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      Putin ready to make Ukraine deal, Trump says before Alaska summit

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      Donald Trump has said he believes Vladimir Putin is ready to make a deal on the war in Ukraine as the two leaders prepare for their summit in Alaska on Friday, but his suggestion the Russian leader and Volodymyr Zelenskyy could “divvy things up” may alarm some in Kyiv.The US president implied there was a 75% chance of the Alaska meeting succeeding, and that the threat of economic sanctions may have made Putin more willing to seek an end to the war.Trump insisted that he would not let Putin get the better of him in Friday’s meeting, telling reporters: “I am president, and he’s not going to mess around with me.“I’ll know within the first two minutes, three minutes, four minutes or five minutes … whether or not we’re going to have a good meeting or a bad meeting.“And if it’s a bad meeting, it’ll end very quickly, and if it’s a good meeting, we’re going to end up getting peace in the pretty near future,” said Trump.He also said a second meeting – not yet confirmed – between him, Putin and Zelenskyy would be the more decisive.“The second meeting is going to be very, very important, because that’s going to be a meeting where they make a deal. And I don’t want to use the word ‘divvy’ things up, but you know, to a certain extent, it’s not a bad term, OK?” Trump told Fox News Radio.He was referring to the possibility that Zelenskyy will have to accept “land swaps” – in practice the handing over of Ukrainian territory to Russia, potentially including some not captured by Moscow.Later on Thursday, Trump suggested that any second, trilateral meeting could happen quickly – and possibly take place in Alaska.“Tomorrow, all I want to do is set the table for the next meeting, which should happen shortly,” he said. “I’d like to see it actually happen, maybe in Alaska.”Any such meeting would be a concession by Putin since he refuses to recognise Zelenskyy as the legitimate leader of Ukraine.Trump conceded he was unsure whether an immediate ceasefire could be achieved, but expressed interest in brokering a peace agreement. On Putin, he said: “I believe now, he’s convinced that he’s going to make a deal. I think he’s going to, and we’re going to find out.”Zelenskyy will face a difficult choice if Putin rejects Ukraine’s call for a full 30-day ceasefire and offers only a partial break in the fighting, particularly if Trump thinks a three-way meeting should still go ahead.The Ukrainian president spent much of Thursday in London discussing Wednesday’s video call between European leaders and Trump with the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer. European leaders were largely relieved with the way the conversation went, but know Trump is unpredictable and prone to acting on instinct, rather than sticking to a script.View image in fullscreenThe US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said changes on the battlefield could make peace harder. “To achieve a peace, I think we all recognise that there’ll have to be some conversation about security guarantees,” he said.Trump has rejected offering such guarantees before, but it is possible European security guarantees could be agreed. Rubio said he believed Trump had spoken by phone to Putin four times and “felt it was important to now speak to him in person and look him in the eye and figure out what was possible and what isn’t”.Starmer and Zelenskyy met in Downing Street for breakfast on Thursday and hailed “a visible chance for peace” as long as Putin proved he was serious about ending the war.European leaders emerged from Wednesday’s meeting reassured that Trump was going into his summit focused on extracting Putin’s commitment to a durable ceasefire and was not seeking to negotiate over Ukraine’s head.The plan for Trump and Putin to hold a joint press conference after their talks suggests the White House is optimistic the summit will bring about a breakthrough. Moscow is determined that the summit should not just focus on Ukraine but also agree steps to restart US-Russian economic cooperation.