Bonus ep: How the UK is navigating the Trump era

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0:25Hey everyone, Mark Filippino here with a special bonus episode. Don't worry, we're still going to have a show for you this Friday too. But I wanted to play you a recording of an event I just hosted in London at the FT Weekend Festival. I spoke to U.S. Managing Editor Brooke Masters, Whitehall Editor Lucy Fisher, and U.K. Political Editor George Parker about the special relationship between U.S. and U.K. politics. and I learned lots of cool stuff in that conversation, stuff that I think you're going to want to hear. Like, why was Nigel Farage on Capitol Hill the other day? It was a ton of fun. I think you're going to enjoy it.

0:58So take a listen.

1:06Hi, everyone. I'm Mark Filippino. I host the FT News Briefing podcast. It's our flagship daily news show. It goes out Monday through Friday. It's a show about general news, the economy, geopolitics, and everything in between. I also host our Swamp Notes podcast, which is a newish show about everything that is going on in the Trump administration right now. And I decided to take a little break to see what calm politics are going on here in the UK. Okay, that joke didn't land.

1:37Brooke Masters: They take themselves seriously here, Mark. Here with me, I want to introduce the rest of our panel. We're going to be doing a talk about the US and UK politics and the relationship between the two countries. We've got our Whitehall editor, Lucy Fisher. Hi, Lucy. Hi, Mark. She also hosts Political Fix podcast, along with George Parker, our politics editor. And we also have our US managing editor, Brooke Masters. Thanks. So let's dive into what has been kind of a whirlwind week for British politics. I landed yesterday morning. A few hours later, there was a new deputy prime minister, and I can't help feel like it was my fault.

2:16What happened? Well, thank you very much for turning up with me. I'm George Parker, and I feel a bit like Dick and Dom or Supergrass opening the festival on the Pyramid stage, one of the outer stages at Glastonbury. I mean, what happened was extraordinary yesterday. I traveled up to Birmingham for the Reform UK annual conference and spent Thursday nights having a chat with Nigel Farage and stuff. And then on Friday, I was still in Birmingham when news broke that the Angela Rayner announcement was coming, which then quickly became apparent that was going to precipitate a massive upheaval of the cabinet, a total reshuffle of Starmer's team.

2:55And so essentially, I spent the whole day in my hotel room in Birmingham, typing from about nine o 'clock in the morning till seven o 'clock in the evening. And I mean, basically what happened was that Rainer's departure, which I think was inevitable, you can't have a housing minister who doesn't pay her housing taxes. She went, and that meant that Stam had to bring forward a reshuffle that he already had planned. And in British politics, we often talk about the nice of the long knives and all that sort of thing. I think probably it's more like a nice of the blunt knives or the day of the blunt knives, because what you saw was Starmer turning his cabinet on its head, but not doing what you would normally do with an underperforming team.

3:32And I think most people would agree that the Starmer government underperformed in quite a big way in its first year. It wasn't a case of kicking loads of people out and bringing new people in. It was more a question of moving people that weren't doing very well in their previous job into different jobs and hoping you're going to get a better result as an outcome. And we ended up, as you say, marked with a new deputy prime minister, David Lammy, who it seemed to me at least was growing into the job as foreign secretary, certainly did a good job in building relations. We'd probably come on to this with the US, being moved out of that job into the Justice Department, but being given a consolation prize of being given what's really a courtesy title of Deputy Prime Minister.

4:11And in his place in the Foreign Office was Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, who's presided over the Home Office at a time when public anxiety about immigration has hit record highs. And she's been promoted upwards into the Foreign Office. The only thing I would say is unusually for a reshuffle, it was executed in a fairly efficient and speedy way. It was done very quickly. It was done in a few hours.

