Davos and PMQs, 21st January 2025

To adapt the My Fair Lady song, “Why can’t a Yankee be more like a Brit?” It was fun watching Andrew Neil sizzling ever hotter on X as President Trump spoke at Davos - “If the folks at Davos had a spine they’d be walking out en masse now. Leaving him to an empty room.” Neil seems to prefer the English habit of cautious precision, apology and understatement; I once unintentionally misled a Californian when I told him Colman’s mustard was “fairly warm” and watched him impressed as he slathered it on his hot dog.

Richard North takes a different angle: “Most of [Trump’s] speeches are self-aggrandising waffle with multiple factual inaccuracies. You have to listen to the song and not the lyrics.”

North is correct. The WEF, EU and Starmer’s Ingsoc are still playing with their citizen-paralysing legal architecture while China is bulldozing its way around the world. By contrast Trump is combative - who will ever forget his reaction to being nearly killed in Pennsylvania?

When Montgomery first met Churchill in 1940 and Winston overmatched him the General later said he’d thought “we’ve got our man.” Churchill didn’t get everything right either - Alan Brooke did great service in moderating most of the PM’s ideas; but what counted, and what still counts, was the fighting spirit and sense of direction.

But how Trump ruffles feathers! Suddenly Starmer has discovered “values and principles” in relation to Greenland and told the Commons he “will not yield.” To clarify, on Monday he said “any decision about the future status of Greenland belongs to the people of Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark alone.”

That prompts us to ask, “which of those two?” For the Danes have not made themselves loved among the Inuit, on whom the Copenhaven government inflicted forced contraception decades ago, apologising only last August.

Naturally some people say, if the people of Greenland must make their own decision about national sovereignty, shouldn’t we also respect the result of the Brexit referendum? (And as Badenoch said, what about the Chagossians?) But don’t expect Starmer to have consistent principles on that, any more than with free speech, trial by jury and liberty generally.

Turning to national defence, where Sir Keir boasts of boosting funding, we struggle to square that with giving the Chinese the go-ahead on building a fortress-like embassy in central London, and yielding (to use his new favourite word) the strategically important Chagos islands to China-aligned Mauritius. On Monday the PM shared custard cream biscuits with Samaritans representatives; perhaps he should offer Cowardy Custard Creams to the FCO and intelligence services?

This week’s PMQs was rowdy. The Speaker issued multiple warnings to his unruly class but shadow Transport Secretary Richard Holden persisted and was ordered out. Holden has been an MP since 2019 so ignorance could not be an excuse; did he want to bunk off for a fag behind the bike sheds?

He’s not the only one to transgress protocol. Starmer once again introduced the session with a party political broadcast and when the Greens’ Dr Chowns asked about agricultural water pollution she was treated to an aggressive interrrogation of Zack Polanski’s policy toward NATO. Speaker Hoyle brought him up short - “We do not ask the Opposition questions” - but after eighteen months in power surely the PM should know how not to be a hooligan.

The first query was a softball about the new Warm Homes plan. Even if the figures are right the £15 billion investment might take over a decade to pay for itself but that doesn’t solve the problem that our energy prices are four times higher than in the US and consequently our industry is withering. Does the unyielding PM have the spine to cancel Net Zero and redeploy Miliband the Mad?

It’s odd how Starmer is willing to pay for palliative measures rather than seek fundamental cures when it comes to energy, immigration and wealth production. Instead his radicalism comes out in cowing and de-democratising the people.

On the other hand Trump is resented for his willingness to use America’s might in order to tackle systemic matters. Would-be statesman Ed Davey said today that the Don is a “crime boss”; Labour’s Steve Witherden called him a thug and bully. One supposes they prefer the bureaucratic gradualism of their European political colleagues, the ones who so dragged their feet when Ethiopia was starving and needed Bob Geldof’s popular support to galvanise them into action.

It’s not just that Trump is an old man in a hurry. Like his predecessors he is under the gun, having only two years (if that) to make his mark before the mid-term elections (all members of Congress and a third of the Senate) that could change the balance of power and hamstring his efforts to restore the Republic and cleanse its institutions of subversive zealots (both Left and Right.) He is a flawed and fallible man but we need to rise above soap opera judgmentalism to consider the great challenges in this newly multi-polar world.