Keir Starmer hailed his “good relationship” with Donald Trump just hours before the US President’s special envoy slammed the PM’s Ukraine peace plan as “a posture and a pose”.
Steve Witkoff said the Labour leader’s idea of a peacekeeping force made up of the ‘coalition of the willing’ was based on a “simplistic” notion of thinking “we have all got to be like Winston Churchill”.
In an interview with the pro-Trump personality Tucker Carlson, Mr Witkoff also praised Vladimir Putin, saying that he “liked” the Russian president. “I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy. He’s super smart,” he said.
Mr Witkoff is leading the US ceasefire negotiations with Russia and Ukraine.
Asked about the plans to create a “coalition of the willing” to provide military security guarantees for Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire, Mr Witkoff said: “I think it’s a combination of a posture and a pose and a combination of also being simplistic. There is this sort of notion that we have all got to be like Winston Churchill. (And thinking that) Russians are going to march across Europe. That is preposterous by the way. We have something called Nato that we did not have in World War Two.”
In an interview with the New York Times published hours later, Sir Keir said of Mr Trump: “On a person-to-person basis, I think we have a good relationship.” He added: “I like and respect him. I understand what he’s trying to achieve.”
He also revealed that on the day of the disastrous meeting between the President Trump and President Zelensky in the Oval Office, which saw the Ukrainian leader berated by his American hosts, that the UK was “under pressure to come out very critically with, you know, flowery adjectives to describe how others felt.”
Sir Keir added: “I took the view that it was better to pick up the phone and talk to both sides to try and get them back on the same page.”
Earlier, the chancellor Rachel Reeves said she has “confidence” the UK can avoid Mr Trump’s potentially devastating economic tariffs due to be imposed within days.
She did not rule out changing or ditching a tax on tech companies in a bid to duck the extra charges on goods entering the US, which experts have warned could shrink the already faltering UK economy.
And she said the President was right to be concerned about countries that had a large trade deficit with the US, but insisted that the UK was not in that position.
