Trump’s UK state visit could push PM Starmer’s government over the edge

Is Great Britain on the brink of a Trump revolution?

The president’s visit to the United Kingdom this week coincides with signs Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government is crumbling.

Starmer’s own party increasingly thinks he has to go — and if Labour fares as poorly as polls presently suggest it will in local elections next May, Starmer will be out.

If he even lasts that long: Scandals have taken out three of his key aides and allies already this month.

The British right, meanwhile, is showing new signs of vigor.

Up to 150,000 people flocked to London last weekend for the hard-right activist Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” rally.

But perversely, Robinson might be the best friend Labour has — the one man who can divide the right severely enough to keep Britain’s anti-populist left in power.

And egging Robinson on is an American billionaire who has thought about splitting conservatives in this country, too: Elon Musk.

Britain is a battlefield — not only between left and right, populists and insiders, but also between bitterly opposed factions on each side.

The makings of a Trump-style political revolution were plain to see in the triumph of Brexit nine years ago.

Britain’s departure from the European Union was a harbinger of a change sweeping the West, as working-class voters almost everywhere began turning against liberal leaders and parties.

Unfortunately for Britain, its Conservative Party wasn’t prepared to remake itself the way the Republican Party here did under Trump.

Even as the Tories remained in power, they failed to find a leader who could wield it effectively — and Conservative prime ministers came and went like contestants on “The Apprentice.”

Voters got sick of it and in last year’s elections gave Labour a commanding majority in Parliament: 411 seats to the Conservatives’ pathetic 121.

The out-of-power Conservatives are still in disarray, with Nigel Farage’s new populist party, Reform UK, overtaking the Tories in the polls.

Charles III might object to calling Farage a king without a crown, but he’s on an express track to becoming prime minister — if Robinson and Musk don’t derail him.

Starmer’s party won last year not because voters wanted what Labour was selling so much as they wanted anyone but the Tories.

Even with his lopsided majority in Parliament, Starmer has failed to catch on with voters, and now he’s stumbled into a series of personnel crises.

His deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, resigned Sept. 5 after it came out she’d underpaid taxes on her seaside home.

On Monday, Paul Ovenden, Starmer’s director of strategy, resigned over sexually degrading remarks he made years ago on WhatsApp about Diane Abbott, an elderly MP that Ovenden graded in a game of “shag, marry, kill.”

Worst of all for Starmer, the PM last week had to fire Lord Peter Mandelson, his ambassador to the United States and a Labour grandee of the Tony Blair era, after newly revealed emails exposed Mandelson’s consoling messages to Jeffrey Epstein after the notorious businessman’s convictions for sex crimes.

With Labour flagging in the polls, Starmer is staring down the fate that befell so many of his recent Tory predecessors: being deposed by his own party.

But Britain doesn’t have to hold its next general election until August 2029.

Until then, the country is stuck with Labour, and Labour is just plain stuck, sitting in office while popular discontent swells.

Farage, the mastermind of Brexit, stands to inherit everything as Labour and the Tories disintegrate.

Only two things can prevent him from becoming Britain’s Trump.

The Conservatives might yet, after so many years of leadership musical chairs, find someone who can compete with Farage for Britain’s populist voters.

And Robinson, who is more akin to a football hooligan than a political insurgent, might turn his own pet party, Advance UK, into a force that can drain Reform’s momentum.

Musk, who has fantasized about creating a new party to compete with the GOP on this side of the Atlantic, can’t directly bankroll Robinson — but is giving him plenty of moral support.

The Tesla CEO has been outspoken on X about his enthusiasm for Advance (and antipathy for Farage), and made a video appearance at Robinson’s rally.

Robinson’s inflammatory rhetoric and criminal record make him noxious to British voters otherwise eager to hear a populist alternative to Labour and the Tories.

But, as the massive numbers he drew to London demonstrate, he has a significant following.

With the right already facing a choice between Tories and Reform, Robinson threatens to tip the scales back to the establishment, giving Labour a reprieve it doesn’t deserve.

Despite his falling-out with Trump and Farage, Musk should reconsider: Just as America needs Trump, the UK needs Reform.

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and editor-at-large of The American Conservative.