Keir Starmer is unlikely to land a trade deal with Trump

As President Trump takes office later today, Keir Starmer has assembled his top team, tasking them with landing a trade deal with the United States. It’s a nice idea, sure, but he is not going to get a deal — and he will simply embarrass himself by very publicly failing. 

The Prime Minister has put together a “mini-Cabinet,” made up of the Chancellor Rachel Reeves, the Foreign Secretary David Lammy, the Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds and Jonathan Powell, with help from the UK’s incoming ambassador to Washington, Peter Mandelson. It would be hard to describe any committee that includes David Lammy as the “A-Team,” but still, Starmer is at least putting his most senior people on the case. 

The need for a deal is clear. Donald Trump is so erratic in his approach to government that no one really has any idea what he might or might not do once he is in the White House. But the US is the UK’s largest trade partner, and a 20 percent blanket tariff on British goods could cost billions in lost sales for British companies, a blow which an economy already on the edge of a recession can’t afford. 

There are two big problems, however. First, the Blairite retreads Starmer is relying on carry too much baggage to have any weight with the Trump White House. Powell is the architect of the Chagos deal, which is only going to annoy Trump, and was Sir Tony Blair’s main foreign policy adviser, which will hardly go down well with the isolationists around the new president. Likewise, Mandelson epitomizes the “third way” Clinton-Blair style of politics that the MAGA crowd despise.

The second problem is that everything the Starmer government is doing, from giving away territory, to cozying up to China and the EU, to policing free speech, is only going to antagonize the President. If he were serious about a deal, he would have to change his entire government, and that is not going to happen. 

In reality, by making a big deal of how he is trying to land a trade deal with the US, Starmer is only setting himself up for failure. The best he can hope for is to maintain the status quo, and avoid any additional tariffs or quotas that Trump may decide to impose on the EU. Anything else is simply not achievable. All the PM is doing is making it very easy for Trump to publicly humiliate him — and that will be very painful when it happens.