25.09.2025

The Donald arrives and is meeted and greeted

All the king’s men

Behind all the talk of the ‘special relationship’, there is radical subordination. What about Trump, the man? Not only was his already huge ego fed, flattered and further inflated: there are the mid-terms and maybe even a third term, writes Eddie Ford

Donald Trump made history last week. As Sir Keir Starmer obsequiously emphasised when he made the original invitation before the media, no other world leader has made more than one official state visit to Britain before.

From Trump’s point of view, his huge ego was fed, flattered and further inflated with all the totally over-the-top flummery, as it was meant to be. As for Starmer, there was just relief that he got away with it with no cock-ups. No doubt he was delighted by the fact that at their joint press conference the US president lent credence to the longstanding claim, so vital to the British establishment, that the ‘special relationship’ sees the UK as America’s first partner in defence, spying and now artificial intelligence.

Trump was described as being on “his best low-wattage behaviour” and not disagreeing with his host about much - except Starmer’s decision to recognise a Palestinian state (a token gesture, as things stand) - and the only moment when he appeared to be teetering away from diplomacy was when he advised Starmer to use the military to stop small boats crossing the Channel (leaving aside the Online Safety Act that continues to be a source of tension between Washington and London).¹

Of course, it is not only about Trump’s ego - it is also about the folks back home, especially the Republican electorate. If you are living in Britain and do not meet many ordinary Americans, you run the risk of forgetting that from their point of view Britain is ‘quaint’ - full of royals, castles and old houses. By contrast, America is a very ‘new’ country - and we are not just talking in pure age terms of a few hundreds of years. The nature of American cities, for example, is a near endless cycle of building and rebuilding. Creative destruction.

So Trump got what he wanted, with a king and a queen, dukes and duchesses, gilded carriages, soldiers dressed up in bearskins and all manner of pomp and circumstance. As for the wider point of view of Britain PLC, the visit could be a boon for tourism. OK, the American dollar is not what it used to be: nonetheless there will surely be massively increased numbers visiting Windsor Castle, Chequers, etc.

Politically Trump will have an eye on the mid-term elections, but also, perhaps, on a third term for himself - sod the constitution, sod the woke lawyers and far-left ‘lunatics’. You cannot rule it out.

Anglosphere

What is particularly noticeable, of course, about the second official visit, compared to the first, was that central London was not touched. The last time Trump went down Whitehall and into Downing Street, there was a big crowd of tens of thousands protesting. Trump could not have missed them. This time parliament was in recess and protests a lot smaller, the Met estimating some 5,000. Protestors from the Stop Trump Coalition, a group of unions and charities, carried signs with slogans such as ‘No to racism’ and ‘Stop arming Israel’. Also, the Socialist Party in England and Wales has to be praised for taking the initiative in trying to organise a school strike by students, even if it did not really catch on.²

A more high profile - if hardly mass - protest, was the giant image of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein projected onto Windsor Castle by the ‘Led By Donkeys’ collective, all while a soundtrack questioning the relationship between to the two men was played on a speaker. For the sin of being off-message and potentially making the US president feel a bit awkward, four people were arrested under the Orwellian charge of “unauthorised projection”.

Other than that, Trump was essentially shielded from the public. He flew in by Air Force One to Stansted, then later was whisked off by Marine One to Windsor Castle for the state banquet - and then to Chequers, also by helicopter.

Interestingly, someone else who was sitting down to the lavish dinner that night was Rupert Murdoch - a familiar face on such occasions - who was, a little while ago, being sued for $10 billion by the US president. Murdoch is, of course, the owner of The Wall Street Journal, which published an article reporting on a suggestive birthday card given to Jeffrey Epstein in the shape of a naked woman bearing what purports to be Trump’s signature.³ Trump has, of course, denied it, but the WSJ insists that it is telling the truth and has filed for the judge to toss the charges. Either way, having pumped up the Epstein scandal for all its worth in order to victimise the Democrats, Trump is now the victim … and, needless to say, he doesn’t like it.

