Joe Biden met Keir Starmer at the White House. It was uncomfortable to watch

Today, the 61-year-old new prime minister of the UK and a man old enough to be his father met at the White House to discuss the defense capabilities of much of the world. This was the first official sitdown meeting between Keir Starmer and Joe Biden — the former just days into his premiership, having won the election on the 4th of July; the latter currently fighting both the opposition and a sizeable portion of his own party in the lead-up to a November election — but not the first time they’ve talked. Biden spoke on the phone to Starmer at length following Labour’s landslide victory (a call that was broadcast on Starmer’s Instagram in a very West Wing manner). He also shared a handshake and some brief words with the PM at the NATO family photo and summit earlier.

The Oval Office sitdown was a little more cozy. Starmer reportedly brought along an Arsenal shirt to gift the president during their talks (making Biden the most controversial fan since Osama bin Laden) and though the shirt was nowhere to be seen in the room, football was on the agenda. Biden opened with a joke, saying that the soccer news — the very recent England semi-final win against the Netherlands — was “all because of the prime minister”. They batted around that idea for a few seconds — there hadn’t been an England semi-final win while the Tories were in power, and so on and so forth — until it became stale and Starmer moved on the conversation with, “I thought we had a really good meeting today at NATO.”

“Very good,” Biden concurred, but didn’t add much more than that.

Starmer then cycled through the usual stuff a British prime minister has to say at an event like this – it’s good to have “a bigger NATO, a stronger NATO, with the resolve that we need”;