David Cameron meets Donald Trump amid push to shore up Ukraine support

The UK foreign secretary David Cameron has taken the unusual and potentially risky step of travelling to see Donald Trump at his Mar-a -Lago residence in Florida before a visit to Washington DC on Tuesday.

Cameron was hoping to persuade the presumptive Republican presidential candidate to drop his opposition to a new package of aid for Ukraine that is being held up in Congress partly on Trump’s instruction.

It is Cameron’s second visit to the US to try to persuade Republicans that it is in America’s national interest for the Russian President Vladimir Putin not to make any further military advances in Ukraine.

The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Sunday that Ukraine will lose the war if US aid is withheld and Ukrainian air cover is not improved.

The risk is that past bad blood between Cameron and Trump over issues such as Brexit have poisoned the well, and Cameron, for all his persuasive skills, is not the British political leader most likely to make Trump change his mind.

Cameron is scheduled to hold talks with the US secretary of state Antony Blinken in Washington on Tuesday. Although they have much to discuss covering the future of Nato, China and a possible ceasefire in Gaza, the foreign secretary’s key goal is shift Republican thinking in Congress on the relevance of the threat posed by Russia to American interests. A steady stream of European politicians have travelled to Washington on similar missions, only to return frustrated at the growing US indifference to Ukraine’s fate.

The Republican speaker Mike Johnson has so far declined to allow the Ukraine aid issue onto the floor of the Congress, but has indicated he might do so next week when Congress returns from recess. In February, the Speaker refused to