Starmer’s Wooing of Trump Helps Farage Dodge Anti-Populist Wave

Ed Davey Photo by Carlos Jasso /Photographer: Carlos Jasso/Bloom

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(Bloomberg) — The “Donald Trump factor” may have got Mark Carney’s Liberals over the line in Canada and helped reelect Anthony Albanese in Australia, but there’s at least one place where the populist right is still on the rise: the UK.

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Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform party resoundingly won a set of local elections last week, overturning the UK’s traditional Labour-Tory duopoly and going against the grain of the fate of other Trump-aligned parties in the English-speaking world. 

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Carney and Albanese were able to buck a recent trend against incumbents in part by campaigning robustly against Trump’s brand of politics and casting their respective opponents Pierre Poilievre and Peter Dutton as his domestic equivalents.

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In Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer — who secured a landslide general election win last July, before Trump’s reelection, has stopped short of doing the same with Farage, even though the Brexit campaigner is a personal friend and supporter of the president, who himself polls poorly in the UK. The premier has judged that the US relationship is too important to risk by publicly opposing Trump’s rhetoric or policies too vociferously. 

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That means there’s been no effort by Labour to paint Farage as Britain’s Trump. Instead, Starmer has sought to carve out a role as something of a Trump whisperer in the hope of securing outcomes in the UK’s interests both on the Russia-Ukraine war and on tariffs. 

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So far, the jury is out on whether that approach will succeed, with some in Starmer’s governing Labour Party increasingly nervous that it risks a politically unhappy outcome losing votes both to Reform on the right and the Greens on the left, as well as the centrist Liberal Democrats, whose leader, Ed Davey, has made a point of opposing the US president’s rhetoric.

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The UK was handed a blunt reminder that there may be limited upside to playing nice with Trump when he threatened new tariffs on film studios, a measure that would specifically impact British studios. UK officials were blindsided by the announcement as they continue discussions with US counterparts about trying to reduce the impact of tariffs on Britain. 

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“Any introduction of tariffs would be disappointing, but we will always take a calm and steady approach in our discussions with the US,” Starmer’s spokesman, Dave Pares, told reporters on Tuesday when asked about the film levy. “The film sector is a key part of the UK economy and we will always fight for its interests.”

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US tariffs have already hit Britain’s auto industry — one of its biggest exporting sectors to the US — with a threat of further levies hanging over pharmaceuticals, another industry with high sales volumes across the Atlantic.

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The global tumult since Trump’s inauguration has distracted from some of Labour’s domestic agenda, a senior party aide conceded, suggesting that Starmer needed to find a better way of managing the fallout from the president’s agenda-setting moves that resonated with voters at home.