Trump’s Love of UK Royalty Is Starmer’s Best Hope of Making Ties Special Again

As soon as Donald Trump and Keir Starmer spoke for the first time last year, the nature of the US president’s affinity for Britain was clear.

“I love the UK, I love the Royal Family, I love the King,” he told Starmer within minutes of the British premier calling him to offer his support in the days after Trump was shot at during a campaign rally.

That affection has been leveraged by the British state in the months since Trump retook the White House, in order to curry favor with an unpredictable leader prone to picking fights with allies that often result in diplomatic and economic strains. 

During his visit to the White House in February, Starmer brandished a hand-signed letter from King Charles III inviting the president to a “really special, unprecedented” second state visit to Britain, after he was hosted by Queen Elizabeth II during his first term. Trump loved it: “That’s a great, great honor.” 

According to royal biographer Hugo Vickers, the prime minister “was playing to Trump’s Achilles heel,” with King Charles used as bait to lure him across the Atlantic. “The reason there’s a second state visit is because Starmer wants it for political reasons, so he’s using the King as his diplomat,” said Vickers. 

Since then, the visit has been fast-tracked to this week. It comes on the back of a turbulent period for Starmer, most notably with his dismissal of Peter Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador in Washington after the emergence of damaging emails detailing Mandelson’s links to deceased convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Whether the timing of the president’s trip is fortuitous or not will soon become clear.

It will be Trump’s second visit in two months, after the UK helped facilitate his trip to Scotland in July, which the president mostly used as an opportunity to promote his two golf resorts.

It may well be seen as the brazen deployment of a diplomatic tool unique to the UK, and perhaps a few other monarchies, but it’s paid dividends for Starmer’s government. Britain was the first country to strike a trade agreement with the US that saw it avoid the same severity of tariffs faced by other allies.

Starmer’s charm offensive — alongside others by the likes of NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and Finland’s President Alexander Stubb — has also arguably helped soften Trump’s approach toward Ukraine, where at times he’s appeared to lean more into Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s view of the conflict than Europe’s.

The visit will primarily take place at Windsor Castle to the west of London, rather than the usual venue, Buckingham Palace, where Trump’s first state visit took place in 2019. While that’s ostensibly due to ongoing renovations, it also has the benefit of avoiding the president being confronted by mass protests that have been called against him and his MAGA policies.

Away from the capital, the president and First Lady Melania Trump will be met by the King and Queen Camilla in the grounds of Windsor, before taking a carriage procession through the estate together with the Prince and Princess of Wales. 

The Palace is keen to deploy William more in diplomatic events. Trump took a shine to him when they met in Paris last year, saying they had a “good talk” and describing the prince as “very handsome.”

Later they will have a private lunch in the State Dining Room with other members of the Royal Family, before visiting St George’s Chapel to lay a wreath on the tomb of the late Queen.

Trump has visited Windsor before, in 2018, where he met Queen Elizabeth, but it was for a working trip following a NATO summit rather than a grander state occasion. When he disembarks from Air Force One, he will become the first US president to have two state visits: Barack Obama and George W. Bush are the only other presidents to have had formal state visits to the UK.

The evening will see Trump dining at a grand banquet of around 150 guests including celebrities and businesspeople, when both the president and king will deliver speeches. The visit includes a bilateral meeting with Starmer at Chequers, the prime minister’s countryside residence, where the pair will view Winston Churchill’s archives. 

They will also host a business reception, with Sam Altman of OpenAI and Nvidia Corp.’s Jensen Huang expected to attend armed with plans to pledge support for billions of dollars in UK data center investments. 

The chief executives of GSK Plc, Microsoft Corp. and Rolls Royce Plc will be among those to witness the signing of a US-UK tech partnership covering areas like artificial intelligence, while there will also be a nuclear deal to make it quicker for companies to build reactors in both countries.

The leaders will then have lunch of British dover sole served with peas and potatoes, with American key lime pie for dessert.

One break with tradition will be that Trump won’t address the UK Parliament, as most heads of state do on such trips. Parliament will be in recess, conveniently avoiding the potential for a large protest in Westminster — and the risk of Trump hectoring Britain’s lawmakers on issues like their differing approaches to Israel, free speech and trade.

There’s still room for awkward diplomacy, though, particularly when Starmer and Trump give a joint press conference at the visit’s close.

UK officials are particularly worried about Trump confronting Starmer on his pledge to recognize Palestine if Israel doesn’t commit to a ceasefire in Gaza. Starmer’s office will make the final decision the same week, ahead of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, but wants to avoid announcing it until after Trump departs to avoid a political clash. 

It’s one example of where, despite the close bond the America First president and Labour prime minister have built, their deep ideological differences risk tension in the so-called special relationship. Vice President JD Vance singled out the UK in his inflammatory speech to the Munich Security Conference, asserting that the “basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular” were under threat. 

Trump on his summer visit to Scotland described London Mayor Sadiq Khan — from the same political party as Starmer — as a “nasty person.” Starmer interrupted Trump to point out that they were friends as Trump began to say that Khan has “done a terrible job” in his role.

There’s also the hangover of Starmer’s sacking of Mandelson, who was integral to the state visit planning. Some British officials fear that Starmer’s decision appears to show he believes that those with ties to Epstein shouldn’t be in high office — when Trump, too, is facing questions over his Epstein links.

The Royal Family isn’t immune to differences in opinion and approaches to the president. King Charles has been a vocal advocate for tackling climate change, and visited Canada earlier this year to open Parliament and mark the start of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s tenure as Trump was threatening to make Canada the 51st US state. While Charles didn’t address Trump’s comments, many saw his attendance as a symbolic gesture of solidarity in his role as Canada’s head of state.

Still, the king will seek to avoid any such awkwardness this week, when his focus will be to entertain and charm the president with all the pomp and ceremony that comes with a state visit. Charles will take inspiration from his mother, the late Queen, whose “enormous role all through her life was as a conciliator,” said Vickers.

During Trump’s first state visit, the Queen spoke of how their two countries’ cultural, economic and security ties unify the US and the UK. “Mr President, as we look to the future, I am confident that our common values and shared interests will continue to unite us,” she said in her speech at the state banquet.

“To have somebody who just talks a bit of quiet common sense and tries to smooth things down rather than stir things up, that’s what a constitutional monarch does, unlike a politician or even a president,” Vickers said.

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