Donald Trump is “capable of looking past” things people have said about him in the past, one of Keir Starmer’s closest allies has said. Pat McFadden, a Cabinet Office minister, said he thought the new US and UK governments would “get on well” despite the history of senior Labour ministers criticising Trump. David Lammy, the foreign secretary, said while he was a backbencher in 2018 that Trump was “woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath” and a “profound threat to the international order”.
Wes Streeting, now the health secretary, previously called the president-elect an “odious, sad little man” and Ed Miliband, the environment secretary, called him a “racist, misogynistic self-confessed groper”. Presented with some of these comments, McFadden told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “If Donald Trump didn’t speak to people who have said things like that there’d be a lot of people he wouldn’t be speaking to.” McFadden, who is a close ally of the prime minister, told LBC: “He’s capable of looking past these things. He’s looked past them before. “Even his biggest backer, Elon Musk, a few years ago was saying Donald Trump should hang up his hat and walk off into the sunset. “His vice-president, who’s sitting alongside him in the White House for the next four years, mused once whether Trump was another Richard Nixon or America’s Hitler.” He added: “I think there is a bigger point that we can miss in reading these things out is that the alliance and the friendship between the US and the UK is really deep and enduring, and I see it in government on a practical day-to-day basis on defence, security, intelligence, trade – on lots of fronts.” McFadden refused three times to say whether he believed Trump had neo-Nazi or Ku Klux Klan sympathies. “The relationship between the UK and America is really important,” he said. “I think there’s another point that we shouldn’t miss here. Because of the timing of the two elections both being within a few months of one another we now know the character of the two governments on both sides of the Atlantic for the next four years.”
Starmer phoned Trump to congratulate him on his victory on Wednesday night. A Downing Street spokesperson said the prime minister “offered his hearty congratulations and said he looked forward to working closely with President-elect Trump across all areas of the special relationship”. The two leaders “fondly recalled their meeting in September, and President-elect Trump’s close connections and affinity to the United Kingdom”, according to the spokesperson. Starmer and Trump had a two-hour dinner in New York in September, which Lammy also attended. The foreign secretary has sought to build links with senior Republicans allied with Trump. Trump and Starmer discussed the situation in the Middle East but there was no mention of Ukraine in the readout of their call. The president-elected has said he wants to end the war in Ukraine quickly and criticised the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for not making more concessions to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.