As for Starmer, he got away with his own Epstein scandal, that is the sacking of Peter Mandelson. How deep Trump’s own involvement with Epstein goes is purely a matter of conjecture - this writer has no more idea than anyone else - but you cannot say it is anything other than an acute embarrassment. Whether or not Trump signed a particular birthday card is entirely a moot point - but he could have, which is the real point.

The fact that cannot be denied, as it is on open historical record, is that they both ‘inhabited the same world’ - and, quite frankly, what top politician in the US did not inhabit the same world as Epstein? Bill Clinton certainly flew on Epstein’s private jet, the so-called ‘Lolita express’.

When it comes to all those speeches at Windsor, most are, of course, pre-written by teams of advisors, and that incudes Charles III’s politicians too. Not that we should dismiss out of hand everything that was said. Trump’s stuff about how “we must continue to stand for the values and the people of the English-speaking world”, is something, of course, that Winston Churchill himself pushed (he was Anglo-American). Since the 1ate 19th century there was much talk, from politicians but also writers of literature, of two ‘great nations’ coming together to ‘civilise the world’. HG Wells saw America and the British Commonwealth forming the core of his ‘New World Order’.

Vassal

There has certainly been constant reference to a special relationship since Churchill first coined the term in 1946 … and it is not all guff. After all, there is the ‘Five Eyes Alliance’ that unites the Anglosphere - US, Canada, Britain, New Zealand, Australia - at the top of the imperialist pecking order. This is all too real and it is not only about who spies on who, and who shares what with who. Having said that, it would be wrong to exaggerate what the special relationship actually is - since 1956 and the Suez debacle we are talking about a relationship of radical subordination.

The fact of the matter is that, especially when it comes to the City and the financial sector as a whole, Britain very much relies on the US - that is the ABC of world politics and it absolutely matters in British domestic politics. It is, for example, perfectly correct to make demands like ‘Don’t send arms to Israel’, ‘Break off diplomatic relations with Israel’, and so on. But you need to be clear-headed and accept that by raising such slogans you are immediately in confrontation with the US, and it will respond appropriately. If you look back at relatively recent history, it is not for nothing, for example, that Charles de Gaulle kept saying ‘Non!’ to British membership of what was then the Common Market.⁴ He feared, quite rightly, that the UK would act as a Trojan horse for US imperialism within the European project.

There was a carefully prearranged economic package that was very much for Starmer’s benefit - the US and UK promising to boost financial ties, including by exploring closer alignment of their capital markets. Hence the US private equity company, Blackstone, pledged to invest £100 billion in British assets over the next decade as part of a broader $500 billion investment push across Europe.

Meanwhile US officials said there would be at least $10 billion of investment deals in the technology sector, an agreement on nuclear cooperation and an exploration of “how the deep connections between our leading financial hubs can be maintained into the future”. And Trump brought with his delegation leading figures from Big Tech, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and chipmaker Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, while companies such as Rolls-Royce, GSK and Microsoft attended a business roundtable at Chequers. All this was aimed at boosting UK pretentions of being an AI superpower.

It is important to put this into context, it goes without saying. First of all, a lot of it is not new - rather already preexisting deals and proposals - but, when it comes to countries and global trade, it is in reality not a huge amount. Britain apparently has particular expertise in the field of AI and this American investment is a mixed bag - some of it involves taking over existing British companies, whilst other parts seem to be about investing in existing British companies, but there also appears to be a large element of investment purely for American companies. It is not a straightforward job to decipher these announcements, but a press release talked about “directly” creating 7,600 British jobs - interpret it any way you can.

Nick Clegg - former Tory deputy prime minister and also Meta’s former president of global affairs - has a point when he says that the multibillion-dollar transatlantic tech deal, heralded with great fanfare by both governments, represents “sloppy seconds from Silicon Valley” - essentially “mutton dressed as lamb” that would make the country even more reliant on US tech firms.⁵ He has declared that the relationship between the UK and the US tech sector was “all one-way traffic” and warned that Britain was being “defanged” by simply fostering a greater reliance on the US tech sector. Clegg concludes that the UK is a kind of “vassal state technologically” - the moment British companies start developing any scale or ambition, to use his terms, “they have to go to California”, because this country just does not have the necessary growth capital.