What will happen to the US and UK ‘special relationship’ with PM Starmer in charge?

In British elections, things happen at warp speed. There is no languid two-and-a-half-month interregnum from the close of polls to the taking up of the reins of power, as there is in the US. Prime minister Starmer will move into Downing Street imminently, and before he’s worked out how to use the remote control or found out where the loos are, he’ll be on a plane to Washington for the Nato summit next week.

There, the most newly minted Western leader will take his first baby steps on the world stage. But – to put it mildly – it’s going to be weird. There’s going to be Keir Starmer, with his whopping, great big mandate, shaking hands with Joe Biden who – how can one put this gently –is looking a touch past his sell-by date. In November, as things stand (and it is my belief this might change), Keir Starmer will be either spending his premiership dealing with a US president who appears mentally compromised or one who is morally compromised.

Never mind, as the politicians are wont to tell us, they will deal with whoever is the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and from the grand Lutyens House a mile or so away on Massachusetts Avenue, the British ambassador, Karen Pierce, will be doing her best to smooth the path of the new PM and his fledgling administration.

It would be conventional now to talk about the“special relationship” but it is a phrase I came to hate in my eight years in the US. It is something the British – and our press – obsess about but which the Americans don’t think twice about. The travelling British press pack when Starmer goes will be on high alert for anything that could be construed as a snub. Will there be a bilateral? Or will it just be a corridor brush past? How long will it last? Did Macron get