Former British prime minister Harold Wilson used to say that a week was a long time in politics. So is four days, 16 hours and 39 minutes.
That was roughly the gap between the 2am (6am UK) attack on Venezuela ordered last Saturday by Donald Trump, and Downing Street’s confirmation late on Wednesday night that the US president had finally taken a call from the man meant to be his closest military ally, UK prime minister Keir Starmer.
That it took almost five days to reach Trump – and after a second US show of force in the maritime seizure of a Russian-flagged tanker – is being touted by Starmer’s party political critics in Westminster as evidence that, under him, UK influence is waning on the world stage.
“The events in Venezuela have shown that the prime minister is on the outside looking in, not respected abroad,” said Kemi Badenoch, leader of the opposition Tories. She said it was “concerning” that, by Wednesday afternoon, he still hadn’t even spoken to Trump.
The deeper fear in Westminster, however, is that it’s not Starmer who is losing influence in this new age of raw power, but the nation of Britain, no matter who runs it.
Starmer has courted Trump with an unprecedented second UK state visit and lavish praise since the US president’s inauguration a year ago. In return the UK leader has secured carve-outs from some of Trump’s trade tariffs and promises of technology investment.
What he hasn’t got is a seat at Trump’s decision-making table.
Starmer confirmed last week that he was not even consulted in advance of the US strike on Caracas in which the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, was forcibly brought to New York to face drugs charges. The US did, however, tip off certain oil companies.
The UK prime minister was also kept out of the loop last November when details were leaked of an initial 28-point Ukraine peace plan that Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, had been developing following talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin’s regime.
Starmer’s allies say he was subsequently able to influence the process – after Witkoff’s plan leaked, the US moved closer to giving hard military guarantees to Ukraine, for which the UK prime minister lobbied hard.
[ Keir Starmer’s ‘see no evil’ Donald Trump strategy risks making him weakerOpens in new window ]
Britain was tipped off in advance of US air strikes last June on Iran’s nuclear facilities, although UK forces did not take part. But even that early warning was wrapped in a snub, as Starmer had spent the previous few days loudly calling for de-escalation.
This week, the US capture of the Russian-flagged oil tanker, the sanctioned Bella-1, also known as the Marinera, was carried out with direct support from the UK. It supplied a refuelling tanker and gave Royal Air Force surveillance of the sanctioned ship.
Only then, or hours later, did Starmer finally have his call with Trump. They discussed the tanker, Ukraine, Venezuela and Trump’s increasingly bellicose rhetoric about a potentially taking over the Danish-controlled Greenland, a mineral-rich, vast, ice-clad territory.
“The prime minister set out his position on Greenland,” said the sparse official readout from the UK side, which was circulated at 10.39pm.
Starmer didn’t risk upsetting Trump by reiterating in the readout what his position actually was. Presumably, the same thing that he hinted at on Tuesday, when he said he “stands with” Denmark, an ally of the UK and the US through the Nato alliance. The Danes had condemned Trump’s aggressive rhetoric.
Starmer has sought to adapt to this new geopolitical age of hard power over soft influence by deepening a military pivot that began under his Tory predecessors.
Britain is hiking defence spending while cutting international aid, which will drop from 0.7 per cent of the value of Britain’s economy before the pandemic, to 0.3 per cent by 2027.
Meanwhile, spending on its previously hollowed-out defence forces is set to rise from 2.3 per cent of the value of its economy to 2.6 per cent by 2027, with a vague ambition to get it up to 3.5 per cent by 2035.
Britain now understands that if it wants greater influence in an age of raw power, it must beef up.
[ Europe needs to toughen up and stop curtsying to TrumpOpens in new window ]
With the US under Trump mostly doing its own thing in geopolitics, Starmer has tried to boost British influence by deepening co-operation with other countries.
The UK signed a security partnership with the European Union last year. Britain also liaises much more closely with France and Germany – collectively the E3 – especially on security and Ukraine. The three countries announced an agreement this week to put “boots on the ground” in the invaded nation, if a peace deal is signed.
For Britain, however, its most critical partnership by far remains with the US through the Nato military alliance that Washington is supposed to lead.
John Bew, a King’s College academic who advised four UK prime ministers from Boris Johnson to Starmer, told the popular Comment is Freed blog in a piece published this week that “the size and scale [of US power]” is the most important “by a million miles”.
“The vast power of the United States is something that anyone with a strategic brain in any European capital understands very profoundly,” he said.
For Starmer, all that really matters is staying on the right side of that power, no matter how unpredictably Trump wields it or how little it can be influenced from London.