Trump and Starmer: How on earth will the Odd Couple get along?

This time next year – if polls are accurate – we could have Donald Trump in the White House and Keir Starmer in No 10. What could possibly go wrong, asks Sean O’Grady

One was a hereditary billionaire, the other was brought up in a pebble-dashed semi (Getty/Paramount)

In a little over a year, if all goes well (from his point of view), Donald Trump will have been inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States. Back in the White House for a second term of office, he will soon be off on a victory lap, meeting world leaders.

Early calls will be paid to the countries with which America considers it enjoys a “special relationship” – Canada, Mexico, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The UK, which thinks it has a special relationship, along with other European powers, will come a little later.

And then we will see the emergence of the oddest of odd couples ever to have been thrown together by a geopolitical Cupid – president Donald J Trump, and – if current polling is to be believed – the also newly installed prime minister of the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer.

It will be a “marriage” made in hell.

The two guys could hardly be more different, in outlook, in background and, most jarring, in beliefs. Trump is a hereditary billionaire who lived, and lives, in vast, palatial compounds and has tower blocks named after him; Starmer, proudly, was brought up in a pebble-dashed semi, and the nearest he ever came to property development was buying a field at the back of the old family home in Surrey so his mum could create a donkey sanctuary.

I can’t imagine what Trump would make of that when he reads the State Department briefing on the new British premier. Nor that he was named after a 19th-century socialist.

Whereas Starmer is a distinguished lawyer who’s only ever had a ticket for speeding, Trump is currently facing 91 charges on everything from unlawfully holding confidential documents to manipulating the value of his corporate assets and, er, encouraging an insurrection.

Neither is a stranger to the courtroom – but in very different capacities. Starmer lives by the rule of law and spent time prosecuting criminals; Trump tends to believe the legal system is corrupt, when it finds against him, and spends much of his time in court defending himself against civil and criminal lawsuits. Trump ridiculed a reporter with a physical disability, and, well… that’s not really Keir’s style.

Starmer is an instinctive internationalist, while Trump is an unabashed nationalist, isolationist and protectionist. Starmer is “woke”, in the best sense of the term; his prospective American counterpart, according to a notorious leaked conversation, thinks it’s OK to grab women by their genitals, and has been found liable in a New York courtroom for sexual abuse.

They are as disparate as the characters played by Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon in the classic 1968 movie, The Odd Couple.

To recap, as the IMDb explains, the film is about a clean-living New Yorker newly separated from his wife who moves in with his best friend, a divorced and rather untidy sportswriter, but their ideas of housekeeping and lifestyles are as different as night and day.

Well, Trump isn’t exactly a slob, but he enjoys a burger more than nouvelle cuisine, like the sportswriter played by Walter Matthau; and Starmer is rather more the fussy, fastidious type, in the mould of the Jack Lemmon character. Starmer and Trump aren’t going to be co-habiting, aside from what might be an uncomfortable stay at Chequers or the White House, but they will have to find some modus operandi. That will be difficult.

Of course, they say that opposites attract, but it is difficult to see Starmer striking up any kind of rapport with Trump. Even with Boris Johnson, to whom Trump once paid the unwanted compliment of “Britain Trump”, Trump didn’t do Britain any favours. Theresa May, who Trump appeared to like, treated Trump to something close to a state visit, and the Queen, as ever, laid on the usual fine show for him. But for all the banquets, the pageantry, the photo ops and the millions spent on the futile event, there was no great dividend for the UK.

The fact is that Starmer and Trump won’t even have the same grudging regard for each other, let alone anything like the personal affection, that Felix and Oscar, the characters Lemmon and Matthau played, felt for one another, which survived the irritations and resentments engendered by them having to share an apartment. This is not just about personalities, really, because it’s also about national interests no longer coinciding.

When Tony Blair, ideological ally, pupil and buddy of Bill Clinton, had to make friends with the very different George W Bush, the British attempts to stay onside with the new administration were greatly assisted by a shared set of what would now be termed globalist interests. Bush, on the whole, believed in the same kind of things that Blair did in the international field – the primacy of Nato, the benefits of free trade and spreading freedom and democracy (or at least that was the idea).

In the long, merciless conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, ill-starred as they were, Britain and America fought side-by-side in the war against terror and attempted to nation-build. When, on an early visit to Camp David, Bush was pointedly asked whether the pair had forged a personal bond, Bush quipped: “Well, we both use Colgate toothpaste”.

It worked as a joke, because they did in fact build a fine working relationship, and soon Bush, who had little personally in common with the Labour leader, was backslapping his one reliable ally in the world: “Yo, Blair, what are you doing?”

Historically, the most fruitful transatlantic relationships were based on the pursuit of shared interests and mutual personal respect: Churchill and Roosevelt; Macmillan and Kennedy (an Irish background, but a keen Anglophile); Thatcher and Reagan; Major and George HW Bush.

Assuming he does win the presidency, what Britain needs from Trump the next time round will be much the same as it was first time round – and the British are destined to be just as disappointed again.

The UK needs a firm US commitment to Nato; to stand up to Vladimir Putin over Ukraine; to push Israel towards an accommodation with Palestine and a two-state solution; to stick to the net zero target; and to sign us up to a free trade deal. With his crude “America First” mindset, Trump is not going to deliver on any of those. We know this, because he didn’t do it the last time around – and there’s no reason to believe that Trump will change his mind this time, nor that Starmer will be able to persuade him to do so.

And, by the way, it also seems just as obvious that King Charles, though close to Trump in age, has even less in common with him. You can well imagine His Majesty banging on about the planet and the plight of the Patagonian toothfish to a bewildered Trump. They’d be mutually appalled.

It would be delightful if, against all odds, Starmer and Trump did manage to build a new oddly special relationship, but the divergence in national interests as well as personal outlooks now is too stark. For example, Trump, it would appear, wants to make peace with Putin and let him keep large swathes of Ukraine.

Worse still, a Trump presidency would likely loosen its commitments to European security; does anyone think Trump would fight a war to save Estonia, Latvia or even Poland from Russian subjugation? Trump would pursue a one-sided vision of peace in the Middle East that he shares with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Far from giving the UK a trade deal, he’d be more likely to slap higher tariffs on British exports, just the same as the rest of the world. And we know that, as far as climate change is concerned, Trump’s preference is to “drill, drill, drill”. He might bring the bust of Winston Churchill back into the Oval Office, sentimentally, but that’s about as good as it’s going to get.

Trump would much rather deal with Nigel Farage than Starmer or any other possible British leader, but the harsh truth is that even Farage wouldn’t get much out of a Trump administration. Whatever did emerge would, like the Brexit that Farage and Trump both favoured, actually harm British interests. It is a pretty dismal outlook.

At the end of The Odd Couple, the pair part on friendly terms, and accept that each has learnt something from the other during their uncomfortable time together. That is probably the best that can be hoped for from Donald and Keir’s awkward political co-habitation.