If you’re having a weary Wednesday, feeling downtrodden at work or otherwise discontent just revel in one thing: At least you’re not Sir Keir Starmer. The Prime Minister may be labouring under the delusion that a smooth visit for President Donald Trump will show him to be adept at diplomacy and hope that his opponents concession to this fact distract from a domestic deluge of failures. The reality though is that this visit, while initially praised as a coup, will turn into yet another humiliation for our inept PM. It doesn’t matter how well it goes, today is a bleak day for Starmer.
Fresh from cringing over the scandal-ridden departures Peter Mandelson and Angela Rayner, he must now stomach a state visit enjoyed by his precise political opposite who happens to be vastly outperforming him on an issue that is at the forefront of UK voters’ minds: illegal immigration. Whatever one thinks of the way in which Trump has executed his clampdown across the water, it cannot be denied that he has relentlessly pursued the for-some-reason controversial idea that one cannot turn up to in a country illegally and face no consequences.
Starmer, meanwhile, can’t even execute his depressingly unambitious ‘one-in, one-out’ deal with France, the first deportation flight of which was this week rendered impotent.
This news came just days after unprecedented crowds swelled in the streets of London to demand the small boats crisis end at Saturday’s Unite the Kingdom rally.
Whatever Starmer’s opinion on illegal immigration, its perpetrators and their rights, he surely knows what the British people, whose votes he needed to get into power, think.
How crushing it must be to the cultivate polished public persona which sychophants in recent memory praised for its forensic approach to politics only to be outdone on the biggest issue of the day by a perma-tan president with what is rumoured to be an especially unsophisticated diet.
How humiliating it must be to bow and scrape to a man who has been vilified as the modern-day incarnation of fascism by your own MPs.
We can’t feel too sorry for Starmer, not least because his shamelessness is so evident that one could be forgiven for believing that it’ll get him through this difficult time.
But I suspect that even the brass in his neck isn’t robust enough to resist the downward pull of his premiership collapsing before the eyes of the very same world that wrote The Donald off long ago.
If only semi-erotic write-ups in The Times were enough to sustain a political career (if you missed that, it’s well worth reading Caitlin Moran’s 2024 outburst titled: Keir Starmer has turbocharged my arousal levels. I feel fruity).
And if only exasperate exaggerations had been enough to cull Trump from the political field then Starmer might not be in for quite such a rough day.
The poetic justice of this is that if Starmer has simply acted on the British people’s concerns rather than fob them off with his lameduck deal in the hope it would distract us from the droves descending on England’s southern shores then he could have stood before Trump safe in the knowledge that he’d achieved something big to distract from a bleak hellscape of other failures.
Instead he stands before the president of our most important ally as a man castrated by the fence he’s been foolishly straddling since his first day in office.