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a brief summary of the Downing Street meeting, British officials said Zelenskyy and Starmer expressed cautious optimism about a truce “as long as Putin takes action to prove he is serious” about peace. In a separate statement, Zelenskyy said there had been discussions about the security guarantees required to make any deal “truly durable if the United States succeeds in pressing Russia to stop the killing”.On Wednesday Starmer co-chaired a virtual meeting of the “coalition of the willing” – a European-led effort to send a peacekeeping force to Ukraine to enforce any deal – where he said there was a “viable” chance of a truce.On Thursday the prime minister gave Zelenskyy a bear hug in the street outside the door to No 10 in a symbol of continuing British solidarity with the Ukrainian cause. Similar public displays of solidarity followed the disastrous February meeting between Trump and Zelenskyy, when the two leaders quarrelled in front of the cameras in the White House.View image in fullscreenFurther sanctions could be imposed on Russia should the Kremlin fail to engage, and Starmer said the UK was already working on its next package of measures targeting Moscow.Trump has frequently said he will know if he can achieve peace in Ukraine only by meeting Putin personally. He sets great faith in his personal relationship with the Russian leader, but on Wednesday he played down expectations of what he could do to persuade Putin to relent. At the same time he warned there would be “very severe consequences” for Russia if Putin did not agree to a ceasefire, a veiled threat to increase US sanctions on Russian oil exports.He has so far held off from imposing such economic pressure on Russia, but by the end of the month the US is due to impose additional tariffs on Indian imports into the US as a punishment for India continuing to buy Russian oil.The UK would like to see the US consider other, more targeted sanctions, either on the so-called shadow fleet of Russian oil tankers or on refineries that use Russian oil. But Moscow briefed that the Alaska summit, far from leading to extra economic pressure on the Russian economy, would instead include discussion and agreements on new US-Russian economic cooperation, a step that would relieve the pressure on Russian state finances.Some European leaders took heart from the detailed grasp of the issues shown on the call by the US vice-president, JD Vance, and by hints that Trump could be willing to contribute US assets to a European-led security guarantee for Ukraine in the event of a peace agreement.The Alaska summit, due to start at 11.30am local time (2030 BST), will include a one-to-one meeting between Trump and Putin, with interpreters, then a wider meeting.The Russian delegation will include the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov; the defence minister, Andrei Belousov; the finance minister, Anton Siluanov; the head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev; and Putin’s foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov. More

