Trump’s state visit conduct wasn’t ‘undiplomatic’ – it was a return to the straight-talking politics of the Thatcher-Reagan era

You may not like the way he tweets or the way our own politicians have adopted the same startling directness, but there is surely a virtue in national leaders saying things as they see them

This has been a week, for the UK at least, when we have come pretty close to visual overload, what with all the red, white and blue pageantry rolled out for Donald Trump and the commemorations, both here and in France, for the 75th anniversary of D-Day. And it could be argued that both of these highly staged, largely formal, occasions showed off the UK, in different ways, at its best.

But the coincidence of these two events illustrated something else: the significance at such times of the spoken, written and now tweeted word. The D-Day anniversary was a stellar example of the different registers complementing each other: national leaders not only intoning the euphemistic lexicon of remembrance so familiar from Armistice Day commemorations – the courage, the fallen, the sacrifice – but reading out private letters from the time; which often depicted a more personal, but more earthy and tragic reality, as did the reminiscences of the veterans themselves.

Then there was the Queen looking unusually relaxed, noting almost in an aside that she too was of the wartime generation, and they were a resilient bunch.

If the D-Day anniversary was commemorated with language in complementary registers that largely reinforced each other, the US president’s state visit was another matter. The supreme split-screen moment for the visuals came on Tuesday afternoon, when Trump and Theresa May were giving their press conference in the splendid surroundings of Durbar Court at the Foreign Office and the leader of the opposition had just finished his address to the protest that had wended its way along Whitehall to Parliament Square. There was less than a central-London block, indeed, really only a couple of walls, between the two, yet these were two different worlds.

You could even argue that there were three worlds: the largely scripted formality of the news conference, the largely spontaneous venom of the protesters, and Trump’s world where there were no protests to be seen, or at least none worthy of his attention. Then, again, perhaps he was – unusually – just trying to be diplomatic.

Because what was striking was that the visual split screen had its verbal equivalent. For the most part, the US president was on almost exaggerated best behaviour. Both he, and the UK choreographers of his visit, seemed to have learnt from the missteps of his visit the year before.

The Trump family did not get in the way of the Queen. The president turned up on time; he spoke softly, he showed deference, and he lavished compliments (including to the prime minister he had previously scorned). There were times when it almost seemed as though the Queen – of course, she has spent a lifetime presenting a careful public face – might be enjoying his company. (Prince Charles, and the younger royals, it must be said, less so.)

But there was another Trump, inimitably out in the popular press and the Twittersphere. In his interview for The Sun, he barged into the Conservative leadership contest to back Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt. He (again) condemned May for her handling of the Brexit negotiations, and appeared to criticise the Duchess of Sussex.

In a tweet, put out as he arrived, he lambasted Sadiq Khan, as a “terrible” mayor and a “stone cold loser”, though to be fair, Khan had got in first, describing Trump’s language as akin to that of “the fascists of the 20th century”, and gave as good as he got afterwards.

All of which posed a question that was raised in different ways and at different times during the visit and boiled down to what should be considered appropriate conduct. Was it unacceptable or rude for opposition leaders to boycott a state banquet and address a protest rally instead?

Was it unacceptable or rude for Trump to lay into the London mayor as he did? Indeed, should he have carried on tweeting at all after he became president? When George W Bush, an early email adopter, came to office in 2001, he was told that his emailing was at an end until he returned to private life. No such strictures could be applied to Trump.

And it can make for a very bumpy diplomatic ride. Tweeting to, or about, unpredictable national leaders (such as North Korea’s Kim Jong-un) can be seen as a risky, even reckless, approach. Some of what Trump has said about May has been plainly insulting. But I have to admit that, not just as a journalist but as a citizen, I see more pluses than minuses about such plain speaking.

One feature that positively leaps out from Thatcher: A Very British Revolution, the current BBC documentary series about Britain’s first female prime minister, is how direct and unambiguous she was, from the very first, in her language. She left no doubts about where she stood; no one listening to her was in danger of getting the wrong end of the stick.

In subsequent years, that preference for plain speaking was lost, and what took its place was a resort to euphemism and “spin” that has hobbled UK politics pretty much ever since.

Our lawyers and diplomats are recognised as world leaders in the art of drafting, and our adversarial system of justice, as of politics, can favour linguistic facility over actual facts: one person’s nuance may be another’s distortion.

The Blair government’s arguments before the Iraq War are a case in point. Whether there was any actual lying can be argued, but there was certainly what might be called verbal sleight of hand. At the more primitive end was the “dodgy” dossier that supposedly showed that Iraq still possessed, and was prepared to use, weapons of mass destruction.

At the very top level was the UK-drafted UN Security Council Resolution 1441, which was passed only because supporters and opponents of war could interpret it in opposite ways. On the one hand, this was a triumph of drafting; on the other, it enshrined an ambiguity that backfired when the UK failed to gain sufficient support for the so-called second resolution – which left the war without UN cover.

One of the reasons why Gordon Brown was (briefly) welcomed at No 10, is that he was seen as a straight-talker – too straight for his own good, though, it turned out, when he was caught calling Gillian Duffy a “bigoted woman” – while Tony Blair had been a master of verbal manipulation.

Arriving back in the UK in 2001 after almost 10 years abroad, I remember being horrified by what seemed the abject degradation of the political language that now bore scant relation to reality.

Nor, it has to be said, were the PR-whizzkid, David Cameron, or the vocally timid May much of an improvement. A few minutes of viewing the Margaret Thatcher documentary offers an instant reminder of the difference, in terms of the political language, between then and now.

So, you may not like the fact that Trump tweets, or the way he tweets, with its frequent crudeness and non-respect of persons – or the way others, including our own politicians, are adopting some of the same startling directness that was seen during the premierships of Thatcher and her US counterpart, Ronald Reagan. But there is surely a virtue in national leaders, especially, saying things how they actually see them, if not quite how they actually are.

Is there not a virtue, too, in using language that brooks no misinterpretation, whose primary aim is to say something, and not merely to please? Has the pendulum now swung too far the other way with Trump? Maybe. But, given the pernicious prevalence of “spin”, there was quite a long way it needed to go to bring words and reality back into sync.