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Your guide on what Trump's second term for Washington, Business and the World means
For Sir Keir Starmer, it was a “really fantastic historical day”: a moment of American-Uk Redolente cooperation at the 80s earlier when the inhabitants of Great Britain dragged the bruant to celebrate the allied victory over the Nazis.
The reality was a little more prosaic: an agreement between London and Washington, sealed in a surprise of the eleventh hour telephone call and delivered in chaotic circumstances, the main aim of which was to limit the damage of the World Trade War of Donald Trump.
The Prime Minister watched his beloved football club Arsenal on television on Wednesday evening when he was to break the match: the American president was at stake.
British officials thought that the long -term agreement sought had been concluded, but Trump was looking for two late concessions on agriculture. “We accepted one of his requests and not the other,” said a British official.
The official information sheet of the White House boasted of the agreement “would considerably increase access to American beef … and almost all the products produced by our large farmers”.
Wednesday's call crowned weeks of increasingly intense talks, British officials going to Washington to join UNITED KINGDOM Embassy staff in negotiating the agreement.
Aside from Lord Peter Mandelson – the UK ambassador to Washington who was radiating in the Oval Office during the announcement – The Chief of Starmer Trade Relations, Varun Chandra, also played a key role in the finalization of the agreement.
The self -proclaimed “calm and proportionate” response from Starmer to Trump's commercial provocations – which included the threat of this week to impose price On foreign films that would have struck the British world class production industry – was seen in London for keeping discussions on the right track.
But in the end, British officials concluded that Trump needed a trade agreement as much as the United Kingdom. “Most of the Trump administration was to show the markets they can conclude,” said a Starmer ally.
While the dry ink, there will now be a meticulous examination of the question of whether Great Britain, in its precipitation to obtain a commercial agreement with America, has obtained good conditions compared to the other countries with which the American president is negotiating.
The rush extended to Thursday itself: Trump's announcement that he intended to put Great Britain at the front of the queue for what he called a “complete and complete trade agreement” caused an all-powerful race when number 10 tried to rewrite the Starmer program.
The Prime Minister, who was to spend the day marked the day, was sent to a Land Rover Jaguar factory in the West Midlands, where he composed at the Oval Office on a landline to hear Trump announce the agreement, which included concessions for British car manufacturers.
The number 10 insisted that he had not been blinded by the announcement, but nevertheless accidentally sent journalists to the bad factory of JLR in Coventry, 13 miles from the Prime Minister's press conference in Solihull.
Starmer, in an extension of his prolonged and finally successful offensive of Trump Charm, recalled how much 80 years earlier, the inhabitants of Great Britain dragged the bruant to celebrate the victory of the United Kingdom and the United States forces.
“As the day Ve Day reminds us, the United Kingdom has no more allies than the United States,” said the Prime Minister.
Mandelson – Standing alongside Trump in the Oval Office – entered the act with a Churchillian Fleurian: “For us, this is not the end. This is the end of the start.”
Mandelson, who is now trying to develop a technical partnership in the United Kingdom, increased this prospect with US vice-president JD Vance Thursday at the White House. “I'm here for you,” said Vance, according to British officials.
In the end, Trump's “complete and complete agreement” was not like the ambitious British-free trade agreement envisaged by Brexiters after Great Britain left the EU in 2016, but it attracted part of the American president's trade stitch, blinking the impact of prices on cars and pharmaceuticals while eliminating them on steel and aluminum.
For the moment, Starr Will win some applause for having been the first world leader to conclude an agreement with Trump since the president announced scanning prices last month.
“If we can get an agreement with India, Trump and the EU in the next three weeks, it would be the dream scenario,” a British minister told Financial Times on Monday.
Starmer accepted a Commercial agreement with India Tuesday, and a new “strategic partnership” Post-Brexit UK-EU should be contained at a summit in London on May 19, paving the way to deeper cooperation in defense and commerce.
While the Prime Minister has trouble in the country – languid in opinion polls and, at the end of an x -ray, during the local elections last week – he seems eager to adopt the international scene.
Confined if the agreement would always leave British trade relations with the United States in a worse state that before Trump takes up his duties, Starmer insisted that it was not the bad question. He replied: “You should ask” is it better than yesterday? “”