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      Shared prayers and tears: how Lammy wooed JD Vance and the White House

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      It was famously something that Tony Blair did not do with George W Bush, or at least not something to which the then British prime minister wished to admit. But these are very different times.When the US vice-president, JD Vance, and his family join David Lammy at the foreign secretary’s grace and favour home in Kent at the start of their summer holiday in the UK, they are expected to deepen their relationship by praying together, it is understood.Within the grounds of Chevening lies the pretty 12th-century St Botolph’s church. It is Anglican but, security risks and denominational differences aside, it may present one option for a place to take communion, sources suggested.Vance is a Catholic and Lammy has described his faith as Anglo-Catholic. The two men previously took mass in Vance’s residence in Washington when the vice-president hosted Lammy and his family in March.The burgeoning relationship between the two men, freshly evidenced by word that they will spend time together before the Vances head to the Cotswolds, may surprise some.As a backbencher, Lammy described Donald Trump as “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath”. Now, Trump is “someone that we can build a relationship with” and Vance is a “friend”.The philosophy behind Lammy’s foreign policy has been described as “progressive realism” – taking the world as it is and not as we might wish it to be.Sceptics might be temped to describe such a pivot in different terms but the outcomes were difficult to argue with, said Michael Martins, formerly a political specialist in the US embassy in London and founder of the consultancy firm Overton Advisory.“I think they have done a pretty good job and you can see it with some of the incoming tariff increases which have not affected the UK as they have with other trading partners, like Canada,” Martins said.“I think it is paying off. I think President Trump’s view on Putin and Russia has changed, is changing and softening, in a way that I think the British government has been pushing for. I think the dividends from the relationship building are starting to come.”Lammy, a touchy-feely sort of politician, targeted Vance for a full charm offensive early on, when Labour was in opposition and Trump’s re-election was far from certain, sources said. The then shadow foreign secretary had a significant obstacle to overcome: Lammy has been a friend of Barack Obama since they met at a 2005 gathering of Harvard Law School’s black alumni.Such was the love-in that Lammy’s wife, Nicola Green, an artist, was given “unprecedented access” to chronicle Obama’s 2008 campaign. It was this political and personal relationship that has been front and centre of every US newspaper profile of Lammy in recent times. “A Friend of Obama Who Could Soon Share the World Stage With Trump” was the New York Times headline last April.View image in fullscreenLammy had a further card to play. He has spoken about how Vance’s bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, bore parallels to his own story of growing up with a single mother and an absent, alcoholic father. Lammy has said Vance’s book “reduced me to tears”.“I said to JD: ‘Look, we’ve got different politics, but we’re both quite strong Christians and we both share quite a tough upbringing,’” Lammy said of an early meeting.He recently elaborated in an interview with the Guardian. During drinks with Vance and the deputy Labour leader, Angela Rayner, in the US ambassador’s residence at the time of the new pope’s inauguration, Lammy had an epiphany. It struck him that they were “not just working-class politicians, but people with dysfunctional childhoods”, he said. “I had this great sense that JD completely relates to me and he completely relates to Angela.”Donjeta Miftari, a former foreign policy adviser to Keir Starmer in Downing Street who is now a director at Hanbury Strategy, said: “David is an incredibly pragmatic person and he likes to take the world as it is. Frankly, you don’t have influence over which populations elect certain individuals in the country.”Lammy had had a gut feeling that the Republicans would win the White House back, she said, and he worked for “years, not months” on building the necessary relationships.“I’ve known him for a few years now, and I’d say that he is also, just on a personal level, one of the most empathetic and relational kind of MPs and politicians,” she said.“You know, in the early days of opposition and in government, I think he had a strong sense of where the US was going, and that is grounded in the fact that he studied out there, lived out there. He knows America well and it’s a big part of who he is.“So I think he sort of clocked basically that that is the direction in which the country was going so built these relationships well before they came to power in the US. And I think that gives it, like, extra kind of credibility and authenticity as well, because you’re not just calling them when you need them when you’re both in post. He’s an incredibly effective operator. Frankly, he’s quite good company as well, which always helps.”There will be a formal bilateral meeting between the two politicians before Vance’s wife, Usha, and their three children join Lammy, his wife and their children for the weekend. After their stay with the Lammys, the Vances are understood to be heading to a Cotswolds period property near Charlbury, about 12 miles (19km) north-west of Oxford.Martins, who was working in the US embassy at the time of Trump’s first state visit, said he recalled the delight that the president took in the pomp and ceremony. “I think vice-president Vance has to walk a bit of a delicate line,” he said. “Obviously he is angling for his own White House bid at the end of the Trump presidency. You know, I think he has to be careful not to appear as the primary recipient of international flattery.” More

