Boris Johnson is an unlikely role model for Keir Starmer. The Etonian bluffer and the stolid lawyer could hardly be more different, but there’s one thing the former prime minister got right. Five years ago this week, Johnson spoke to the country in a direct, televised address that conveyed the seriousness of the threat Britons faced and steeled them for the pain to come. Now Starmer needs to do the same, not because there is a pandemic on the way – but because Donald Trump is already here.
That six-minute video message of Johnson’s was transformative. It signalled that we had entered a period of emergency in which almost everything we had taken for granted – including basic human liberties – would no longer apply. “Stay at home,” he said and, with few exceptions, we did. Johnson framed the sacrifice as an act of patriotism, implicitly drawing on memories of blitz-spirit solidarity: “I know that as they have in the past … the people of this country will rise to that challenge.” They did. Hence the fury when it emerged that Johnson and his circle had not themselves made the sacrifices that they had demanded of everyone else, a fury that drove him and eventually his party from power. But it all began with that TV address.
Now imagine if Starmer seized this current moment the same way. The right time would have been straight after Trump humiliated Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, when people could see with their own eyes a US president destroying the post-1945 order. But it’s not too late.
Each day brings fresh evidence of the Trump menace, whether it’s the US finding ever more insulting ways to signal that it is abandoning its allies across the Atlantic – including by repeating its intention to seize, in Greenland, a European territory – or wrecking world trade through tariffs imposed apparently on a whim. Starmer could pick any evening to clear the TV schedules and describe the threat.
“I want to speak to you tonight because, in the clash of dictatorship against democracy on our continent, the US has changed sides,” he might begin. He could explain that, with Washington lining up with Vladimir Putin, there must now be a change in how Britain defends itself – and in much else. He could warn that this new era will demand a great deal from us, that it will not be easy. He could close by promising that we will get through it together, much as we have before: “We are a proud, independent nation and we will stand united in the face of this new peril.”
Imagine the space that would create. Having cast Trump as a clear and present danger, he would brace Britons for a new age of rearmament, one that’s surely needed if Britain is to protect itself in a world where the US behaves more like an enemy than a friend. As for paying for those weapons, Starmer would have described a new situation in which the previous rules that bound British politics no longer hold.
So just as the pandemic enabled Johnson to persuade Conservatives, historically allergic to state intervention, to spend hundreds of billions to keep the economy functioning, so Starmer could make his own case for radical action, necessitated by the whirlwind of Trump.
At its most drastic, it would have seen Rachel Reeves announce in her spring statement on Wednesday that she was discarding the limit on borrowing she had imposed on herself. If that would have risked driving up interest payments on UK debt, she could have chosen a different way to pay for the guns: a wealth tax on the richest.
Instead, and having failed to depict this as a moment of national emergency, she did neither, the government preferring to place the burden of increased defence spending on the most vulnerable, whether at home, via Reeves’s cuts in benefits for disabled people and the poorest, or abroad, with the slashing of the aid budget.
But if Labour were to describe the Trump threat with sufficient force, persuading voters that everything has changed, new possibilities would open up, including steps that would once have been taboo. Looking into the camera, Starmer could tell the country that we voted for Brexit nearly a decade ago when the world was very different. That world has vanished. Now that the White House is seemingly bent on starting a global trade war, we need to stand with our nearest trading partners, not stand apart from them. Just as there was no room for old Thatcherite bromides about the small state when Covid struck, so there is no room for Faragist fears about the single market now.
Of course, I understand why Starmer hasn’t done it. I know why he won’t go on television and say we face an orange hurricane from the west. It’s the same reason that UK ministers, even when confronted with the Signalgate transcripts that confirm that the most senior figures in the US administration regard America’s allies in Europe as “pathetic” freeloaders, repeat pieties about the “special relationship” as if nothing has changed. The UK’s military and intelligence capability is so bound up with that of the US that even the idea of divergence from Washington makes their heads hurt.
But Trump’s behaviour leaves little doubt: decoupling will have to happen eventually. Better to begin the process now, aiming for a future in which both we and our European neighbours acquire more hard power and our deepest cooperation is with them, the Nato partners who remain true to the alliance.
For now, the UK’s leaders are, naturally, scared. They fear the wrath of Trump that would descend if the slightest squeak of criticism were to be heard from London. Starmer’s preferred strategy has been to tell the playground bully that we’re not like the other kids and that we should be spared his blows.
But at some point, we need to get the message. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy and pal, did his best to say it loud and clear this week when he dismissed Starmer’s plan for an international “reassurance” force to support a ceasefire in Ukraine as “a posture and a pose”, calling it the “simplistic” result of the PM and others thinking “we have all got to be like Winston Churchill”. In that same interview, Witkoff said how much he “liked” Putin, whom he praised as “gracious”, “super-smart” and “straight up”, before revealing that the Russian leader had commissioned a portrait of the US president as a gift.
The penny should be dropping by now. When it comes to Trump, Starmer should follow the immortal advice given to Miranda in Sex and the City, accept that “he’s just not that into you” and act accordingly.
Yes, it will be fraught with risk to acknowledge that out loud and to act on it. But it will yield benefits, too. For one thing, as Mark Carney is demonstrating in Canada, there is a powerful national solidarity, a defiant patriotism, to be harnessed in standing up to Trump. But, more importantly, it will be freeing, allowing Starmer and his government to describe a reality that everyone can see and do so truthfully. It could also open up political territory long closed off to Labour, whether on taxation or Britain’s relationship with Europe. But first, Starmer must look us all in the eye – and describe the new menace that is rapidly reshaping our world.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
100 days of Trump’s presidency, with Jonathan Freedland and guests. On 30 April, join Jonathan Freedland, Kim Darroch, Devika Bhat and Leslie Vinjamuri as they discuss Trump’s presidency on his 100th day in office, live at Conway Hall, London, and live streamed globally. Book tickets here or at guardian.live
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