Is the US-UK trade deal a coup for Starmer – or Trump?

It’s musical deals in world politics at the moment. Last week, Donald Trump and his senior officials intimated that a big new trade accord with India was imminent. Yet on Tuesday, Keir Starmer announced that he had reached a major agreement with Delhi. Then, late last night, the New York Times reported that Trump will today announce a beautiful new deal with the United Kingdom. 

The British embassy in Washington has yet to comment. But earlier, Donald Trump had written on social media: “Big News Conference tomorrow morning at 10:00 A.M., The Oval Office, concerning a MAJOR TRADE DEAL WITH REPRESENTATIVES OF A BIG, AND HIGHLY RESPECTED, COUNTRY. THE FIRST OF MANY!!!”

He does like to tease. It now seems as if that “big and highly respected country” is the United Kingdom. 

If correct, the latest news goes against an earlier report in the Guardian that the United Kingdom had been relegated to secondary or tertiary status in the US State Department’s order of negotiating priorities – after the bigger trading blocs of India and the European Union.  

But in this brave new world of Trump tariffs, it turns out that Brexit Britain, with its freedom to operate outside of the Brussels bureaucracy, is able to move faster and announce things. And the arch Remainer, Lord Mandelson, now the UK’s man in Washington, can take credit for that. Funny how things turn out. 

Of course, we know little of the details of the deal. Today’s announcement is much more likely to be the basic framework of an agreement: proper trade negotiations are very intricate and take time. But it seems likely that the United Kingdom will drop or lower its digital services tax on American’s tech giants. In return America could reduce its 25 percent tariff on British steel and cars. And the 10 percent baseline tariff on all British goods could be dismissed, too. 

This would all represent a significant vindication of Starmer’s policy of staying calm and courtly in the face of Trump’s tariff dramas. The Prime Minister’s hand-delivered invitation to Britain from King Charles may turn out to have a been a very shrewd piece of diplomacy. 

Of course, given that Britain has the trade deficit with America, the United Kingdom can afford to be calmer than most nations. Trump may be easily flattered. He’s no sucker, though. 

Britain, still for all its problems the sixth largest economy in the world, has given Trump the quick win he needed after more than a month of global trade confusion following his now infamous Liberation Day announcement in the White House rose garden.  

Trump played nonchalant on Tuesday about his administration’s need for new trade agreements. He said: “Everyone says ‘When, when, when are you going to sign deals? … We could sign 25 deals right now We don’t have to sign deals. They have to sign deals with us.”

But the President loves announcing deals more than anything: the symbolism is what counts. And there’s no doubt his administration wants to follow today’s announcement with a string of further deals – with India, South Korea, Japan and others – in order to calm rattled global markets. 

For the UK, the devil will be in the details: how much will a US trade deal pull Starmer and Mandelson away from their cherished reset with the EU? If Trump is trying to set the world order against China, where will that leave Labour’s attempts to curry favor with the Beijing? And of course the question that keeps every transatlantic trade wonk up at night: will Britons soon be eating chlorinated American chickens?