been increasing calls for him to stand up to Trump, most recently over his threats to sue the BBC for $1bn over the Panorama editing claims, and the suggestion he could back far-right candidates in European elections.
Earlier this month at Prime Minister’s Questions, Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey called on Mr Starmer to: “make it clear to President Trump that any attempts to interfere with our democracy are totally unacceptable.”
Mr Starmer replied: “On the question of Europe and President Trump’s comments, what I see is a strong Europe, united behind Ukraine and united behind our longstanding values of freedom and democracy.
“And I will always stand up for those values and those freedoms.”
Deltapoll interviewed 1,997 British adults online between 16th December to 18th December 2025. The data have been weighted to be representative of the British adult population as a whole.