UK could avoid US tariffs that the ‘atrocity’ EU is facing because Starmer has been ‘nice’, Trump suggests – UK politics live

Ed Davey has urged Keir Starmer to invite Commonwealth leaders to a summit in London to discuss coordinated retaliation against the US for the tariffs it has imposed on Canada.

In a statement the Lib Dem leader he said:

We mustn’t let Donald Trump bully the UK or our close ally Canada, who we share a head of state with. Trump’s tariffs on our Commonwealth partner are a shocking way to treat a country that stood alongside both the US and the UK during the second world war.

We need to work with our allies in the Commonwealth and Europe to stand strong against Trump and remind him that we are America’s longest standing friends. So the prime minister should invite Commonwealth leaders to London as soon as he returns from Brussels, to discuss a joint response to the global trade war Trump is unleashing.

Donald Trump is acting like a playground bully and is trying to play our allies off against each other. We must stand together against his attempts to divide us. Only by showing our combined strength can we persuade the president to behave properly with America’s friends.

The British government can’t just sit back and hope Trump won’t hit us with tariffs directly. He’s proven time and again how unpredictable he is and our economy will be hurt by this trade war anyway, which will push up prices for families in the UK.

Judging by what was said at the Downing Street lobby briefing earlier (see 12.41pm), the chances of Starmer agreeing to this are about zero.

At the Downing Street lobby briefing the PM’s spokesperson was also asked if Keir Starmer was happy about reports saying that he was seen by colleagues as HR manager, or someone who was not driving the train.

These were references to two of the most striking quotes in the extracts from Get In, a new book about Starmer’s rise to power by the Times columnist Patrick Maguire and the Sunday Times Whitehall editor Gabriel Pogrund published in the Sunday Times yesterday. The HR manager one was quoted at 11.53am. The train quote is here, attributed to an unnamed Labour insider speaking in the early phase of Starmer’s leadership.

Occasionally they even spoke of their leader as if he were a useful idiot. Said one, referring to the driverless Docklands Light Railway that wound its way through east London: “Keir’s not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR.”

Asked about these comments, the spokesperson said it was not for him to comment on what Starmer was doing when he was in opposition. But he also said:

The prime minister is focused on delivering the plan for change and delivering on the priorities for the British people … this government was elected on a mandate to change the country and put people’s priorities at the heart of delivering that’s why the prime minister’s focused on getting on with the job.

Asked if Starmer was right to designate his voice coach a key worker during Covid, the spokesperson said he could not comment on what Labour did in opposition. Asked if the PM would designate voice coaches as key workers in the event of a future pandemic, the spokesperson said that was a hypothetic question.

But the spokesperson did say, as far was he was aware, Starmer has not used a voice coach since he has been PM.

At the Downing Street lobby briefing the PM’s spokesperson was also asked about president Trump’s desire to buy Greenland from Denmark, and his threats impose sanctions on Denmark if it refuses to cooperate. The spokesperson seemed anxious to say as little as possible on the subject. He said that the UK’s “longstanding on Denmark and Greenland” (ie support for the status quo, and self-determination) was “well understood”. But, with reference to the US, he said he would not get into “hypothetical situations”.

Asked if the Nato article 5 guarantees would apply to Denmark, which could mean the UK and other Nato members help the Danish fight off an invasion (at one press conference Trump refused to rule out using military force to take Greenland), the spokesperson just repeated the line about not getting into hypothetical situations.

Downing Street has inisted that the UK’s trade relationship with the US is “fair”. At the morning lobby briefing, the PM’s spokesperson would not criticise Donald Trump for suggesting yesterday that the UK’s trade relationship with the US is unbalanced. (See 9.34am.) Trump has hinted that he may impose tariffs on British imports, and he suggested that by implying that current trade arrangments are unbalanced (ie, the UK is selling more to the US than it is buying). But the spokesperson did defend the current trading relationship.

Here are the key points from the briefing on trade matters.

From our part, the US is indispensable ally. It’s one of our closest trading partners. We’ve got a fair and balanced trading relationship which benefits both sides of the Atlantic. It’s worth about £300bn, and we are each other’s single largest investors, with £1.2tn invested in each other’s economies.

And we look forward to working with President Trump and the new US administration to build on UK us trading relations to benefit of both our economies …

We’re committed to free and open trade. We have a strong UK-US trade relationship, and as we said before, we look forward to working with President Trump to continue to build on the trading relations support so many jobs, no ties as the Atlanta has.

As the Financial Times reports, whether or not the UK has an overall trade surplus with the US depends on whether you look at US statistics or UK statistics.