4:33Brooke Masters: It's days and days where they all go into Downing Street and you wait for them to come out. Yeah. Actually, it was simplified by the fact it was done on a Friday because all MPs were in their constituencies. So you didn't have the whole rigmarole of people walking up and down Downing Street and waving to the cameras because they were all back at home. And the Scottish secretary, for example, was in Scotland and was sacked on the phone by Keir Starmer, for example. He was one of the very few people who actually was sacked. But it was an extraordinary day. I think one of the funniest things is that I'm watching this kind of all unfold on Slack.

5:02So the political fix was posted sometime around like 10 in the morning. And the last message after it was posted was, how long is this going to last? Because at that point, she hadn't stepped down, right? So one of the things I want to ask you is, how do you all, not just for podcasting, but generally, especially in the US, handle the constant news flow and do your jobs while staying on top of things and making sure that everything is fresh and new without falling behind? I think it's a really difficult challenge of podcasting. We have an amazing team of editors, producers, people who do the kind of sound technician and the video work around it.

5:42That can't be rushed. That needs time between recording and the editing process to make sure that what we're putting out isn't kind of scrappy. And it's one of my key criticisms of other podcasts, even ones I love, is that there's sometimes a sloppiness that creeps in. Facts are wrong. People are misdescribed in terms of their title. Figures are awry. And I think that that's a shame. And it shouldn't be the case that podcasters allow themselves to get away with that sort of sloppiness that they would never allow themselves in print if they're writers and reporters. So, I mean, that's just one of the realities that means there is always a lag for us between recording and putting something out.

6:20But what we try to do, I think, is go behind the immediate news story to give listeners, you guys, more context, more background. Often the thing I love about hosting and being on FTE podcasts is being able to go under the bonnet of stories and give you some of the color of what we pick up. being in Westminster all the time as George and I are. We speak to so many people around the principal characters, as well as principal characters themselves, the advisors. We travel on the plane with the prime minister, and again, giving you a flavor of what that's like. And I have to say, especially at the beginning of a new administration, when an incoming prime minister hasn't really fallen out with the press and isn't feeling embittered, you get so much more access.

7:05You know, my first trip to New York with Starmer, he came out for beer and pizza in downtown Manhattan with us, which I give him another six months. I don't think he'll be doing. So we can kind of tell you about that, what he's like behind the scenes. And that's an extra kind of value added for podcasts, even if you're not always the most up to date with the news lines. I mean, Trump did away with his famous beer and pizza trips with the press years ago.

7:27Brooke Masters: I don't think he eats pizza. No, he does, but with a fork and knife. That's right. And he only and he doesn't drink beer because he's a teetotal. although God, I think one of the things, like the FT news briefing is supposed to, when you wake up in the morning, be up to date and fresh, but we don't work all night. But that means picking the stories where you can say something smart and giving more information. It's often the second half of the podcast is prerecorded by going into a story where the FT has broken some news and can now tell you more interesting things. Shifting focus a little bit back towards the constant news cycle.

8:05Why was Nigel Farage in U.S. Congress last week? I'm still trying to figure that one out. And George, it looks like you are too. Well, he's certainly been around this week, hasn't he? He was invited to give evidence on the question of free speech. And he actually had quite a tough time.

8:23Brooke Masters: Yeah, people don't understand that going in front of a congressional committee is not like going in front of a treacherous elect. I haven't covered both. The congressional committees, there's an entire staff and there's two parties and they do their homework. So if you get up there, your career can be destroyed. I don't know how many of you remember the university presidents in the U.S. who also were up for free speech. There were three of them and two out of three lost their jobs over their appearances. One of them is now Kirsten. I'm a chief economics advisor, Manoush Shafiq. But I mean, it's not and it's obviously not the same as going on Fox News either.

8:59so Farage thought he could go over there and he would do his usual shtick about Britain being on the verge of turning into North Korea oh yeah and actually I think it doesn't reflect well on him and I think there was a bit of a backlash politically this idea that you're a British politician going to a foreign country to slag off your own country I don't think it works particularly well and it's something that Liz Truss does all the time as well you know she goes over there and says you know Britain's on the edge of an economic precipice very very different to the one I was in charge of back in 2022.