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      Dear Keir Starmer, stop cosying up to Donald Trump – or he’ll drag Britain down with him | Simon Tisdall

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      Donald Trump’s victory in last November’s US presidential election presented Keir Starmer, Britain’s Labour prime minister, with a choice – and an opportunity. Either cosy up to a man whose obnoxious, hard-right, ultra-nationalist policies are inimical to UK security and foreign policy interests, economic prosperity and democratic values; or risk a rupture with the US, a longstanding but overbearing ally, and seize the moment to redefine Britain’s place in the world, primarily through reintegration in Europe.Starmer made the wrong call – and Britain has paid a heavy price ever since. The cost to national dignity and the public purse will be on painful show this weekend as Trump, pursued by the Epstein scandal and angry protesters, makes an expensively policed, ostensibly private visit to his golf courses in Scotland. On Monday, the prime minister will travel north to kiss the ring. More humiliations loom. In September, Trump will return for an unprecedented second state visit, at Starmer’s unctuous behest. At that point, the full, embarrassing extent of Britain’s thraldom will be there for all the world to see.Let’s be clear. Trump is no friend of Britain’s and is, in key respects, a dangerous foe. Efforts to curry favour with this narcissist will ultimately prove futile. Trump always reneges. His unedifying career is littered with broken promises and relationships, personal and political. His only loyalty is to himself. Right now, this wannabe dictator is busy making America not greater but weaker, poorer, less influential and more disliked. Don’t let him drag Britain down, too. It’s not too late to make the break.US leadership of the western democracies used to be taken for granted. Now it’s a problem. Politicians in both Britain’s main parties have difficulty accepting this shift. As so often, public opinion is ahead of them. Recent polling by the Pew Research Center found 62% of Britons have no confidence in Trump “to do the right thing regarding world affairs”. Most of those surveyed in 24 countries viewed him as dangerous, arrogant and dishonest. Thanks to him, the US’s international standing is in freefall.Giving Israel a free hand in Gaza is the most egregious example of how Trump’s policies conflict with UK interests. Starmer’s government has condemned the deliberate killing and starving of civilians. Among the 55% of Britons opposed to Israel’s actions, 82% believe they amount to genocide, a YouGov poll found last month. A majority backs additional sanctions. Trump’s support for forced relocations, opposition to a two-state solution and close collaboration with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli leader charged with war crimes, all contradict stated UK policy. Trump bears significant personal responsibility for what Starmer calls the “unspeakable and indefensible” horror in Gaza.Starmer warned dramatically last month that the UK was in growing danger of military attack following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Britain and other Nato states have steadfastly supported Kyiv. Not so Trump. Since taking office, he has toadied to Vladimir Putin, vilified Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, suspended military supplies and questioned Nato’s future. Ignoring proliferation fears, Trump is simultaneously fuelling a nuclear arms race. Now the hapless Starmer has been panicked into buying US jets capable of carrying warheads and, it is claimed, has secretly allowed US-owned nukes back into the UK. This is not the Britain Labour voters want.Trump recently reversed himself on Ukraine, patched things up with Nato and criticised Putin. But he could change his mind again tomorrow. Oblivious to the glaring double standard, he congratulates himself meanwhile on “obliterating” Iran’s nuclear facilities – even though last month’s illegal US bombing was only partly successful. Britain rightly favours negotiations with Tehran. It wasn’t consulted.Trump’s tariff wars pose a direct threat to the UK economy, jobs and living standards. Despite Starmer’s deal mitigating their impact, 10% tariffs or higher remain on most US-bound exports. Trump’s bullying of Canada, Mexico, Greenland, Panama and others over sovereignty, migration and trade feeds uncertainty. His irrational hostility to the EU may gratify the likes of Nigel Farage (and Putin). But endless rows between important allies do not serve Britain’s interests.The advance of hard-right, nationalist-populist parties in Europe and, most recently, in Japan suggests the socially divisive, chauvinist agendas championed by Trump’s Maga movement have widening international appeal. That augurs ill for democracy in Britain and the world generally. For the same reason, Trump’s assaults on US constitutional rights, notably minority and gender rights, attacks on judges, universities and public institutions, and attempts to suppress independent media scrutiny are ominous. Such toxic behaviour is contagious. Trumpism is the new Covid. Britain needs inoculation.By slashing overseas aid, cutting public service broadcasters such as Voice of America, defunding and ostracising UN agencies, flouting international courts and pretending the climate emergency is illusory, Trump inflicts immense harm on the US’s reputation, global influence and soft-power armoury. He is wrecking the rules-based order that Britain views as fundamental. It’s a gift to China, Russia and authoritarians everywhere. As Pentagon spending rockets to $1tn annually, his crude message is unmistakeable: might makes right. Brute strength rules.Trump is a disaster for the west and all in the UK who respect progressive democratic values. His second term will evidently be more globally perilous, destructive and destabilising than his first. In support of universal principles established centuries before anyone heard of him, Britain should steer clear of this walking, talking catastrophe. Rather than hug Trump close, Starmer should keep him at arm’s length for fear of infection.Don’t go to Scotland to see him, Prime Minister. Don’t waste your breath. Instead, start planning for the post-special-relationship era. Make the break. It’s time.

      Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Should we ban opinion polls?

