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Donald Trump may invite populist rightwing leaders from Europe such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán to the White House before Keir Starmer, senior UK diplomats believe.
Downing Street and the Foreign Office are eagerly pressing for the prime minister to be at the head of the traditional “beauty parade” of overseas leaders who are called to see the new president in the days after the inauguration on 20 January. Representations are being made via the UK embassy in Washington.
But senior diplomatic figures are warning that Trump may prefer to give the first visits to political soulmates on the hard right, rather than social democratic and left-of-centre Europeans, and are suggesting that Starmer and his team prepare a face-saving response just in case.
In January 2017 Theresa May was the first foreign leader to be invited to see Trump at the start of his first term. May wanted to extract a strong statement from Trump in support of Nato, and to warn him over his closeness to Vladimir Putin.
But the visit became strained when Trump grabbed her by the hand as they walked through the White House, which May, it later emerged, found distinctly awkward.
One former top-rank UK ambassador said there was certainly no guarantee that Trump would honour the special relationship by asking the UK prime minister first, particularly as Starmer has different political views to his own.
“No one knows what Trump will do but I would not be surprised if he asks Meloni first or Orbán as they are from the right. There has already been talk in Trump circles about this dreadful leftwing socialist Starmer government.”
But such a decision would be a temporary embarrassment for Starmer, and not a serious lasting problem, say diplomats.
Peter Ricketts, former UK ambassador to Paris, said he too believed Trump might prefer Meloni or Orbán first.
Starmer’s team needed to be ready, he said. “They need to discount the market. What they then need to say is that we are really more interested in substance rather than who gets the first call. There is always this beauty parade and it is what is said and how they get on that matters.” Ricketts added that the UK’s best chance of getting in early was to be clear in advance about what Starmer and the UK could offer Trump. “There is no point in having a conversation with Trump for the sake of it. He is purely transactional.”
Another UK diplomat with US experience said that if Starmer is granted an audience he needed to keep it light.
“You don’t want to go in with your six-point plan on Ukraine. He will just switch off or interrupt and change the subject.
“Trump likes at least one session one-to-one with no officials. He likes the personal stuff, what do you think of him? What did you make of her? Do not appear needy or ask for too much. He finds that contemptuous.”
Nigel Sheinwald, a former UK ambassador to the US, said most western leaders were likely to have testing relationships with Trump. But this did not mean an initial meeting with Starmer would be confrontational. “Trump can be gracious and he likes the UK and its traditions. Starmer has met him so will know this will be no conventional first meeting. He’ll need to roll with the Trump free flow. I don’t think it will be high noon.”
Meloni met Trump last week for dinner at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago home and he said at the time how much he admired her. “This is very exciting,” he said. “I am here with a fantastic woman. She has really taken Europe by storm.”
