By Mauricio Alencar

Copyright cityam

President Donald Trump will look out of Air Force One’s windows to see England’s green and pleasant land before arriving this afternoon. He will surely be giddy with excitement about his meeting with the King and a very royal carriage procession inside Windsor Castle’s grounds tomorrow. He will also be pleased to see his unlikely friend with a “beautiful” accent, Keir Starmer.

When he watches the world’s most powerful man coming down the stairs of his personal plane, Starmer would do well to reflect on how each of the two world leaders’ starts have gone. Whereas Trump has managed to force through dozens of policies on everything from the economy to January 6 pardons by being brutally unapologetic about his desire to Make America Great Again, Starmer has largely failed to deliver on his Plan For Change.

As Trump steps onto the tarmac at Stansted, among London’s less glamorous airports, nearly all of Starmer’s woes will temporarily vanish as he slips into statesman mode. His friendship with the US president has been one, perhaps the only, source of success. Businesses, bond traders and Britons are reliant on Starmer’s appeal to the president if they wish to keep exports flowing, key multilateral organisations running and Russian missiles away from Britain.

Downing Street will be hoping that after a successful state visit the UK public could become slightly less desperate for a Change of Plan and looks afresh at Starmer’s Plan for Change. No 10 and Buckingham Palace have carefully designed Trump’s itinerary to champion Great Britain and boost the image of the country’s government in the eyes of its visitors and spectators around the world.

Over Wednesday, Trump and Starmer will be far away from Westminster as they will be greeted at Windsor Castle by the Royal Family, a flypast of US and UK fighter jets and, later, enjoy a state banquet altogether.

On Thursday, Trump’s team including treasury secretary Scott Bessent, vice-president JD Vance and commerce secretary Howard Lutnick are expected to be joined by tech bros Sam Altman and Jensen Huang, as well as the financiers Larry Fink and Stephen Schwarzman, in a visit to the Prime Minister’s estate at Chequers. On the agenda is the future of AI, international trade and saving the West – not exactly light topics for a conversation over an afternoon tea. But a “tech partnership”, an agreement on building 12 nuclear reactors and investment deals for financial services firms will be welcomed as essential to reviving growth hopes on this side of the Atlantic.

If the state visit goes as smoothly as is hoped by Number 10 strategists, by Friday morning Starmer could be waking up to boosted business confidence and a reminder to his party critics that he’s quite good at this kind of high politics, even if he’s hopeless at the low kind.

Reality will hit hard

But at some point over the following few days, reality will come crashing down on Starmer. The real test will be whether the Prime Minister’s advisers have offered him a plan to sidestep the several landmines surely poised to injure him in quite an undignified way between Windsor and Chequers.

If not on Thursday afternoon – when a press conference at 2.30pm is likely to feature awkward questions on Peter Mandelson’s sacking given Trump’s alleged contributions to Jeffrey Epstein “birthday book” – Starmer will be haunted by his political ills and Trump will be disturbed by some critic, naysayer or irritation.

Their trade deal will receive more attention and scrutiny than at any time before. UK plc is following developments closely. It has not been amused by Starmer’s handling of Mandelson in the last week, with the British Chambers of Commerce’s head of trade policy William Bain telling City AM firm owners and investors valued “certainty and predictability” in policymaking above everything else. In lacking an ambassador, and with the loss of a big-name diplomat who was credited with smoothing relations between the UK government and the Trump administration, friction between Starmer and Trump may become easier to see as the pair stand side-by-side and Britons watch the scenes unfold from home.

Business chiefs will, first and foremost, highlight that the early US-UK trade deal still has not been finalised and lacks firm commitments. There is little clarity on what “preferential treatment” the UK has secured from tariffs on pharmaceuticals as well as whether zero tariffs on steel can be agreed, despite UK imports only getting taxed at a 25 per cent rate rather than 50 per cent.

It is also unclear whether the digital services tax – a two per cent levy on mainly US tech companies – will remain in place after this week amid attacks from the Trump administration. Officials at the European Union will be ready to respond quickly to any exemption secured by the US, with the Labour government hoping to play a double act by opening trade with both economic powers without seeing regulations conflict across the two competing relationships, which would subsequently put UK trade under threat.

Similarly, a US-UK tech deal that undermines the EU’s adequacy test on transparent data provision could result in tech companies suffering the breakdown of digital services trade across the English Channel, researchers at the think tank UK in a Changing Europe said. But the bigger “trap”, according to analysts, is Starmer’s government failing to align itself with a larger economic bloc as it instead takes a cake-ist approach to trade, which risks failing to show that the UK is not adopting a coherent strategy and signing up to a single rulebook.

Keir Starmer’s difficult mornings ahead

Starmer may also have to wake up to Trump ranting about the decline of the UK on Truth Social. His summer stay in Scotland prompted him to complain about windfall taxes on energy companies, net zero and controls on free speech. These issues will creep into conversations again over Wednesday and Thursday, along with illegal immigration, unnerving diplomats who have worked on building ties over the course of months.

Russia’s attacks on Ukraine and Israeli strikes in the Middle East could also turn the visit on its head at any time while Reform UK campaigners will be waiting in the wings to capitalise on any Labour mishap. The Farage-alligned philosopher James Orr and new Reform member Danny Kruger already boast closer ties with Vance than many at the top of the UK government claim to have.

The real risk is that the whole summit could belly-flop before it even begins. On Tuesday morning, a three-hour emergency debate will be held in the House of Commons to unpick what Starmer knew when about Mandelson’s emails to Epstein. Questions and answers laid out in parliament on the record will likely set the tone for the rest of the week.

Upon leaving the UK, President Trump’s views on Starmer – and the UK – may end up souring due to public and media hostility, chaos and disagreements about the future course of the two countries.

The meeting that could revive Starmer’s political career could also destroy it once and for all.