{"id":680852,"date":"2026-07-08T18:26:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T18:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/680852\/"},"modified":"2026-07-08T18:26:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T18:26:09","slug":"starmer-says-trump-wants-to-stay-in-touch-after-he-steps-down-keir-starmer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/680852\/","title":{"rendered":"Starmer says Trump wants to \u2018stay in touch\u2019 after he steps down | Keir Starmer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Donald Trump has agreed to stay in touch with Keir Starmer after he steps down from No 10 despite his increasingly tense relationship with the UK prime minister over recent months.<\/p>\n

After meeting at the Nato summit in Ankara<\/a>, Starmer suggested that maintaining links with the US president would be part of his continued responsibilities to the strategic relationship between the two countries.<\/p>\n

Despite fears that Trump could further destabilise the military alliance at the summit with an angry tirade over defence spending, Starmer said the UK had swerved criticism over its contributions.<\/p>\n

He told reporters: \u201cLet me just share with you the closing words of President Trump \u2026 who thanked everybody there for the spirit of the meeting and the unity of the meeting. So far as funding is concerned, speaking only for the United Kingdom, President Trump thanked us for the contribution we made over many years in material terms.\u201d<\/p>\n

The US president had shared a chart with fellow Nato<\/a> leaders of their defence spending in real terms, Starmer said, with the UK in second place over the last decade, although the country is 12th out of 32 members on spending as a proportion of GDP.<\/p>\n

Earlier this week Trump suggested that the UK was a \u201cdeindustrialised welfare zone\u201d and was in decline, blaming it on Starmer\u2019s \u201cweak leadership\u201d, the latest in a series of attacks on the prime minister after he refused to get more involved in the US\u2019s war against Iran.<\/p>\n

But despite nearing the end of his time in office, Starmer declined to comment on the latest salvo. \u201cHaving resisted so far, I\u2019m not going to be tempted at the last hurdle into starting commenting on what other people may say or not,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have turned this country around in the last two years, where we\u2019ve got a stronger economy, stronger public services, stronger defence and security \u2026 Our international standing two years after I took office is undoubtedly in a much better position than it was when I took over.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite tensions in recent months, Starmer said that over the longer term the pair had \u201cgot along really well\u201d. He added: \u201cThere\u2019s no doubt about that, and we discussed a moment ago, we\u2019ll stay in touch \u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is important in terms of the relationship between the UK and the US, because it is a really important strategic relationship for the UK. I saw it as my duty to make sure it\u2019s a relationship that worked.\u201d<\/p>\n

Starmer also declined to rule out standing for the role of Nato secretary general in future, saying he was focusing all his attention on his current job. \u201cI\u2019m not thinking about what comes next until I have discharged that duty.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, he repeated his warning to Andy Burnham<\/a>, the prime minister-in-waiting, not to tweak the fiscal rules to pay for extra defence spending in coming years. \u201cI think the fiscal rules are really important. They are undoubtedly amongst the reasons that we\u2019ve stabilised the economy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe caution I have with extra borrowing is that we are already spending \u00a31 of every \u00a310 that we spend as a government servicing our borrowing, and therefore it is not for me the sensible place to go for extra defence money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Senior UK defence officials, however, suggested that a Burnham administration may be prepared to look at doing more within the existing fiscal rules to increase military spending.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know that he\u2019s expressed views on it previously, so I\u2019m sure that they will be thinking about it,\u201d one senior official said. \u201cIn truth that\u2019s definitely going to be a judgment that the next prime minister will have to make.\u201d<\/p>\n

The senior official also suggested that Burnham might look again at the idea of war bonds, previously rejected by the Treasury as it amounted to extra borrowing. \u201cWe definitely need to look at all of these things, and we\u2019ve got to find the best mechanisms of generating the kind of resource that we are going to need now and in the future,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n

On the plane back to the UK on Wednesday, Starmer told reporters that Turkey\u2019s president, Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan, gave him, and all the other leaders, a surprising choice of gift: a revolver engraved with their names and a box of live rounds.<\/p>\n

But the prime minister had to leave his in Ankara. Even though it came with a note from Erdogan waiving export controls, it remained illegal to import it to the UK. Instead, it stayed behind with the British embassy for decommissioning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Donald Trump has agreed to stay in touch with Keir Starmer after he steps down from No 10…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":680853,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-680852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=680852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680852\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/680853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=680852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=680852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=680852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}