Trump was as desperate for a deal as Starmer – and here’s why

On 24 June 2016 I stood on the 9th tee at Turnberry in Scotland. The fabulously manicured green was a 100 or so yards away – and beyond that was the lighthouse that makes this hole one of the most iconic in golf. But I wasn’t here to play golf.

It was the day after Brexit and Donald Trump – then just a presidential hopeful – had come to inspect his Scottish bits of real estate and make the case for this course to host The Open. But the Brexit vote had captivated him. He loved it for what it was and what it symbolised. If the boring old Brits could vote to leave the EU, then surely in a few months’ time they could vote for me to become president, he reasoned with himself.

On that day, he mused on the great deals the US would be able to make with Britain now that it was free from the shackles of Brussels.

Well, the deal that has finally been delivered isn’t great – and it’s taken the best part of nine years. It’s worth just arching an eyebrow here on the irony that the deal has been delivered by all those who argued against Brexit – Peter Mandelson, our ambassador in Washington, and Keir Starmer, the rock solid remainer – where a succession of pro-Brexit PMs had failed.

But from that day on 24 June, I would go on endless TV and radio programmes to opine that any future trade deal would be on America’s terms. They held all the cards (to use one of Trump’s favourite metaphors). We would need it much more than they; we would have to go cap in hand and accept an agreement on their terms. Cue spats about chlorinated chicken and hormone-injected beef.

There has been a lot of commentary since Trump and Starmer got on their crackly transatlantic phone call (should someone tell them about Zoom or Teams?) to lavish praise on each other, whether this was a major capitulation by Starmer.

But this is to miss a central point, which I have not seen argued on this side of the Atlantic, prone as we are to taking a Brit-centric view of things. The fact of the matter is that in the last few weeks the calculus has shifted fundamentally.

The raw politics of this is that Trump needed this trade deal every bit as much as Starmer. Maybe even more. And if you look at it through that end of the telescope you can see why, finally, the deal came together after all previous efforts had failed.

Trump had started a war where it was beginning to look like he was the biggest casualty. Since the chaos of his self-styled Liberation Day, the news has gone from bad to worse – for him. The stock markets had cratered, the bond markets had gone a bit “yippy” – to use the Trumpism that he deployed when he announced one of his many chaotic U-turns on the tariffs policy. Worse still were the GDP figures that came out on day 101 of his presidency, which showed that the US economy had actually shrunk in the first quarter of this year.

Bosses of some of America’s biggest companies had been to see him to warn that the US would soon be seeing empty shelves and prices soaring. He was told to stop his attacks on the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, because it was further roiling the markets.

But perhaps most critically of all, Trump was seeing his own approval ratings crater. If you look at US polling data, there is normally a honeymoon period for incoming presidents that tends to last until Labor Day in September. It is then that things tend to go south.

Trump’s numbers, though, are already underwater. I saw it when I was in Detroit last week and went to his thinly attended 100-day rally. Sure, those that were there still talked about him as being their saviour – but there was a wariness, uncertainty, a doubt that I hadn’t seen before. And with good reason: all these people would have been looking at their 401Ks – their pension pots – and seen how much they had gone down in value since Trump had embarked on his trade war.

So it can’t be overstated how much Trump needed this, too. He needed to show that there was more than just bombast and bluster behind his rhetoric. This deal will be weighed as much for its political importance as for any economic benefit it brings to the US or the UK.

The Trump administration has talked about doing 90 trade deals in 90 days. That will never happen. Not a chance. These deals take time – and remember the UK deal is an outline agreement. There are hard yards that need to be fought over before something more substantial emerges. But the British are now not just supplicants in this process.

It does represent something of a victory for Starmer. His super chumminess, the flourishing of the letter from the king, and the more emollient approach do seem to have paid off. Is the deal perfect? No. But thousands of jobs in the auto industry were at imminent risk. They will be secured by this agreement, at least in the short term. And, yes, although cars made in Britain will cost 10 per cent more than they used to, European vehicles will be costing 25 per cent more in the US market until such times as the EU does a deal with Trump – which might still be some distance off.

There is also the timing and sequencing. Trump’s antipathy to the EU is profound. If Britain had done a deal with Brussels before the US (which it’s hoping to do in the next couple of weeks), might that have made Trump more antipathetical to reaching an agreement with us? It’s possible. Starmer, for the moment, is still walking that tightrope of refusing to choose between Brussels and Washington.

Of course, he has faced attacks from his Tory opponents. Kemi Badenoch saying on the one hand that he’s been “shafted” in this deal with the US – but on the other, it had all been made possible by the hard work that the previous Conservative government had done.

Which reminded me of one of my favourite Jewish jokes about the two women sitting in the restaurant and one calls the waiter over to complain that the food is disgusting, while the other then adds “and such small portions”.