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      Ahead of the 2016 US presidential election, opinion polls predicted a win for Hillary Clinton. She lost, and the polling industry went through one of its regular spasms of self-criticism and supposed reform. Alas, it did not vote itself entirely out of existence. France and Spain ban the publication of opinion polls in the days leading up to an election, but we should go one better and ban their publication at any time.No doubt it adds much to the gaiety of the British nation to see the Conservative party slip to third or fourth in the polls, but any poll asking who you would vote for if there were a Westminster election tomorrow, held at a time when there almost certainly will not be an election for another four years, is meaningless as a guide to the makeup of the next Parliament.If polls were simply useless that would be no reason to ban them, though. A better reason is that they are actively harmful: a species of misinformation that pollutes the public sphere.One fundamental problem, recognised long ago, is that there is no such thing as “the public”, thought of as a hive mind with a single homogeneous view. To report the results of any poll as “the British public thinks…” is simply a falsehood, except perhaps in the unlikely circumstance that fully 100% of respondents agree on some point. There is, for the same reason, no such thing as “the will of the British people”, a spectre conjured into being only when something very dubious is being proposed.So what is it exactly that opinion polls measure? A random sample, hopefully statistically reliable, of differing and irreconcilable opinions. Not informed opinions exclusively, of course, but also the opinions of conspiracy theorists, the news-phobic and the merely deranged. By such a scientific operation we may uncover the valuable truths that a third of Conservative voters would prefer to see Nigel Farage as prime minister, while 7% of American men believe they could beat a grizzly bear in unarmed combat.A deeper question is whether polls actually create, in whole or in part, what they purport to be revealing. Does everyone go around with settled, reasoned views on every hot-button issue of the day, just waiting to be revealed by a questioning pollster? The answer was clear to the American journalist Walter Lippmann in his 1922 book Public Opinion. It is unrealistic, he argued, to expect people to be able to form “sound public opinions on the whole business of government”, and they shouldn’t actually have to. “It is extremely doubtful whether many of us would … take the time to form an opinion on ‘any and every form of social action’ which affects us.”The act of asking a question, though, heightens the importance of the subject in the mind of the questionee, creating an urge to have one’s say where there might previously have been neither urge nor say at all. As Walter Bagehot, the 19th-century political theorist and editor of the Economist, once observed: “It has been said that if you can only get a middle-class Englishman to think whether there are ‘snails in Sirius’, he will soon have an opinion on it.” As though to prove him right, in 1980 a third of American respondents helpfully offered their view on whether the “1975 Public Affairs Act” should be repealed, even though that legislation did not actually exist.The way you ask the question, moreover, can profoundly influence the outcome. A 1989 study by the American social scientist Kenneth A Rasinski found that varying verbal framings of political issues changed the outcome: “More support was found for halting crime than for law enforcement, for dealing with drug addiction than for drug rehabilitation, and for assistance to the poor than for welfare.” Other such experiments have shown that the order of questioning also matters, that Americans express more support for government surveillance if terrorism is mentioned in the question, and that nearly twice as many people think that the government “should not forbid speeches against democracy” than it “should allow speeches against democracy”, though the options are exactly equivalent.Modern opinion polls, then, are part of the machinery behind the “manufacture of consent”, a phrase originally coined by Lippmann to describe the propaganda operations of politicians and the press. It is no accident, after all, that George Gallup had been an advertising man, with the Madison Avenue firm Young & Rubicam, before he helped to pioneer the methods of systematic opinion polling by borrowing from market research and PR. In 1936, Gallup and his colleagues correctly predicted the election of Franklin D Roosevelt, proving the old-fashioned forecasting methods outdated. Using the “new instrument” of polling, he declared happily in 1938, “the will of the majority of citizens can be ascertained at all times”. This was, of course, partly by way of advertising his own commercial interest as founder, in 1935, of the American Institute of Public Opinion (Gallup Poll). His fellow pollster Elmo Roper described their nascent industry as “a veritable goldmine”.Profitable it may be, but the constant drizzle of polling also incentivises short-term, knee-jerk decision-making by governments. A leader may make a hasty policy change merely in response to a poll, and then if the polling improves, take that as proof that the new policy is correct. Keir Starmer was no doubt cheered when, following his Enoch Powell-adjacent speech on immigration in May, polling found that “more Britons [now] believe that the government wants to reduce net migration”. But a policy designed to massage approval ratings over the course of weeks is not always going to be the same as a good policy that will last years.It would be invidious after all this not to mention one consideration that strongly favours opinion polls, which is that they provide a steady stream of pseudo-news to the media. If each day did not bring a new revelation about the imaginary public’s confected opinion on one or another issue, there would be much less for news programmes to report on. And what would we all do then?Further readingPublic Opinion by Walter Lippmann (Wilder, £7.49)Manufacturing Consent by Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky (Vintage, £12.99)Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics by Michael Wheeler (WW Norton & Company, £13.99) More

