5 March 2025

Is Keir Starmer in cahoots with Piers Morgan?

Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster.

Keir Starmer has a new adviser on how to maintain a personal special relationship with his capricious new bestie, Donald Trump. The Prime Minister was overheard by a radar-lugged informant inviting Piers Morgan into Downing Street to give him a few tips, after the pair appeared separately on Laura Kuenssberg’s Sunday telly show. Morgan and Trump go back a long way, the British TV star having won the US TV star’s celebrity version of The Apprentice in 2008. The president called Morgan, who was in the back of a cab, for a chinwag after Starmer’s White House audition. Morgan and Trump regularly fall in and out. Starmer should buckle up for a crazy roller-coaster bromance.

Trump taking questions from the UK press pack during Starmer’s visit went much better than the lobby’s sweaty brush with the White House during his first presidency. Back then, British hacks – including Torcuil Crichton and Paul Waugh, who have since swapped the noble trade of journalism for the grubby business of politics as Labour MPs – were barred from entry by a marine sergeant. Day/month dates of birth listed by the Foreign Office didn’t match the month/day file on the officer’s clipboard. The only journo initially granted entry was the aforementioned Kuenssberg: born 8/8.

The PM endured a private dressing down from the Commons Speaker before he flew to the US, I hear. Word is that stickler Lindsay Hoyle read Starmer the riot act as his ministers keep riding roughshod over parliament – forever briefing announcements to the press or disclosing them on the airwaves instead of to the MPs’ chamber. Sitting on a big Westminster majority and his backbenchers largely compliant, Starmer didn’t give a monkey’s. There was no common ground, whispered my snout.

Life as our man in Washington is just grand for Peter Mandelson. The UK ambassador purred while showing British visitors his plush private rooms in the DC embassy. Nothing’s too good for the workers, eh Lord Mandelson? His longevity in public life is astonishing since coming to prominence in Labour’s losing 1987 election campaign and surviving two cabinet resignation scandals. He might be the cat with nine lives that got all the cream again, snarled a resentful critic – but in the court of Trump, another downfall might not be far away.

You read it here first. Labour MPs are muttering that Ukraine allows Starmer to do two things. The first is to break more – or all – manifesto commitments, evidenced by slashing foreign aid to fund higher defence spending. The second is to call an early “war election” instead of waiting until 2028 or 2029. Only time will tell.