Starmer seriously thinks the UK doesn’t need to choose between US and EU?

Such ‘cakeism’ will be sorely tested when Trump lands in the White House next month and introduces tariffs, writes John Rentoul

The prime minister opened his Mansion House speech on foreign policy with another of his over-emphatic declarations. “The idea that we must choose between our allies, that somehow we’re with either America or Europe, is plain wrong. I reject it utterly,” he said.

His next sentence mocked him: “Attlee did not choose between allies.” Actually, he did. Clement Attlee refused to take part in the early steps of European integration – and regarded the transatlantic alliance as the key relationship.

Those who venerate the Myth of the Sainted Attlee might be horrified by his response to Harold Macmillan’s application to join the Common Market in 1962: “I confess I feel gravely disturbed. We are allying ourselves with six nations of Europe … Four of those we rescued only 20 years or so ago from domination by the other two. Now we go cap in hand to the people whom we thought we beat in war.”

Keir Starmer is right to say “the national interest demands that we work with both” America and Europe. But the idea that Britain never has to choose between them is pure “cakeism”. Starmer is unlike Boris Johnson in many ways, but sometimes his logic is similar, claiming that we can eat our cake and still have it.

At other times, Starmer sounds more like Tony Blair, whose favourite rhetorical device was to declare that he would adopt the policy of neither one extreme nor the other, but would take the middle way. Blair, too, thought he didn’t have to choose between America and Europe – and in his innocent early days may even have believed his idealistic platitudes about acting as a bridge between the two.

Until the bridge collapsed under the weight of imminent war in Iraq. Although Europe was divided by the war, with Spain and the “New Europe” of the east supportive, most EU members were opposed. Blair faced a choice with no middle option.

If Starmer faces a similar choice on trade, there can be little doubt that he would take the opposite option, of siding with Europe. Britain does more than twice as much trade with the EU as it does with the US – and there are realistic options for making UK-EU trade easier, whereas any fantasy of a UK-US trade deal quickly runs into the obstacles of chlorinated chicken, hormone-dosed beef and gridlock in Congress.

The prime minister should be delighted by the news on Monday that Donald Trump has appointed Warren Stephens, a big Republican donor, as ambassador to the UK. Stephens is a strong advocate of free trade, having once said: “Capitalism and free trade have lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system in history.”

But that doesn’t mean that the threat of US tariffs has gone away. It was only two weeks ago that Stephen Moore, the president-elect’s adviser, gave voice to a rather more authentic expression of Trump’s worldview: “Britain has to decide – do you want to go towards the European socialist model or do you want to go towards the US free market?”

In practice, Trump’s bluster tends to be worse than his bite. He had the same protectionist instincts the last time he was president – and introduced only limited tariffs. But he is a bully and will want to make Starmer squirm.

It was striking, for example, that Starmer’s Mansion House speech included a reference for the first time to “negotiations” to end the war in Ukraine. Trump’s impending inauguration has certainly concentrated minds around the world on the end game in Ukraine.

But if Trump does force Starmer to choose between prioritising trade with the US or that with the EU, the prime minister is bound to choose the EU.