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      FTSE 100 breaks through the 9,000-point barrier to reach new record high

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      Britain’s blue-chip stock index has risen through the 9,000-point mark to touch a new record high.The FTSE 100 share index hit 9,016.98 points in early trading on Tuesday, taking its gains during 2025 to more than 10%.Analysts said the London stock market had benefited from a range of factors this year, including a move by some investors to diversify away from US shares due to concerns over Donald Trump’s economic policies.The US president’s trade war has also helped UK stocks, as Britain is one of the few countries to have reached a trade deal guaranteeing lower tariffs.The AJ Bell investment analyst Dan Coatsworth said: “With the UK having already reached an agreement on a 10% tariff for trade with the US, with exemptions for certain industries, the country is now seen to have an advantage in terms of trade relations.”In recent years, the London stock market has been derided as a “Jurassic Park” index, due to its reliance on companies in long-established industries and a shortage of fast-growing tech companies. However, that has proved an asset in uncertain times.“The UK stock market is the calming cup of tea and biscuit in an uncertain world. There’s nothing fancy on offer, just reliable names that do their job day in, day out. That’s an underrated characteristic and a reason why investors are finally warming to the UK stock market’s appeal in 2025,” Coatsworth added.However, Trump’s trade war has created choppy conditions in financial markets throughout 2025. The FTSE 100 index fell as low as 7,544 points in early April, when tariff announcements sent shares tumbling. It then recovered sharply, as traders embraced the “Taco trade” – the idea that Trump always chickens out if his policies spook investors.The precious metals producer Fresnillo has been the top riser on the FTSE 100 so far this year, up by 155%. It has benefited from surging prices, with gold hitting several record highs this year and silver trading at a 14-year peak this week.The prospect of higher military spending has pushed up shares in the defence contractor Babcock by 120% this year, with BAE Systems up 66%. The engineering firm Rolls-Royce has gained 75%, as its turnaround plan has yielded results.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJohn Moore, a wealth manager at RBC Brewin Dolphin, said “strong earnings momentum in the banking and defence sectors” had helped push the FTSE 100 to a record high.Moore also credited the UK’s “relative political stability”. “While there may be tax increases to come, which was part of the reason for the sell-off of the pound in early June, the government has a clear mandate and tenure for the next few years.“That compares favourably to other parts of Europe, even, where coalition governments are having a tough time,” he said. More

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      Keir Starmer says good relationship with Donald Trump based on shared family values

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      Keir Starmer has spoken about his good relationship with the US president, Donald Trump, and their shared family values.To mark the first anniversary of the Labour government coming to power on Friday, the prime minister spoke to the BBC podcast Political Thinking and said it was “in the national interest” for the two men to connect.“We are different people and we’ve got different political backgrounds and leanings, but we do have a good relationship and that comes from a number of places,” he said.“I think I do understand what anchors the president, what he really cares about. For both of us, we really care about family and there’s a point of connection there.”In the interview, Starmer said he had a “good personal relationship” with Trump, and revealed that the first time they spoke was after the then-presidential candidate was shot at during a campaign rally in July last year.He said Trump had reciprocated with a personal phone call a few days after Starmer’s brother Nick died on Boxing Day.Addressing recent political turmoil, Starmer said he would always “carry the can” as leader after coming under fire over a climbdown on welfare reforms and that he would “always take responsibility” when asked questions.“When things go well … the leader gets the plaudits, but when things don’t go well, it is really important that the leader carries the can – and that’s what I will always do.”Starmer also backed Rachel Reeves and said she would be chancellor “for a very long time to come”, after she was visibly tearful in the House of Commons.The scenes came after the government U-turned on planned welfare changes that put an almost £5bn hole in the chancellor’s plans.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionReeves said she had been upset by a “personal matter” before prime minister’s questions on Wednesday.Appearing on broadcast media on Friday, one year to the day since the 2024 general election, the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, was asked on BBC Breakfast to score the government out of 10. “I don’t think it is for cabinet ministers to mark themselves and mark their own homework,” she said. More