9:31It's worse. And it's worse. Actually, what I do like when Liz Truss goes to America is the deadest caption you've ever seen under someone saying, Liz Truss, UK Prime Minister, September to October, 2022.

9:45Brooke Masters: Yes, I love that one. And always the Americans bring up the iceberg letters because for us, the whole, you remember the letters that outlast her? I mean, in the US, we were like, why can't we have politicians like that? There's so much more fun. Because they get elected prince. Well, I guess she was prime minister. Actually, she was on Odd Lots podcast the other day, you know, going on about how central bank independence is actually a bad thing. And that's a topic that I wanted to bring up because it is 10 o 'clock in the morning and it's a very lively subject that will wake you up. But yeah, guys, why is this something that we're all of a sudden hearing about, not just in the US, but also in the UK?

10:21Look, Liz Truss is just trying to come up with an excuse for why everything went so wrong under her very brief premiership. And for her, that is the suggestion, you know, she wasn't the captain of the ship. That's the phrase she likes to use, suggesting that, you know, institutional shadowy forces outside of her control led to her downfall. and that Central Bank is one of the examples she's cited, saying that because she didn't have control of monetary policy, it was basically the Bank of England that sunk her after the disastrous so-called mini budget. But I must say, I loved one commentator who's pointed out the background to the Bank of England gaining control of monetary policy was, of course, on day one in 1997, Gordon Brown's first move of chancellor, in order to reassure the markets that he wouldn't do what former Labour chancellors had done, which was jack up interest rates and put them down to try and fiddle with the economy.

11:12And Liz Truss saying that a prime minister needs it back again is like a recovered alcoholic saying they definitely, certainly, indisputably don't need to be in control of the whiskey bottle again, but they probably should just to be safe. So yeah, I thought that was a good way to express it.

11:28Brooke Masters: Yeah. I mean, the other reason, of course, that central bank independence is on the agenda is unfortunately in the country. I am in charge of FT coverage in where Donald Trump is cutting a swathe through the current members of the Federal Open Markets Committee, which sets interest rates, and of course, the folks who regulate our banks, which is a little scary. One unexpectedly resigned. He's tried to take on the chairman, Jerome Powell, with a claim. I mean, they're renovating the Fed buildings. They're historic buildings. It's wildly expensive. It's incredibly over budget, but it's been over budget for 10 years, so nobody's really surprised.

12:02Brooke Masters: But Donald Trump's like, no, that shows he really shouldn't be running the economy. That's it that hadn't worked so well. So they have now focused on one of the Biden appointees to the Federal Open Markets Committee, who, of course, is the first black woman. And given Donald Trump's views that nobody who doesn't look like him has any competence. And they are going after her partly. They were starting to go after her on pure DEI. And then they have used their powers to look in, you know, because they run the federal mortgage agencies and they found that she had two mortgages at the same time that both said they were her primary residence.

12:42Brooke Masters: Shades a bit of Angela Rayner. It's a little weird. And they said that this is a crime and therefore she is, you know, should not be running the economy. And it's a complicated thing because it is, I mean, if it's true that she really did lie and was lying about one of them, and there's not some complicated backstory we don't understand, it is disturbing. I mean, you save a lot of money on a primary mortgage in the U.S. It's a big difference. So anyway, he then fired her rather than waiting for her to resign because she refused to resign. And that is, in theory at least, hasn't been tested against the rules.

13:17Brooke Masters: You can only fire a Fed governor for cause, but it's not clear that they have cause because she hasn't been indicted and she says there's another story. And so it looks like we're headed for a showdown where she's peeling through the courts and she's going to try and take the Supreme Court and we have an interesting Supreme Court, which believes in what they call unitary executive theory, which is that the president can do whatever the hell he likes within reason. And it's the within reason part. It's not clear whether the Fed fits there. Right. And Fed independence has been just a huge part of the American economy.

