For a prime minister who has perhaps had his hardest two weeks in office, Donald Trump became the unlikely elixir of a tough political run.
It’s not a sentence I imagined writing in the run-up to this state visit – particularly when the UK ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, was sacked from his post but days ago – but this state visit will go down as a success for a PM in dire need of a win.
From the pomp and pageantry of the first day, to the hard business at Chequers, every detail was carefully choreographed to appeal to the president – including a stay in Windsor Castle, and a bagpipe chorus welcoming him (in a nod to his Scottish heritage) into Sir Keir Starmer‘s country retreat.
Starmer went all out to flex all the soft power he could deploy to garner some hard results.
There were real wins. The showstopper US-UK tech partnership was hailed by both sides as a new phase in the special relationship, as Trump gathered some of the world’s biggest tech billionaires – Nvidia chief Jensen Huang and Apple’s Tim Cook – to attend the signing of the deal at Chequers.
Number 10 added up a series of planned commercial decisions to tout the prospect of £150bn of inward investment.
How that shakes down remains to be seen, but it undoubtedly gave the PM a positive story to sell ahead of the November budget, as the government spoke of thousands of tech and nuclear jobs being created in red wall seats like Hartlepool and Blyth in Northumberland.
A prime minister doing business on behalf of hard-working Britons is the message No 10 wants you to take away from all of it. Because for a Labour government on the ropes,…