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      Trump dropped an F-bomb this week – and just for a moment, I warmed to him | Gary Nunn

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      I did not get out of bed this morning expecting to praise the public use of an expletive, but such is 2025. If any president was going to break this presidential norm, as NPR put it, it was always going to be Donald Trump.“We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing,” the president told a group of reporters this week. “Do you understand that?” he asked, before storming off.It appears to be the first time a president has deliberately used the F-word live on camera to a press scrum or in a public forum, instead of being “caught” using the term accidentally on a hot mic (even that has only happened a handful of times). Cue plenty of puns from journalists about the “dropping of the F-bomb”.For the record, Trump actually used the F-word about Iran in 2020, but the slightly delayed radio broadcast bleeped it out. Plus, as this 2016 video compilation shows, it’s not unusual for him to swear.But what was different about this time – coming as it did at a moment of heightened global anxiety about military escalation – is that it came across as … authentic. Many people watching will have felt, heard and even shared that frustration about Israel and Iran’s alleged breaking of the ceasefire. Trump’s swearing made the point more forcefully than any diplomatic “disappointment” could have done. It wasn’t eloquent, but I believed it.We know other presidents – such as Lyndon Johnson, and especially Richard Nixon – swore in private. They wouldn’t have dreamed of risking the reputational damage to do so in public, and would have had to apologise if they did. No British prime minister has ever said “fuck” publicly to my knowledge. Few world leaders ever have.Which is potentially part of the problem. The most common complaint about the political elite is that they’re out of touch; that we can’t trust a word that comes out of their mouths because it’s all untrustworthy scripted spin. Yet at the same time we believe they’re swearing like sailors – and saying what they really think – behind closed doors (a perception bolstered by iconic roles such as Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker, the foul-mouthed spin doctor in The Thick of It, or the blue-mouthed Roger Furlong from Veep.)Of course, swearing doesn’t equate to honesty. And, in Trump’s case, the obscenity only masked his own complicity in creating the situation that frustrated him – from pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 to his “monumental” airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend. But my point is that the public clearly doesn’t trust the polished and sanitised scripts that characterise so much political speech.I’m not suggesting world leaders all suddenly disrespect the gravitas of their office. Can you imagine Keir Starmer being encouraged to swear? He’d sound like a headteacher attempting to rap. What I am saying is there’s power in judicious swearing.You want to appear more human to voters? Act more like one. YouGov polling reported in April revealed that just 8% of Britons never swear. Perhaps an occasional curse or two would allow politicians to ally themselves with the 92% of us who do.Linguistic norms are always changing. For six years, I wrote a regular column for the Guardian’s Mind your language section. During that time, I saw changes that would incense any purist. For instance, the BBC made even less use of those with received pronunciation accents and started broadcasting more voices that really sound like people across the country. Such “real” accents are supposed to make the institution seem less remote and more trustworthy. The same is true of the institution of politics. Sounding more like real people does nobody any real harm.If the stakes are literally life and death, and people aren’t listening, a well-placed, truly meant expletive will wake everyone up. At time of writing, the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Iran is holding. Maybe the F-bomb did the job after all.

      Gary Nunn is a freelance journalist and author More

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      The Donald laps it up as Nato leaders compete to shower him with sycophancy | John Crace

