Trump And Starmer - How Will The Odd Couple Get On?

In a little over a year, if all goes well (from his point of view), Donald Trump will have been inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States.

- SEAN O'GRADY

Back in the White House for a second term of office, he will soon be off on a victory lap, meeting world leaders.

Early calls will be paid to the countries with which America considers it enjoys a “special relationship” – Canada, Mexico, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The UK, which thinks it has a special relationship, along with other European powers, will come a little later.

And then we will see the emergence of the oddest of odd couples ever to have been thrown together by a geopolitical Cupid: President Donald J Trump, and – if current polling is to be believed – the also newly installed prime minister of the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer.

It will be a “marriage” made in hell.

The two guys could hardly be more different, in outlook, in background and, most jarring, in beliefs. Trump is a hereditary billionaire who lived, and lives, in vast, palatial compounds and has tower blocks named after him; Starmer, proudly, was brought up in a pebble-dashed semi, and the nearest he ever came to property development was buying a field at the back of the old family home in Surrey so his mum could create a donkey sanctuary.

I can’t imagine what Trump would make of that when he reads the State Department briefing on the new British premier. Nor that he was named after a 19th-century socialist.

Whereas Starmer is a distinguished lawyer who’s only ever had a ticket for speeding, Trump is currently facing 91 charges on everything from unlawfully holding confidential documents to manipulating the value of his corporate assets and, er, encouraging an insurrection.