Sir Keir Starmer has proved himself to be a rather more adept negotiator on the world stage than his detractors would suggest. The timing was partly fortuitous, but it remains the case that he concluded three advantageous trade deals last month, with India, the United States and the European Union.
He will need those diplomatic skills this weekend at the G7 summit in Canada. The geopolitical order has been shaken by Israel’s attack on Iran, and there is an urgent need for the leaders of the world’s rich democracies to show unity and resolve in response.
Solidarity and resolution are hardly the qualities associated with Donald Trump, however, and even before the bombs fell on Tehran there were serious differences between the US president and his fellow leaders.
Never before in the history of the G7, which goes back to the oil crisis of 1973, has one of its members sought to annex another, for example, as Mr Trump has offered to do with Canada. While most leaders of G7 nations seem to share a broadly similar outlook, there is one who does not. It is almost as if it is a summit of the Group of 6 plus 1.
So far, it has to be said that Sir Keir has managed to deal with the unpredictable ego of the US president more adroitly than most. For all that some Britons might find it emotionally satisfying for their prime minister to tell Mr Trump to his face what they think of him, there can be no doubt that it is in our national interest for Sir Keir to lay on the compliments with a trowel.
That is the approach that secured agreement in principle to exempt the United Kingdom from at least some of Mr Trump’s tariffs. If Sir Keir has to continue that approach in order to get those exemptions locked down, then so be it.
The prime minister will also need to work hard to try to keep the US president from straying too far from the G7 consensus on support for Ukraine – Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, has invited Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, to join the summit in Kananaskis, Alberta. Mr Trump will find it harder to try to bully Mr Zelensky in a setting in which the US president is so obviously outnumbered.
There is the linked subject of Nato’s future, and the forthcoming discussions about Nato’s European members raising their defence spending to take up more of the burden of supporting Ukraine from the US.
Then Sir Keir will also want to lobby Mr Trump to keep the Aukus submarine agreement between the US, the UK and Australia, about which some members of the US administration have been sceptical.
Finally, there is the Middle East, where a gap has opened up between the US and UK responses to Israel’s attempts to ensure that Iran does not acquire nuclear weapons. The Israeli strikes were a rebuff to Mr Trump, who seems to have imagined that his diplomacy aimed at restraining the Iranian nuclear programme was making progress.
Yet the US president – despite Marco Rubio, his secretary of state, initially standing back from the onslaught – quickly declared his support for the “excellent” attacks. The British government’s response has been – rightly – more circumspect, and the leaders of the other G7 countries have likewise also called for restraint and de-escalation.
On his arrival at the resort in the Canadian Rockies, Sir Keir will be walking a tightrope. Let us hope that he is as successful as he has been up to now.
