The government has done its best to keep President Trump away from the public during his two-day trip here, lest protests sour the good mood that pageantry and parades have put him in. However, it didn’t plan for the determination of activist prank groups. When a picture of Trump standing with the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein was projected onto the walls of Windsor Castle last night, it was deemed to be enough to tip the balance into unlawfulness. The veracity of the image is not contested, and no crime of trespass has been alleged.
Police nevertheless say that four people were arrested on the grounds of “malicious communication”, where the intent is to cause distress to the recipient. One wonders what “Teflon Don”, the man his admirers suppose to be so hard to ruffle, who was hailed by a scattering of adoring fans outside Windsor Castle as the “free speech king”, makes of these arrests in the wake of his arrival – or, more crucially, how it would sit with his base.
It is always a circus when Trump comes to town, and as on his previous visits, the British public have relished the chance to make their feelings felt. The famous “baby Trump” blimp that dogged his previous visits in 2018 and 2019 may not have reappeared in London – the owners gave it to the Museum of London, thinking they would not need it again – but thousands of protesters have turned out to have their say. A reasonable president should take this attention, however negative, as a compliment: US power extends so far beyond its own shores that even people from other countries want to protest vigorously.
Taking it as an insult makes sense to the vain Trump, but it goes against the very history that made the United States great in the first place. The US seceded from Britain in response to its overbearing rules and restrictions. When, in 1791, Americans came to draw up the Bill of Rights, they included in it explicitly both freedom of speech and the right to peaceful assembly – that is, the right to be rude and the right to protest. Yet, here we are.
Free speech – not to be confused with freedom from consequences – indicates a society that can deal with complexity, where people can be both in the right and in the wrong and live to tell the tale, and where one party may have to accept stress, if not distress, in the cause of upholding that higher purpose. In the simpler times of 250 years ago – even before the US existed – police in Britain would not have used the charge of “malicious communication” so much as that of “seditious libel”, or of bringing the King into “hatred or contempt” – blunt legal tools, fashionable under the rule of George III, by which the King and his ministers could police anyone who dared to mock those in power.
What have the last 250 years of history been about if not to demonstrate that freedom of speech is better than what went before? At the time of the United States’ founding, the people of Britain and Europe lived or died at the mercy of dictators and monarchs. Pamphlets were banned, and dissenters were locked up by the courts. People were pilloried for distributing material deemed to be offensive. The French writer, philosopher and satirist Voltaire spent much of his life living in exile.
The most significant thing that the United States has exported to western Europe over the last centuries has been its values of liberty and freedom of expression. It is these that the government may be alluding to to when it refers to the “special relationship” that Trump and his administration have all but smashed. The reality is far more mercurial.
It is unclear whether the Trump entourage complained about the prank, or whether it was a zealous police force that took offence on his behalf under instructions from a government nervous of rocking the (already rocky) tariff boat. One can’t help but wonder what Trump, whisked carefully from one private residence to another away from the prying eyes of the British public, would say. Freedom of speech is, after all, a favourite hobby horse of his. One rule for them, perhaps.
Keir Starmer and his team must have weighed the risks and decided this curb on their own country’s freedom of speech was worth the consequences: for the activists, and potentially for the government itself.
