Donald Trump has agreed to stay in touch with Keir Starmer after he steps down from No 10 despite his increasingly tense relationship with the UK prime minister over recent months.
After meeting at the Nato summit in Ankara, Starmer suggested that maintaining links with the US president would be part of his continued responsibilities to the strategic relationship between the two countries.
Despite fears that Trump could further destabilise the military alliance at the summit with an angry tirade over defence spending, Starmer said the UK had swerved criticism over its contributions.
He told reporters: “Let me just share with you the closing words of President Trump … who thanked everybody there for the spirit of the meeting and the unity of the meeting. So far as funding is concerned, speaking only for the United Kingdom, President Trump thanked us for the contribution we made over many years in material terms.”
The US president had shared a chart with fellow Nato leaders of their defence spending in real terms, Starmer said, with the UK in second place over the last decade, although the country is 12th out of 32 members on spending as a proportion of GDP.
Earlier this week Trump suggested that the UK was a “deindustrialised welfare zone” and was in decline, blaming it on Starmer’s “weak leadership”, the latest in a series of attacks on the prime minister after he refused to get more involved in the US’s war against Iran.
But despite nearing the end of his time in office, Starmer declined to comment on the latest salvo. “Having resisted so far, I’m not going to be tempted at the last hurdle into starting commenting on what other people may say or not,” he said.
“We have turned this country around in the last two years, where we’ve got a stronger economy, stronger public services, stronger defence and security … Our international standing two years after I took office is undoubtedly in a much better position than it was when I took over.”
Despite tensions in recent months, Starmer said that over the longer term the pair had “got along really well”. He added: “There’s no doubt about that, and we discussed a moment ago, we’ll stay in touch …
“That is important in terms of the relationship between the UK and the US, because it is a really important strategic relationship for the UK. I saw it as my duty to make sure it’s a relationship that worked.”
Starmer also declined to rule out standing for the role of Nato secretary general in future, saying he was focusing all his attention on his current job. “I’m not thinking about what comes next until I have discharged that duty.”
However, he repeated his warning to Andy Burnham, the prime minister-in-waiting, not to tweak the fiscal rules to pay for extra defence spending in coming years. “I think the fiscal rules are really important. They are undoubtedly amongst the reasons that we’ve stabilised the economy.
“The caution I have with extra borrowing is that we are already spending £1 of every £10 that we spend as a government servicing our borrowing, and therefore it is not for me the sensible place to go for extra defence money.”
Senior UK defence officials, however, suggested that a Burnham administration may be prepared to look at doing more within the existing fiscal rules to increase military spending.
“I know that he’s expressed views on it previously, so I’m sure that they will be thinking about it,” one senior official said. “In truth that’s definitely going to be a judgment that the next prime minister will have to make.”
The senior official also suggested that Burnham might look again at the idea of war bonds, previously rejected by the Treasury as it amounted to extra borrowing. “We definitely need to look at all of these things, and we’ve got to find the best mechanisms of generating the kind of resource that we are going to need now and in the future,” they said.
On the plane back to the UK on Wednesday, Starmer told reporters that Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, gave him, and all the other leaders, a surprising choice of gift: a revolver engraved with their names and a box of live rounds.
But the prime minister had to leave his in Ankara. Even though it came with a note from Erdogan waiving export controls, it remained illegal to import it to the UK. Instead, it stayed behind with the British embassy for decommissioning.
