Inside UK Labour’s push for a US special relationship — even with Trump

It is “an unprecedented situation, there’s no doubt about that,” Starmer half-chuckled Friday. He insisted: “We will work with whoever is elected … We have a special relationship with the U.S. that transcends whoever the president is.”

Business and pleasure

For Labour but particularly Lammy — who has gone from describing Trump as a “racist KKK and Nazi sympathizer” in 2017 to saying the ex-president is “often misunderstood” — working with team Trump is business. Dealing with Democrats is pleasure.

Lammy has been friends with Barack Obama for two decades, enjoying a “wonderful” dinner with the ex-president in London in March. American centrists Matt Bennett and Josh Freed, of the think tank Third Way, advised Labour officials on election messaging over dinner last year. Labour’s one-word campaign slogan, “change,” even recalls Obama’s “hope” in 2008. (A Labour strategist insists there is no connection).

But since January Lammy has been busy expanding his Republican contacts into the MAGA aisle. He has met Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita; Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien and deputy NSA Matt Pottinger; and Republican members of Congress JD Vance, Lindsey Graham, Joe Wilson, Jim Risch, Thom Tillis and Pete Ricketts.

Evidently Lammy smells an imbalance — but also an opportunity. Pro-Trump Republicans were furious when current foreign secretary and ex-PM David Cameron compared withholding Ukrainian aid to the appeasement of Hitler. By contrast Elbridge Colby, spoken of as a possible Trump security adviser, praised Lammy’s approach on POLITICO’s Power Play podcast.

Starmer’s former policy director Claire Ainsley, who now works for the Progressive Policy Institute, a Democrat-aligned U.S. think tank, said: “I’m sure it’s no secret that there would be a desire — particularly in a more insecure world — for there to be a Biden presidency, and Starmer in power in the U.K, and perhaps [Social Democratic Party Chancellor Olaf] Scholz in Germany.

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