13:49The threat of Fed independence ending has rattled markets since Donald Trump has started making these threats since he retook office earlier this year. So for this to be in danger has really become a huge vocal point for us. I mean, it's something that I don't know about you guys, but it's something that I talk about with my colleagues at least once a day, just because it impacts so much of the coverage that we take and really just part of everyone's day-to-day lives. From the Bank of England side, is there actually a threat to central bank independence? No. No. It's the simple answer to that.

14:24I mean, there's a huge amount of interest currently in the state of the markets, but nobody has suggested the Bank of England should have its independence from Europe. It's not even on the agenda of Reform UK, is it? No, it's not. But I think there is this widening of the acceptable options on the table for constitutional reform, the reform of key institutions, which is something reformers trying to get a think tank linked to it, getting going on some of the thinking on. So I think, you know, I'd be interested to see what reform bring forward before the next election. I think they'll watch very closely what happens in the US.

14:55And let's be honest, some of the early indications on growth, inflation, jobs, consumer confidence data suggests that, you know, Trump's messing with the US economy may not be in the best interests of either American companies, bosses or consumers. So I think they'll be watching carefully to see what happens there. Well, there is a big visit coming up. I believe Donald Trump is coming to the UK in a week, two weeks. How are we all feeling about the coverage of that? What are some of the big topics that are going to be covered by the FT and elsewhere? Well, I mean, it just caps off the end of a MAGA British summer, doesn't it?

15:30With Trump coming first to Scotland in July to visit his golf clubs, but not without preparing that immigration was killing Europe. J.D. Vance coming to the Cotswolds, a bit surprising, a holiday destination given his previous characterizations of the UK as some sort of free speech hellhole. But, you know, this is a really important, unprecedented second state visit by Trump that's coming up. You know, there's a lot of foreign policy that's on the table here, Gaza, Ukraine, and in terms of the economy, too. I think, you know, there'll be closer scrutiny of the UK and US's economic ties after the trade deal that was secured.

16:08And of course, Peter Mandelson, UK's ambassador to Washington, will be talking later today in a speech just outside Oxford about a new technology partnership that the UK wants to forge with the US. So I think that will be one of the key wins potentially of this trip. Although we have to be honest about it, the real reason Trump's coming over is not to talk about tech partnerships or Gaza. He's coming here because he wants to stay at Windsor Castle for two nights. And I was speaking to Nigel Farage at this conference in Birmingham. And he'd just come back from the Oval Office, of course. And he said Trump was just obsessed about Windsor Castle.

16:40And Farage was explaining how old it was. He said, wow, that's really incredible. And I mean, I suppose the whole idea of soft power, British soft power, it's quite interesting that the way that we can deploy Scottish golf courses, in this case, owned by American presidents or castles or the royal family as a way of attracting world attention and world leaders to the UK. I think what the Brits will be trying to do is focus, as you say, Lucy, on things like this tech partnership, which Peter Manderson has very high hopes for being almost as important as defense partnerships after the Second World War.

17:12The Gaza discussion is going to be difficult. Donald Trump has an obsession about windmills and wind power, which no doubt he'll be raising, particularly windmills near his… Hates them. Hates, hates them. Aberdeenshire golf course. The last two weeks have been just a… He shut down a bunch of windmills.

17:26Brooke Masters: Yeah. 80 % done, they shut the project down. But I think speaking to people on the government side, what they really want to do is focus this visit on the abiding strength of the US-UK relationship and to try to depersonalize it as much as possible. So it's not about Donald Trump. It's about the bilateral relationship. I always find it very interesting as an American. I lived here for a long time. This whole special relationship idea that the UK and the US have a special relationship. The UK clearly thinks this. The US hadn't noticed. I mean, they kind of, because Americans are famously terrible at foreign languages and they don't understand Europe, they like the UK because they could understand them.

