Oh cruellest of cuts! Towards the end of the Trump-Starmer press conference, Sky News’s Beth Rigby mentioned Peter Mandelson. Called him ‘the elephant in the room’. Mandelson, Mandelson, hmm. Donald Trump leaned forward a little, as if straining to hear a distant gnat. No. Sorry. ‘I don’t know him,’ said Mr Trump distantly, pumping his lips in regret. Turning to Sir Keir Starmer, he added: ‘What’s your opinion?’
He’s a naughty mischief, Trump. Funnier and quicker than critics allow. And in the flesh lumpier, more hunched. You understand more clearly that he is 79. Pale, Scots colouring, strawberry-blondish. You notice, too, that there is a lot of eyelid. His gaze has an elliptic quality, almost Tibetan. And he is burly. Still a big lad. Must be all those beefburgers.
We were in the Great Hall at Chequers, the PM’s Buckinghamshire house. Seventeenth-century portraits of chinless Herberts gazed down, some a little chocolate boxy, presumably over-restored. We reporters were stabled in a marquee in the walled garden, beside the hollyhocks and dahlias and verbena bonariensis. The sunflowers had died. Pear trees groaned with fruit.
Chequers sits in parkland, fringed by cedars and oaks and, yesterday, an astonishing security operation. Constables lined the country lanes, ready to pounce on any badger showing suspicious tendencies.
Donald and Melania, accompanied by Sir Keir and the elegant Lady Starmer (olive dress with floral decorations), tottered outside after lunch to watch the Red Devils do a sky-dive. It was so windy, the Devils did well not to be blown to Wendover. Not that Mr Trump thinks much of wind. ‘It’s disastrous,’ he said. ‘Wind is a joke!’ He was talking about eco-friendly windpower but the words were spat out with the asperity of a man whose barnet, on this state visit, was gravely tested by autumnal English gusts.
There was a lot about Vladimir Putin. ‘He has let me down,’ said Mr Trump grumpily. That’s one way of describing the mass slaughter of civilians and soldiers.
The President did not think much of our government’s Palestine policy. He thought the Royal Navy ought to sort out the small boats. Illegal immigration ‘destroys countries from within’. Earlier he had raved about the economic effects of his tariffs. And now he was talking of peace between ‘Aberbaijan and Albania’. Azerbaijan and Armenia, perhaps.
Sir Keir, standing beside him, adopted the jaw-taut expression of a man with electrodes attached to his sweetbreads. A lawyer next to his colourful client. A lion tamer beside a batey old king of the African jungle. And yet the nasal knight did okay, even if his eyes did bulge a bit – two oysters a leaping – when Mr Trump invited him to give his thoughts on Mandelson. I was laughing so much, I quite failed to listen to Sir Keir’s blurted response.
Donald and Melania Trump stand next to Sir Keir Starmer and Lady Victoria Starmer at Chequers
They watched a skydive by the Red Devils parachute display team
And I bring you great tidings. Sir Keir, until now thought a dreary atheist, affirmed himself a Christian. A US reporter had asked if we were still a Christian kingdom. Sir Keir: ‘I was Christened. That’s my church. Has been all my life.’ Hosana to the Highest.
Melania and Lady S attended the press conference, as did Marco Rubio, Secretary of State. What astonishing ears. They could be novelty accessories from a joke shop. The president’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, far from the vixen of lazy caricature, seemed chatty and good fun. Mr Trump, when he passed the finialled front gates at the start of the day, veered over to speak to US press photographers and marvel at Wednesday’s night’s Windsor Castle dinner. He had obviously loved it.
His gait was heavy, perhaps more from gouty twinges and near-constant travel lag than from any desire to look menacing. Once inside he flopped gratefully into a Howard-style armchair to talk to Sir Keir for an hour, the room decorated in Colefax and Fowler’s Berkeley Sprig wallpaper. Chequers may lack the Oval Office’s gilded bling but, like Windsor, it seemed to soothe him. Even with the damn sound of bagpipes in the distance.
And then his enormous helicopter arrived, to whisk him away, back to the New World and its hassles. His trip to cod-medieval Camelot was at an end.
And all I could think was ‘poor Peter’. A disowning of near-Biblical proportions.