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      Sometimes it pays to be a narcissist. To bend reality to your own worldview. To live almost entirely in the present. Where contradicting yourself is not a problem because two opposing statements can both be true. On the way to Nato you can question article 5. On the way back you can give all the other Nato leaders a patronising pat on the head. And everyone is grateful for it.There again it also helps if you are the most powerful man in the world. Donald Trump is not just tolerated, he is actively indulged. Prime ministers from other countries go out of their way to compete with one another in outright sycophancy. Flattery that started off as contrived now sounds dangerously sincere. Almost as if they genuinely believe it. Thank you Agent Orange for all you have done. We don’t know where we would be without you.And The Donald just laps it up. Feeds on it. At the recent Nato summit he looked like a pig in shit. Living his best life. Whatever sunbed regime he’s on, it’s working for him. If he lost any sleep over his decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, it doesn’t show. Just repeat after Donald: The mission was a complete and utter success and Iran’s programme has been put back decades. If the Pentagon says otherwise, it’s just fake news. Yet again, reality can be what you want it to be.Even when Trump temporarily loses it, he wins. Swearing is generally a no-no for any leader. A sign that you’ve lost control. But when Donald said Israel and Iran didn’t know what the fuck they were doing, he came out of it smelling of roses. Praised for his authenticity. Applauded for saying what the rest of the world is thinking. The Donald can do no wrong. He looks relaxed. God stand up for narcissists.Keir Starmer is no narcissist. And breathe a sigh of relief for that. The UK tried the narcissist route with Boris Johnson and that didn’t end well. Maybe we just aren’t a powerful enough country to get away with a sociopath in charge. Or, heaven forbid, maybe it was a matter of timing. Boris was the right man at the wrong time. That’s a horrible thought. Most of us would quite happily settle for a period of fairly boring politics. Where the government is serving the country rather than the ego of the person in charge. Where even when they are getting things wrong, they are at least trying to do the right thing.But that level of decency comes with a cost. Your psyche does not reward itself with a free pass. You worry about the consequences of your actions. Your toadying to The Donald. You worry about the people dying in Ukraine, Gaza, Israel and Iran. You worry when your domestic policies look like they are falling apart. Wish you had spent more time reassuring backbenchers. Had explained better the trade-offs you were making. Had not been so quick to take a quick cash-saving win by removing benefits from people who can’t wash themselves before going to work.Keir has tried to keep a lid on all this as leaders always do. Pretend that he’s fully in charge of the situation. That everything is going according to plan. But always the tell-tale signs leak out. Starmer’s eyes betray him. They have a deadness to them, the life squeezed out. His face pasty and pallid. A man desperate for a breather, a moment to relax away from the treadmill.Yet always there is one thing more. Another summit, another speech, another bilat, another crisis at home. This wasn’t how he imagined his first year in Downing Street. The pressure and the pace is relentless. The treadmill going ever faster and there’s no getting off. He aches in the places where he used to play.Just hours after returning from The Hague, Keir was giving a keynote speech to the British Chambers of Commerce. It was one that he and they will quickly forget. A routine, box-ticking affair. An annual date, along with the CBI, in any prime minister’s diary. It wasn’t meant to be this way, mind. Starmer knows better than anyone that Labour has to work twice as hard to show that it is the party of business. But this time he couldn’t fake it to make it. He’s no visionary. He can’t access people’s hearts. Only their reason. And that only intermittently.Keir began by thanking the BCC for all it had done for the country. He knew it had been a tough year and he had asked a lot of business, but the good times were round the corner. Possibly. There was the new infrastructure strategy. Now there was also a new trade strategy which sounded very much like the old one. Which was to keep on doing the trade deals we can, as with the partial deals with the EU, US and India, and try to do some new smaller deals with other nations. The applause from the audience was barely audible. They didn’t sound desperately impressed. They can tell when a speaker is out on his feet and is phoning it in.Just over an hour later and Starmer was in the Commons for a statement on the G7 and Nato summits. Here he was much more like his chipper self. Not so much in his opening remarks about how the west was making a dangerous world safer, but in his reply to Kemi Badenoch.The Tory leader just gets worse and worse. Half-witted, sulky and tone deaf. Kemikaze seemed to think the UK should no longer bother to send its prime minister to these international meetings. That Keir had only gone for the craic and to avoid her at prime minister’s questions. As if. Facing Kemi over the dispatch box was his half an hour of R&R in the week.Starmer dismissed her with barely concealed contempt as neither serious nor credible. An am-dram politician. Even the Tories were aghast. Mark Pritchard openly criticised his leader. He spoke for many on his own benches.Kemi had achieved the seemingly impossible. She had revivified a tired prime minister and united both Labour and opposition MPs against her. There is only one politician who looks a genuine leader in the Commons and it is still Starmer. He may have his hands full with a rebellion over the welfare bill, but as long as Kemi remains the leader of the opposition, he has nothing to fear from the Tories. More