We need European leaders who can stand up to Trump

His America has given up on our continent – so it’s time to stop appeasing the Maga regime

Photo illustration by Omar Marques/Sopa Images via Getty

Say what you like about the Trump administration, it has a gift for memorable phrase-making. Europe is growing too slowly, says the new US national security strategy document – but the bigger problem is Europe’s coming “civilisational erasure”, caused by migration and censorship. This is not a rush of blood to Donald Trump’s head; it’s official thinking which is guiding the next generation, JD Vance and Stephen Miller.

It means, in short, that the Americans are leaving us. We should be unsurprised that the document was welcomed by the Kremlin. For western Europe, including Britain, harsher times are coming. Put to one side the fashion for white-nationalist racism and the irony of a country built by waves of immigrants lecturing us about the evils of immigration. Acknowledge too that we have a problem with the scale and speed of migration, and that we need to rearm more seriously. But doesn’t losing the United States in the years ahead mean we need a radical swerve in political leadership? After so much nervous, whinnying appeasement of Trumpism, isn’t this the moment to reassert our values?

Hark! The herald factions sing

Which takes us to the dance going on for the leadership of the Labour Party. There are barely any innocent Christmas drinks at Westminster. The muttering, the totting up, the trading of possible jobs are everywhere. An entirely serious attempt to replace Keir Starmer as a leader is afoot. As Hilaire Belloc had it, the stocks are sold, the press is squared; the middle class is quite prepared. Well, not the press this time, obviously.

Right now, Downing Street is playing defensive tactics quite shrewdly, using the prospect of an Angela Rayner takeover to scare the Blairites and Blue Labour people witless, and therefore stall the advance of Wes Streeting. Simultaneously, allies of Starmer (there are some) are warning the soft left that Streeting is who they will end up with if they push a leadership challenge.

Everyone now has an interest in what’s about to happen. It is hard, for instance, to see Ed Miliband not emerging stronger. However, there is a real danger right now that the cabinet starts to go to war with itself. Authority is starting to crumble; this is a perilous moment.

It is perfectly possible that by emphasising the chaos of a multi-sided and divisive struggle to replace him, Starmer manages to survive. The hardest calculations are over timing. Those who want Shabana Mahmood need to delay any contest for as long as possible, to give her time. But both Rayner and Streeting have an obvious vested interest in going earlier, before Andy Burnham has time to return to the Commons.

There’s going to be a lot of this over the Christmas break. You may yawn. There is the gleam of a possibility of a radically different kind of Labour government – focused on growth, prepared to unpick the Budget, tilted more decisively to Europe and importing big names from outside the Commons (surely they need Ed Balls?). But, for now, this is the only game in this tinsel-bedecked town.

Roasting les rosbifs

I’ve been giggling at a French thriller on television, Liaison, not because the script is so poor – though it is – but because of its endearing French view of Britain. The plot hops between Paris and London, and you always know when you are in the latter because of the sleeting rain and the appalling food. The British in general look lumpy and badly dressed compared to the haggard but devastatingly attractive French stars. The satisfaction is in having one’s suspicions about how they see us so richly confirmed. Salut.

Writ in water

I was briefly hypnotised earlier this week by yet another vivid graph showing the collapse in newspaper circulations since 2019. I won’t pick out individual titles, but the Great Shrivelling is dramatic.

When I began as a hack, no day started without a turgid black coffee, a couple of ciggies and a greasy pile of newsprint. Why is it that, even now, words inked on to paper, whether in a daily rag, a magazine or a book, engage me more than the identical words on a smartphone or tablet screen? I mean this quite seriously – printed matter stays in my mind for longer, curls round it tighter. I can almost hear more synapses snapping.

Age? I think it more likely that this is the mind’s subliminal recognition that digital images endlessly vanish, clouds of zeros and ones across blank-eyed glass, so that this writer’s thoughts and data disappear in a blink, to be replaced by entirely unrelated material. An endless never-breaking wave. Momentarily, it says, here are these thoughts and facts. Almost immediately, there will be different ones. And so on, ad infinitum.

The medium may not be the message, quite, but it matters to the evolved ape. Separated from the thing-you-can-hold, the moment-arrested, it becomes wash. I remember Keats’s grave in Rome: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” And then I remember that I remember it because it was writ, of course, in stone.

A Hitch-and-run

I’ve been leafing through Christopher Hitchens’ memoirs and discovered the most venomous description of what we used to call the flyover states: “The hookworm and incest belt.” See? We can dish it out too.

[Further reading: Labour is now the least trusted party in Britain]