18:01Brooke Masters: The legal system's a little more similar. But honestly, in the US's vision of the universe, they're busy sucking up to China. And so I think it's always very interesting on these state visits where for the American public, they're interested in King Charles and, you know, they follow the royal family saga and got very involved with Meghan Markle and all that stuff. but I don't actually think they're that excited about the political side. It's interesting under Boris Johnson, but you remind me that he basically banned the term special relationship. He knew exactly that, that it's embarrassing. There's something a bit craven about the way we cleave so closely to it in the UK.

18:38And then in the US, you maybe get a sort of warm words of recognition, but equally you scan what the US president will say about France as the oldest ally. And it can sometimes seem warmer still or whoever's kind of flavor of the month. So I kind of respected Johnson for that, not necessarily much else. But I thought maybe it was time that the UK stopped trying to be so sort of desperate in buddying up to the US. It's pathetic. And what happens is that you go to the White House and the American president has been briefed that he has to say over and over again how special the relationship is. It's awful.

19:11One thing I just mentioned, Mark, just a bit of colour, you might be interested in. Starmer was in the White House in February and I was fortunate enough to go with him and went into the White House, one of those sprays. Yeah. Well, that is an extraordinary thing. Those little press conferences, which used to be, were just meet and greets, looking forward to having an interesting conversation about our mutual interest, Mr. Prime Minister, Mrs. President, whoever it may be. But to be in there and see him, Donald Trump, being the star of his own show and... Yeah, he's running a daily reality show.

19:39It's an incredible thing. And one thing he does do, which I think as a journalist, you have to respect, is he does take questions from people he's never met before. He didn't know who was in the room, and he was going around and actually giving quite detailed answers to him. And I was speaking to someone in the White House press corps who said that he's taken more questions in his first week as president than Joe Biden did in a year or even a whole term. Yeah,

20:01Brooke Masters: getting back to sort of what we do for a living, it's really changed the way we cover things because three, four days a week he will do these sprays and make news on whatever somebody asks him about. And so you absolutely cannot plan. And it's a real change from Biden, who, as now we all know, was highly guarded and did almost no formal press conferences, made almost no appearances beyond like kind of waving because it turns out he wasn't really home. And so it has shifted the entire news cycle because, you know, until he's had the spray for the day, you have no idea what the topics are. I mean, literally.

20:35And his staff doesn't know. We have made personnel changes on the U.S. where we deploy a nighttime reporter in a way that we never did before. We have a late shift. We have someone who works, what is it, 1 to 9 or 4 to 11 or something like that?

20:48Brooke Masters: We have somebody who works 1 to 9, and we have people who are on call from 9 to 11. Because, of course, the other way he makes news is he goes on Truth Social, which is the social media platform he owns, which if you have not been on it, is worth one visit at least to see. That's one. And so, again, you can never be sure. Many of the biggest news stories, like I'm going to fire Jerome Powell, will be like him tweeting at 3 in the morning. But Downing Street is also bracing for this kind of unpredictability in this visit. But I have to say, when Keir Starmer is so often criticised for being leaden, a wooden performer, I found watching him deal with Trump, kind of listen carefully, without giving too much ground, without agreeing, but avoiding insulting him.

21:29I found he's been a bit more dexterous a leader in that kind of airy, febrile scenario than some might have thought. Actually, I think that's true. that in that spray, it was quite interesting seeing that relationship quite close up, that he did the whole fawning, here's a letter from the king, and it's an amazing honour, and all that sort of talking like Donald Trump. He did that bit of it. But then when J.D. Vance, whose job in the Oval Office seems to be to chuck rocks in and try and cause some trouble, started talking about how free speech was being over in Britain, Starmer just said, that is not true.

22:02We've had free speech for centuries. We'll have it for centuries to come. It's completely untrue. When I think Trump said, we want our money back from Ukraine, for the money we said, that's not true either. He was pushing back, actually. It was interesting.

22:14Brooke Masters: And he did it in a way that wasn't as disastrous as we all remember the Ukraine, the first one of these, in February when Zelensky and Trump were there and Zelensky lost his temper and the whole thing went completely downhill. I was impressed that Starmer actually was able to push back without fighting, because Macron had a harder time with it when the French president was visiting. Yeah. One thing I want to pick apart a little bit is Trump's involvement in foreign policy. He's often built himself as an isolationist president, which is interesting considering that he's taken on this idea of global tariffs, which seems kind of counter to what...