Yes, the prime minister has had a really constructive early set of conversations with president Trump, and looks forward to working with him to deepen our trade, investment, security and defence relationship.

• The spokesperson dismissed suggestions that the UK might intervene to help Canada in its trade war with the US. Asked about possible intervention to help Canada, an ally, the spokesperson said he would not comment on other countries’ trade relations, and he stressed the strength of the UK-US trade relationship.

Keir Starmer was forced to change his personal email account in 2022 after the security services investigated a ­suspected Russian hack, the Times reports today.

It is the latest story from Get In, a new book about Starmer’s rise to power and his early days in No 10, by the Times columnist Patrick Maguire and the Sunday Times Whitehall editor Gabriel Pogrund.

Describing what happened to Starmer, Maguire and Pogrund report:

Jill Cuthbertson, his head of office, circulated a note without explanation instructing staff not to email Starmer under any circumstances.

Starmer subsequently changed his email address, which a source said had been “dangerously obvious”, and added two-factor authentication, a fail-safe under which users can access an ­account only after passing two security checks …

Senior advisers from the Labour leader’s office were briefed on the hack at the National Cyber Security Centre, which is part of GCHQ.

Starmer was told that his personal email may have been hacked. Although there was no evidence that emails had been published, the services could not guarantee that sensitive information had not been stolen.

The book contains a series of other revelations, some of them embarrassing, which have been published in the Times and the Sunday Times. They include:

• Morgan McSweeney, who is now Starmer’s chief of staff, privately doubted whether Starmer was capable of being an effective leader in the early days after he took over Labour, the book says. In an extract published yesterday, the authors say:

To a tiny circle of trusted friends, McSweeney later wondered aloud whether his boss was strong enough to weather the storm that engulfed his office in 2021. He had often referred contemptuously to some MPs as members of “librarian Labour”. Too many of them, he felt, seemed drawn to the quiet life: unprepared to confront the Corbynite left and with it existential questions about Labour’s purpose.

At times, McSweeney wondered if even Starmer was a librarian. In private he voiced his fears that his principal might be too timid. The leader was prepared to work with people who either did not understand the urgency of the change required, or appeared inclined to sabotage it.

He told one friend in the early phase of Starmer’s leadership: “Keir’s very bright and picks things up very fast. He’s not completely unpolitical. He has some sense of skulduggery. But not like these people. Angela is political all the time, she manipulates people … All of her people come from Unite. Keir doesn’t realise these are people he cannot do business with.” To another, McSweeney was openly fatalistic, questioning his boss’s lack of politics: “Keir acts like an HR manager, not a leader. What’s the point of circling the wagons if you can’t last?”

• Angela Rayner viewed Prince Andrew as a “nonce” and tried to stop him having the right to stand in for the king as a counsellor of state in the king’s absence, the book says.

• Dominic Cummings encouraged Jeremy Corbyn and his team to back Theresa May’s Brexit deal, the book says. It says that Cummings urged Corbyn to do this because he wanted Brexit to happen, and was not concerned that passing the May deal might split the Conservative party.

• Starmer hired a voice coach, who was designated a key worker at one point so she could help him during Covid. The Tories are suggesting this broke lockdown rules, but Labour denies that.

• Sue Gray, Starmer’s former chief of staff, excluded McSweeney from “accessing official papers and even using Downing Street teabags in a rift inside No 10” shortly after the election, the book says.

Polish PM Donald Tusk says he wants to have UK ‘as close as possible to EU when it comes to security issues’

Jakub Krupa

Donald Tusk, the Polish PM, and a former president of the European Council, has said that he wants to see the UK “as close as possible to the EU when it comes to security issues”. Poland currently holds the presidency of the EU and Tusk said it was his initiative to invite Keir Starmer to the dinner tonight.

This is what he said (in Polish) as he arrived this morning.

I am really keen that, regardless of Brexit and its consequences, to have the UK as close as possible to the EU when it comes to security issues, defence industry, and to find ways to eliminate or reduce barriers in trade between the UK and Europe.

Today is the moment to get as close as possible again.

Q: School absences are still very high. How long will it take to turn that round?

Phillipson says she is “deeply concerned” about this. One child in five is not regulary in school. That damages their life chances, she says. She goes on:

That’s not something that we as government can tackle alone, although there’s a lot that we’re doing. It’s about that partnership between government schools and families. And after the pandemic, that increasing fracturing that we’ve seen – that’s why it’s been so important that we’ve reset that relationship between government and schools, and with the workforce, too.

In terms of what we’re doing at the moment, we’re investing more in mentoring and attendance support, working with schools that are not delivering what they should to drive up attendance rates.

