Donald Trump’s war with the BBC has brutally revealed the hard limits of Sir Keir Starmer’s relationship with the US president.
In the latest escalation of the dispute, Mr Trump has filed a $10bn defamation lawsuit over the Panorama instalment that sparked a crisis at the broadcaster and prompted the resignations of the BBC’s director general Tim Davie and CEO of BBC News, Deborah Turness.
The programme, which was broadcast just a week before the 2024 US election results, is accused of misleading viewers by editing a speech Mr Trump delivered on 6 January 2021.
It spliced two distinct clips, creating the impression that Mr Trump instructed the crowd: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol … and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
But while the British prime minister has a reputation among his international peers as a “Trump whisperer”, he has noticeably ducked intervening in the president’s dispute with the BBC.
Some may see this as fair because the BBC is an autonomous media organisation which the government does not control.
But when you consider that Labour takes the view that the BBC is a national and international asset for the UK, which provides an important part of the country’s soft power, then the attempt to bankrupt it becomes a potential national security issue.
After all, the licence fee money helps pay for the World Service and BBC World, which provide a UK news presence around the globe as well as all the cultural and art investments the corporation makes.
It had been widely expected that Sir Keir would use some of his personal capital with President Trump to prevent papers being filed against the corporation.
When the scandal of the Panorama programme editing Trump’s speech emerged, there were reports that the prime minister would have a call with the White House on the topic.
But a call took well over a week to happen, and even then, Sir Keir chose to focus only on Ukraine and did not mention the BBC at all. It took 24 hours for Downing Street to concede that the prime minister had effectively chickened out.
It may be that Sir Keir had decided that Ukraine was such an all-encompassing issue that he did not want to dilute his arguments for a better deal for Kyiv or the insistence on Trump’s support for a coalition of the willing to guarantee peace with a row about the BBC when it was clearly in the wrong.
However, with the corporation now facing an eye-watering $10bn damages case in Florida, which will at the very least cost millions to defend, Sir Keir must consider this as an existential issue.
The position of the BBC is such that an attack on it of this nature is also an attack on the credibility of the UK. Added to that, its funding model means that, in effect, taxpayers are those who pay for it and would have to pay for any damages to the president.
Privately, diplomats in London have already commented with surprise that Sir Keir did not try to use his influence with the White House to prevent this scenario from coming to pass, even if he was ultimately unable to dissuade a vengeful president.
But the fact that he did not try now threatens to undermine Sir Keir’s own reputation as an international statesman, the one area he had appeared to excel in as prime minister.
It also leaves the UK looking weak on the international stage and drags a major British institution into the bitter mess that is US politics.
Source: UK Politics - www.independent.co.uk