22:56Brooke Masters: No, that's isolationist. I guess it is, yeah. But why would he get so involved with Ukraine, Gaza, just generally, if he wants to be America first? Two words. Nobel Prize. Jimmy Carter has one. He doesn't. Obama has one. He doesn't. He wants one. He's convinced that everybody should give him the Nobel Prize. And he knows the way to do that is to solve a world crisis. But also, I mean, his economic policy is serving, in a sense, to push some of the West's enemies, adversaries, potential rivals closer together. And we've seen that in the past week with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit.

23:38You know, Modi making a very big entrance to that, showing that with the very punitive 50 % tariffs that the US has slapped on India, that India has other friends and can hang out with China and Russia and so forth. So on the one hand, he's trying to pursue policies on a diplomatic line, but his economic radicalism is also having a kind of countervailing effect. Can I ask a question to Mark and Brooke? If you want to win the Nobel Peace Prize, why do you rename your Department of Defense the Department of War?

24:07Brooke Masters: Because the guy is a man of impulse. If you can't see the strategy behind that, George, then it's very clear. And I'll explain it to you later. I think he wants to be, he's like, be peaceful or we'll come get you. I guess the reason the tariffs to me doesn't strike me as isolationist is because you're putting yourself out there to do all these bilateral trade deals. Like you're putting yourself in positions to connect to countries one-on-one. I would say another thing you have to remember about Donald Trump is his vision of himself is a dealmaker. Remember his first big book that really moved him from beyond being a New York city figure to a national figure was the art of the deal.

24:48Brooke Masters: Right. Which is an interesting study in semi-truth telling. But he really sees himself as a negotiator. And so trade deals are a great way to do that because there aren't that many in a free trade world, which is run by the WTO. There isn't a lot of deal making to be done. And so I think it's partly he's created a crisis that he thinks allows him to run the world. I'm going to switch to a topic that is near and dear to my heart, which is sports and how that is kind of connecting the US and the UK right now. Major League Baseball has been playing two games. Has anyone noticed that Major League Baseball has been playing two games?

25:27No. Okay, we're in trouble. In the UK? Yeah, here. Where? In London, in London Stadium. Oh, okay, right. I have to admit, when you sent a note about this, I had to look up what MLB and NFL even was. So my question is, maybe I'm going to get some flack for this and maybe lose some listeners for this, but I'm going to take that risk. Why is it that when European teams come over to play football, soccer, it gets such a big audience? And then when American sports come over here, there's not, because the NFL is coming to.

26:01Brooke Masters: They've been coming for years. Longer next month. Just in terms of the US-UK relationship, why hasn't there been more? I tell you what about the NFL. I think there is a growing interest in NFL in the UK. In fact, I was listening to Radio 5 Live, the sports channel the other day, and there was a whole half an hour discussion which went totally over my head about NFL, sports I don't follow. The one thing I would say about baseball, Mark, and this is going to be controversial with you, I suspect, it's a really boring sport. And you've already got one. This is a country that plays cricket. You've got cricket, right?

26:30Brooke Masters: Like, why would you need another boring sport with bats? So I guess why are we, if nobody cares, Why is the U.S. doing that? I guess what is this doing to our relationship as two countries? I don't – I would take the view that baseball is jealous of football because American football is working, as George says. I mean, those events are – you do hear about all over this. Like in the city of London, every bank buys tickets and everybody's doing it. Yeah, I mean, I think also they want to buy into the U.K. as a sports-mad country. And it's an incredible success story for this country, the fact that the English Premier League, the Football League, went from being, you know, it was basically a sport beset by hooliganism, falling attendances.

