“Congratulations President-elect Donald Trump on your historic election,” British prime minister Sir Keir Starmer posted on X at 3:21am ET on Wednesday. The best that can be said about this tepid concession is that Starmer got his concession in before Kamala Harris. Make no mistake. This is not the result Labour wanted. Starmer’s Labour party was heavily invested in a Harris win and did everything it could to bring it about.
On July 4, Starmer won a landslide majority in the House of Commons with the lowest share of the popular vote (33.7 percent) for a winning party since 1919. Yet within a month, Sofia Patel, the Labour Party’s head of operations, was emailing Labour staffers to “help our friends across the pond elect their first female president”—Patel adding somewhat condescendingly, “Let’s show those Yanks how to win elections.”
More importantly than Labour foot soldiers pointlessly stomping around North Carolina for Harris, Starmer dispatched several of his top aides—including Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s campaign strategist and now Starmer’s chief of staff, and Matthew Doyle, Downing Street director of communications—to brief the Harris team at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Little good did it do.
In September, they were followed by Deborah Mattinson, who had run focus groups for Tony Blair and served as Starmer’s director of strategy until Election Day. She would tell the Harris campaign “to put the ‘hope and change stuff’ to one side,” one of her colleagues told Politico. Both Starmer and Harris are former prosecutors. Like Starmer, Harris would be “relentlessly pushing this message that she’s a prosecutor who has put criminals behind bars,” explained Jonathan Ashworth, director of the Labour Together think tank. That didn’t do much good, either.
Labour’s hatred of the new president-elect is personal and visceral. In June 2019, during the Conservative leadership election, Starmer posted: “An endorsement from Donald Trump tells you everything you need to know about what is wrong with Boris Johnson’s politics and why he isn’t fit to be Prime Minister.” In 2017, Wes Streeting, now Starmer’s health secretary, tweeted: “Trump is such an odious, sad, little man. Imagine being proud to have that as your President,” an insult aimed not only at Trump but also at Americans.
The most sustained anti-Trump vitriol came from the Harvard Law School-educated foreign secretary, David Lammy. In 2017, Theresa May, the then prime minister, planned a state visit for President Trump. “Yes, if Trump comes to the UK I will be protesting on the streets,” Lammy tweeted. “He is a racist KKK and Nazi sympathiser.” In an unhinged rant denouncing the visit, Lammy condemned Trump for his “shameful behavior on the international stage. We stand with the American people, but we absolutely say, ‘our democratic values are opposed to the misogyny, opposed to the racism, opposed to Steve Bannon and the horrible white supremacy he seems to stand for.’”
In an August interview with The Spectator (its new editor, Michael Gove, endorsed Harris as “the lesser of two evils”), Woody Johnson, Trump’s ambassador to the Court of St James in his first term, described Lammy’s description of Trump as a “neo-Nazi-sympathizing sociopath” as “not a wise comment,” but then allowed, “those things happen in politics . . . there’s always a way to recover if you want.”
