Starmer praises ‘good relationship’ with Trump hours earlier than US envoy slams PM’s peace plan | EUROtoday

Keir Starmer hailed his “good relationship” with Donald Trump simply hours earlier than the US President’s particular envoy slammed the PM’s Ukraine peace plan as “a posture and a pose”.

Steve Witkoff mentioned the Labour chief’s concept of a peacekeeping pressure made up of the ‘coalition of the willing’ was based mostly on a “simplistic” notion of pondering “we have all got to be like Winston Churchill”.

In an interview with the pro-Trump persona Tucker Carlson, Mr Witkoff additionally praised Vladimir Putin, saying that he “liked” the Russian president. “I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy. He’s super smart,” he mentioned.

Mr Witkoff is main the US ceasefire negotiations with Russia and Ukraine.

Asked concerning the plans to create a “coalition of the willing” to offer navy safety ensures for Ukraine within the occasion of a ceasefire, Mr Witkoff mentioned: “I think it’s a combination of a posture and a pose and a combination of also being simplistic. There is this sort of notion that we have all got to be like Winston Churchill. (And thinking that) Russians are going to march across Europe. That is preposterous by the way. We have something called Nato that we did not have in World War Two.”

In an interview with the New York Times revealed hours later, Sir Keir mentioned of Mr Trump: “On a person-to-person basis, I think we have a good relationship.” He added: “I like and respect him. I understand what he’s trying to achieve.”

He additionally revealed that on the day of the disastrous assembly between the President Trump and President Zelensky within the Oval Office, which noticed the Ukrainian chief berated by his American hosts, that the UK was “under pressure to come out very critically with, you know, flowery adjectives to describe how others felt.”

Sir Keir added: “I took the view that it was better to pick up the phone and talk to both sides to try and get them back on the same page.”

Earlier, the chancellor Rachel Reeves mentioned she has “confidence” the UK can keep away from Mr Trump’s doubtlessly devastating financial tariffs as a consequence of be imposed inside days.

She didn’t rule out altering or ditching a tax on tech corporations in a bid to duck the additional prices on items coming into the US, which specialists have warned might shrink the already faltering UK financial system.

And she mentioned the President was proper to be involved about international locations that had a big commerce deficit with the US, however insisted that the UK was not in that place.