27:12They got a grip of it in the early 1990s and turned it into this massive global product. I mean, it's an incredible success story. And I think probably the Americans want to learn a little bit about how we've done that, you know, amongst the whole load of people talking Britain down for lots of different things. I think sport is one thing we can be very proud of here. I do still find it something of anomaly, though, given how much we take our cue from the US. for so many cultural exports, whether it's cinema or TV or certainly music, that sport, I don't know, there doesn't seem to be, I would say, as much interest in US sports as there is most other parts of kind of US cultural exports.

27:46Sorry, Mark. That's all right. It was worth a shot. One last question, and I guess, you know, I have it written down is where does the special relationship go from here? But maybe I'll reword that. Where does the relationship between the US and the UK go from here? I think it's, Starmer's made clear what his strategy is, which is to try and hug America close. You know, he's shot for getting the first trade deal of any nation with the US. He talks often in this very cordial tone about how he likes and respects Trump, even though, you know, the latest YouGov polling shows that eight out of 10 Brits hold a disfavorable view of Trump.

28:23Clearly, he's hoping and betting on the idea that the British public will be pragmatic, thinking whoever the US president is, the UK needs to deal with them. And on one of the most important paradigms that I think Starmel will be looking at this, which is the security paradigm, it will just take a long time for Europe, including the UK, to rearm to a degree that the continent can defend itself, can be there as a reliable partner for Ukraine. It takes time to ramp up defence manufacturing capacity and so forth. So there's not really another option beyond trying to kind of keep Trump within the fold, as I see it going forward.

29:03Can I just follow up on that for a second? Because I find it so interesting how the rest of the world adapts to US administrations that swing so far from one degree to the other. I mean, you had Obama, then you had Trump, and you had Biden, then you had Trump. How do you position yourself in a way that doesn't potentially offend the next administration coming? Or, I guess, alienate yourselves from the next administration that could be wildly different from the current one? I think that's a good question. I think Starmer and the UK government broadly tried to avoid backing themselves into a corner on policy front.

29:33They tried to keep their relationship cordial on a kind of personal rapport. And I think one of the key wins was getting in for this sort of three hour dinner in Trump Tower before Trump came into office and kind of setting the tone of that relationship, but without sort of, you know, being dragged into agreeing or sort of slagging off what Trump is doing. I think everyone understands that you have to deal with the president who's in the Oval Office. I don't think, let's say there's a Democrat president next, I don't think they will resent the fact that Starmer has been handing out invitations to Windsor Castle on behalf of the king to the president.

30:05I don't think that's the issue. But as I mentioned earlier, I think there is a focus on this state visit on looking beyond, because Starmer, if he serves his full term as prime minister, will still be prime minister when the next president comes in. So it's important to frame this as being about the US-UK relationship more broadly, not just about Trump. And I would agree with Lucy. I think the fundamental driving force of everything that Starmer does is keeping the Americans close on the security front. And we need the Americans not just for Ukraine, but just for our own security.

30:35Brooke Masters: I think the other thing to remember is that the relationship has been evolving quite significantly since Brexit anyway. Because before Brexit, the UK was the bridge to Europe for the Americans, because honestly, the Americans don't understand half of Europe. They can't find half the country. They understand the UK. They follow the royal family. And so for a long, long, long time, while the UK was in the EU, the relationship by its very nature was close because the US was getting something out of it. It was a bridge into this 200 million population thing. And that's gone. So the UK is already having to sort of find a different reason to make itself interesting to the US.

31:12And actually, that is one of the strange spinoffs of Trump coming into the White House. It's helped to revive the UK's relationship with our European partners and to become a bridge, not to the European Union's economic policymaking, of course, because we're out of that for good. But the fact that Starmer now is, with Macron, driving the coalition of the willing, it does give Britain a relevance in Europe, which, frankly, it hasn't had for the last five, six, seven, eight years. Trump famously bringing people together.

31:39Brooke Masters: You know, everybody has their skills. I think at this point, we're probably going to wrap it up. I want to thank everyone for sticking around and joining us this morning. Thanks again. Thank you. Thank you.

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