Q: Is it impossible to have a report card system for schools with enough detail to keep the unions happy, but enough simplicity to make it clear to parents?

Phillipson replies:

I think the system should and can do both. I think parents are more than able to process more information than is the case currently provided.

I think it’s, frankly, deeply insulting to suggest that somehow parents either don’t want or can’t understand a wider range of areas that need further improvement, or where there is real strength within the school system.

What this will also allow us to do is to not just focus on areas where schools need to improve, and where we will put extra support behind that, but alongside that, recognising where there is fantastic work within the system.

Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, is giving her speech on school standards now at the Centre for Social Justice.

There is a live feed here.

According to extracts released in advance, she will defend the proposals for a new Ofsted system for assessing schools. She will say:

Our proposals will swap single headline grades for the rich, granular insight of school report cards.

Raising the bar on what we expect from schools, shining a light on all the areas that matter, each given their own grade.

Identifying excellence and rooting out performance that falls short of expectations, so that parents have clearer, better information about their local schools.

Moves to overhaul the way schools are inspected in England have been criticised by headteachers and teaching unions as “demoralising” and worse than the system they are aiming to replace, Richard Adams and Peter Walker report.

Good morning. Keir Starmer will tonight become the first British PM since Brexit to attend a European Council meeting (a dinner, as part of an informal EU summit), and it could not have come at a more difficult time, because it is happening just as Donald Trump is unleashing tariff warfare.

Graeme Wearden is covering the global tariff story on his business live blog.

For the UK, a global tariff war presents a particular challenge. Pre-Brexit, the UK would just been a leading member of the EU camp. In 2016, Brexiters argued that Britain would be better off not aligned to any major trading bloc, and that it would gain most by being able to nimbly duck and weave through the global trading networks. Some Brexiters wanted a straightforward alignment with the US, which now seems to be the official Conservative party position, but most of them were arguing for pick ‘n’ mix unilateralism.

Starmer is about to find out whether this Brexit scenario turns out to be viable, whether, in a trade war between the US and the EU, Britain can avoid the US tariffs that Trump plans to impose on the EU while similtaneously achieving Labour’s goal of improving UK-EU trade by easing some of the trade barriers that have been in place since Brexit. Or whether the UK has to pick a side. Or whether it ends up being crushed in the middle, losing out in both directions.

In comments yesterday, Trump said that he was not ruling out tariffs on the UK, but he implied that he was trying to peel Britain away from the EU, whom he described as “an atrocity”. He was speaking to reporters at Andrews air force base near Washington, as he arrived back from Florida, and he was specifically asked about the UK by Nomia Iqbal, BBC’s North America correspondent. Here is a transcript of the key exchange.

Q: Mr President, which country will be next on tariffs? Would you consider taxing the UK?

DT: Well, we’re going to see what happens. It’ll happen

Q: With the UK?

DT: Might. Let’s see how things work out. It might happen with them.

It will definitely happen with the European Union, I can tell you that, because they’ve really taken advantage of us. We have over $300bn deficit. They don’t take our cars, they don’t take our farm products, they take almost nothing, and we take everything from them – millions of cars, tremendous amounts of food and farm products.

So the UK is way out of line. And we’ll see.

[At this point Trump appears to correct himself, having said UK when he appears to have meant the EU.]

But European Union is really out of line. UK is out of line, but I’m sure that one, I think that one, can be worked out.

But the European Union it’s an atrocity what they’ve done.

Q: Prime Minister Starmer wants a closer relationship with the EU.

DT: Well, Prime Minister Starmer has been very nice. We’ve had a couple of meetings. We’ve had numerous phone calls. We’re getting along very well. We’ll see whether or not we can balance out our budget.

With the European Union, it’s $350bn deficit, so obviously something’s going to take place there

As is often the case with Trump, he managed to combine the language of a teenager (“very nice”, “getting along very well”) with the menace of a gangster.

At some point we will get some sort of response from Starmer, and from EU leaders, although – in public, at least – it may be very constrained and limited.

Jakub Krupa is covering the Europe-wide aspects of the summit on our Europe live blog

Here is the agenda for the day.

10am: Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, gives a speech on school standards.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

2.30pm: Liz Kendall, the work and pensison secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

Afternoon: Keir Starmer holds a meeting with the Nato secretary general at Nato HQ in Brussels. They are due to hold press conference at 3.40pm UK time.

3.30pm: The Home Builders Federation and the National Housing Federation give evidence to the Commons public accounts committee about the cladding scandal.

Evening: Starmer has dinner with EU leaders at the Palais d’Egmont in Brussels.

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