Keir Starmer secures first meeting with Donald Trump | Politics | News

Keir Starmer secured his first meeting with Donald Trump on Thursday after pushing for a meeting with both presidential candidates in New York.

He called the opportunity to meet Trump “good” and added that he still hopes to meet Vice President Kamala Harris before the November election.

Before meeting the former president, he told reporters that he planned to use the meeting “to establish a relationship between the two of us.”

“I am a big believer in personal relationships on the international stage. I think what really matters is that you know who your counterpart is in a given country, and that you know them personally, and that you get to know them personally.

‘So it’s really in that direction. I won’t go into what we’ll actually discuss, of course, but that’s the purpose of it, as you would expect, ahead of the election.

“I should probably add that what I mean is that our camp, our embassy, ​​has good relations with both camps and has had for a long time.

“So it is not the beginning of something, it is the continuation of the good relations that have existed with both camps, and that is very good what the embassy has done.”

Asked how he felt about the British Prime Minister during a press conference tonight, President Trump joked: “Well, I’m going to see him in about an hour, so I have to be nice!”

“I actually really like him. He rode a great race, he did very well, it is very early and he is very popular.”

Asked whether he will be able to stand up to Donald Trump over disagreements if he wins the White House, Sir Keir said the special relationship between Britain and the US “will always be above whoever has the specific holds office”.

He argued that the special relationship is “probably as strong now as it ever was” amid the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.

He dodged whether he would repeat Theresa May’s habit of not standing up to the optimistic former president, saying he would not speculate on possible disagreements that could arise after the election.

Sir Keir and the Labor Party have had to make special efforts to strengthen ties with Mr Trump, given David Lammy’s hate-fueled words about the then president before he became foreign secretary.

In 2018, Lammy launched several verbal attacks on the then-president, writing that he is a “misogynistic, neo-Nazi sympathizing sociopath.”

He continued: “He is also a major threat to the international order that has been the basis of Western progress for so long.”

However, his views have since changed. He said in a speech earlier this year that he and Donald Trump could find “common cause,” suggesting that as a “good Christian boy” and “little conservative” he shared some Republican views.