What has gone under-mentioned as this country emerges blinking from a state visit for Donald Trump in which, somehow, everything that was meant to go right has, and everything that could have gone wrong was dodged, is quite how lowly everyone had to make themselves to get us there.
From the moment Sir Keir Starmer handed the US president a letter from the King when he visited the White House in February, the word that has sprung to mind for many has been “cringe”.
There was the moment at which the prime minister groped – twice, desperately – for his wife Victoria’s hand outside Chequers; there were Rachel Reeves’s dead eyes as she asserted how much Britain and the US “like each other” at Lancaster House, and Trump giving Starmer the kind of back slap a football coach reserves for his most improved under-12 player as he condemned Hamas, but not Israel.
The visit was, by all accounts, a success. The UK has secured a £150bn investment from US tech firms, although how much of that money is going to go towards AI-ing people out of their jobs is no doubt something they’d rather we didn’t think about. And nobody managed to get near enough to Trump to embarrass him with evidence of how low most people in this country’s opinion of him is.
Like a spooky horse, Trump was blinkered from seeing the British public throughout his visit. He was kept away from London, and the only members of the public to get near to the festivities were a group of Squirrel Scouts – four and five-year-old children, presumably unlikely to pose any diplomacy-endangering questions about, say, Jeffrey Epstein.
And so we got the bizarre spectacle of seeing footage of Trump and the King processing to Windsor Castle in a royal carriage as… nobody looked on. I would argue that a carriage procession is feudal-era nonsense anyway, but it is especially nonsensical to do it without any of the public watching, which is the entire point of royal processing: to be witnessed and to do the little wave.
It’s no surprise that Trump seems to have enjoyed his little prince-for-a-day excursion. He’d probably like the kind of unimpeachable power and inalienable right to respect that being a royal entails. I suppose we can’t complain too much about the absurd pomp and circumstance surrounding Trump’s visit because this is just about the only bang we get for our tax bucks from having a royal family: being able to give visiting foreigners a biscuit-tin, theme-park experience of jolly old Britain to make them feel special enough not to hit us with crippling tariffs and the like.
And on the one hand, I do understand that diplomatic relationships need to be maintained. But do they need to be maintained like this, in a way that is expressly above and beyond what other presidents have ever received? Is there anything edifying in seeing Keir Starmer, looking like a cardboard cut-out of a prime minister, every cell in his body visibly screaming, “Do not give a weak handshake” in photos? Or in chumming up to an aspiring dictator, in case he might look kindly on our nation later on when he makes his latest crackpot decision about trade, because we showed him enough golden decor and the Duchess of Cambridge smiled at him?
All we do in hosting Trump in such a lavish and brown-nosing manner is bolster his already gigantic sense of his own importance. Who knows: maybe he’ll now manifest a third state visit. If we’ve learned anything about Trump over the past – God help us – nine years, it’s that what he says, and what he wants, is what happens.
