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Donald Trump has raised hopes in London that he could have a constructive relationship with the UK, telling reporters he liked Sir Keir Starmer “a lot” and that he could travel to Britain on his first foreign trip since returning to the White House.
Trump, who said he would speak to the UK prime minister “in the next 24 hours”, said of Starmer: “He’s liberal, which is a bit different from me, but I think he’s a very good person and I think he’s done a very good job thus far.”
The US president’s positive comments will reinforce a sense in Downing Street that Trump is not seeking a confrontation with Starmer, despite previous tensions with the prime minister and senior members of his cabinet.
The expectation in London is that Trump will not oppose the appointment of Lord Peter Mandelson as Britain’s new ambassador to Washington; he is due to start in the post next month.
Allies of Starmer also hope Trump will not block a contentious deal in which Britain will cede sovereignty over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in exchange for long-term guarantees over the future of the UK-US military base on Diego Garcia.
Trump did not mention the subject when he spoke to Starmer before Christmas and, speaking on Air Force One, he told reporters: “It hasn’t been number one on my list. I’ll be honest with you.”
The US president told a “gaggle” of journalists on Saturday evening that he got on well with Starmer. “He’s represented his country in terms of philosophy,” Trump said.
“I may not agree with his philosophy, but I have a very good relationship with him.” Trump met Starmer for dinner last September at Trump Tower, in what was seen by both sides as a positive encounter.
Asked where he might go for the first international trip of his second White House term, Trump said: “It could be Saudi Arabia, it could be UK. Traditionally it could be UK.
“Last time I went to Saudi Arabia because they agreed to buy $450bn of American United States merchandise.”
Starmer this month told the Financial Times in Kyiv that he had a “constructive” relationship with Trump, in spite of numerous criticisms of the US president by Labour ministers in the past.
Trump railed against the involvement of Labour staffers in Kamala Harris’s unsuccessful presidential campaign, while tech billionaire Elon Musk — named by Trump as a “waste-buster” in his administration — has called Starmer “tyrannical”.
David Lammy, UK foreign secretary, previously called Trump “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath”, although Lammy said the two patched up relations in the Trump Tower dinner in September.
Downing Street has received no indication from the Trump team that the president will block Mandelson as the UK’s new ambassador, despite the peer’s former role as an EU commissioner and his close links to China. “There isn’t a problem,” said one person briefed on the matter.
Starmer’s team is also confident that Trump will share the view of officials in the US State Department and Pentagon that the Chagos Islands deal is good for US security, even though it has been criticised by US secretary of state Marco Rubio.
Trump’s positive comments about Starmer contrast with those he has made since his inauguration about the EU and Canada, both of which the president has suggested could be hit by punitive tariffs.
Jonathan Reynolds, UK trade secretary, has argued that Britain should not be hit by tariffs, given that trade between the UK and US is mainly services-based and is broadly balanced.
