The key to success at Turnberry is getting the President round the course and back on Air Force One with deals, not diversions
Sir Keir Starmer is so indifferent to golf that he became the first Prime Minister in a century to decline honorary membership of the club local to his Chequers residence. That hasn’t put him off a dash to visit Donald Trump’s junket on the windy greens of Ayrshire, with an eye to a couple of prime strategic diplomatic shots.
He hopes to return with the equivalent of an “albatross” – concluding a hole three strokes under par – without getting the nervy “yips”, the term Trump applied to US market jumpiness that followed his tariffs splurge. For sure, there are a lot of yips around; the figurehead of the EU, Ursula von der Leyen, and EU trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič also joined the pilgrimage to Scotland in the hope of ending the threat of a punitive deal on EU trade with the US.
Starmer joins Trump on Monday to flesh out the bare bones of a tariff-relief deal announced with a flourish of the Trump Sharpie pen a couple of months ago but yet to come into force. In essence the UK got lucky that the President fancied visiting his Scottish golf course at Turnberry, which could do with the marketing heft of his personal touch as a second course and luxury hotels in Aberdeenshire near their opening. Combining this with talks with the PM allows for the use of Air Force One and the visit being expensable as a working visit.
It is also an example of how European leaders have largely dropped heated, push-back rhetoric towards the Trump administration, in favour of extracting concessions from a bludgeoning on trade and security, and ignoring the tendency of the 47th president to instruct Europeans on their own business. He told journalists on the flight from Washington, for instance, that Europe needed to grip immigration “otherwise you won’t have a Europe”. Much of this is now factored in as par for the rhetorical course, and best left unanswered.
The UK, for which the President has a soft spot by virtue of family history, an admiration for the royals and a passion for golf courses, has a diplomatic opportunity here to get a clear “win” in the Trump wars.
Yet that, given the wandering attention and tendency to volte-face the President, is never a secure business. The menu at the Turnberry summit in essence consists of four courses, including teeing up the state visit in September. That needs to yield results concrete enough for Starmer to underline that his strategy of careful courtship has brought tariff relief strong enough to drive investment or expansion of companies in the UK. Put less diplomatically, that means doing better out of the final shake-down conversations than the EU.
Shoring up US engagement on Ukraine is a topic Starmer has personally promised Nato secretary general Mark Rutte he will advocate. The darkest subject, and the hardest one to influence the US about, is Gaza and how best to alleviate the starvation of its people. Grim images have jolted Starmer and his Foreign Secretary David Lammy into ramping up rhetorical demands for a swifter end to the IDF military actions to clear out Hamas fighting infrastructure, which hit civilian populations and critical access to food and water.
The Government is facing growing pressure from the left of the Labour Party, and its breakaway Corbyn entity, to end the “anything goes” shrug towards Israel’s high-pressure tactics. This needs careful handling to get engagement from Trump, who is a strong and instinctive ally of the Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. The White House pulled back its negotiators last week, having preemptively signalled optimism that it could broker a deal between Hamas and the Israeli government.
Similar to the run of play in the Ukraine crisis, President Trump has often allowed optimism about his peace-making skills to run ahead of immovable realities: Hamas is not defeated enough to agree to a forced peace and Israel is not yet victorious enough to offer one.
Starmer can however use his moment with Trump to suggest that a more united front on aid and medicine distribution in a growing crisis is worth pursuing, while dodging the subject of Palestinian state recognition – for which there is no plan and no clear borders for such an entity on the table. Even without that dividing line, Trump is less open to supporting European leaders and the UK in pushes to diminish civilian suffering than retaining a “finish the job” posture. The chances of a substantial joint statement in these circumstances look slim.
Domestically, Starmer’s landing zone is a lot clearer. Already the UK has benefited from a reduction on automotive export tariffs from a hefty 27.5 per cent to 10 per cent, and on aerospace products from 10 per cent to zero. But as a 25 per cent steel levy remains in place, and with the steel industry on its last legs and Labour needing to grow a sluggish economy, a tariff advantage over European competitors is a prize worth staying on the President’s sporadic good side for.
Ideally, the Sharpie pen signature on the broad draft trade “deal” (which was really more like a promissory note) would be turned into a firmer signature on the dotted line before Starmer takes a summer breather – that would be a fillip to a tired government and a signal of optimism for UK Plc towards investors. But the golf interstice and September’s state visit also create a “twofer” opportunity few other countries have to keep the conversation flowing with Trump.
On amping up coordinated defence and security arrangements, the opportunity to host Ursula von der Leyen enables western Europe’s “mini Nato” of France, Germany and the UK to show determined co-ordination – and reassures Trump that Europe is prepared to stump up more funding for its security, including buying key weaponry to defend Ukraine from the US.
Yet the subtext of this weekend is that in a new Trump-induced global order, there is also a race afoot for trade advantage between the UK and Europe. The PM, whose formal aspiration is to move closer to Europe, will wish Von der Leyen luck in her quest for a settlement of the US-EU trade baseline at 15 per cent – while hoping that the “Brit factor” with Trump can eke out a better result for the UK.
Any small technical advantage, as the golf aficionados can attest, can make a big difference to the outcome. And the key to success at Turnberry is getting the visitor round the course and back on Air Force One with deals, not diversions – that’s an albatross enough for any leader.