_As an unpredictable second Trump administration continues, Jill Rutter examines what Keir Starmer must do to plan for it._
In 2021, Sunday Times political editor Tim Shipman [tweeted](https://x.com/ShippersUnbound/status/1445711840378511360?lang=en-GB) “Boris Johnson now squats like a giant toad across British politics. He has expanded the Overton window in both directions. Praising bankers and drug companies, while tight on immigration and woke history. Cheered for lauding the NHS and pro LGBT.”
Those days are long gone. Labour found a giant Overton window to climb through at the last election with a simple promise to offer ‘change’ from fourteen years of Conservative government. But having won power, and had five months when he could determine his own priorities, Keir Starmer now finds his government and his governing environment being bent out of shape by the acts and deeds of the new US government. Donald Trump is the new toad squatting over UK politics.
Thus far the threats of Trump to European security have forced (at least) an acceleration of the timetable to speed up spending on defence to 2.5% of GDP (from around 2.3%) by 2027. That is quicker than the date the last Conservative government planned. It has upset the planned sequencing – where any announcement would have come after the Strategic Defence Review to be launched this summer and pre-empted the timetable for the Spending Review. That acceleration also led the government to look for a budget raid – to avoid a Liz Truss moment of an unfunded commitment – and led to a 40% cut in the aid budget (a much bigger squeeze on bilateral aid, once the budget for asylum seekers and multilateral contributions is taken out).
Second, it has forced Starmer to devote time and efforts to intensive coordination with other NATO partners and with the Ukrainian President to try to secure a tenable outcome to the war. The visits and the summitry are just the tip of the diplomatic iceberg that is now having to be devoted to daily management of developments in the Ukraine war since President Trump decided to make unilateral advances to Russia. This has come to dominate the daily news agenda, with planned ministerial announcements relegated to afterthoughts compared to the need to react from whatever Trump or his acolytes have done.
Third, and not too far away, more resources and energy will be being devoted to working out where Trump’s tariff policy is really headed, what – if any – options the UK has for swerving tariffs, and whether such a swerve will have any implications for our trading relations with others, like the EU and Canada, who may not avoid US tariffs and decide to retaliate. A big question is whether the talk of a UK-US deal, even just one confined to AI and tech regulation, is really on the cards and what impact any deal aligning the UK with the philosophy of Silicon Valley (because the UK’s agency to influence terms would look pretty limited) would have on domestic opinion concerned about misinformation and online safety and on European regulators who want a different future model of tech development.
And on all these fronts the government needs to be working up not just plan B in case their first preferences are disappointed, but plans C onwards to cope with wherever the administration moves next. It is hardly the stable and predictable economic environment Starmer hoped his government would be able to offer business; and use to focus on improving people’s lives and the public services they need.
It is now clear that Starmer’s first term will be dominated by dealing with the fallout from the Trump administration’s acts across a wide front. It will affect its plans for growth, its plans for spending and public services, and affect its whole approach to international relations.
But if the government is going to manage to avoid all its ambitions getting completely squished as the giant toad shifts around, it needs not just to be nimble enough to react to the latest moves and manoeuvres as they happen but to build the capacity to anticipate and to absorb.
Anticipation means investing in proper contingency planning, to ensure that the government has worked through the many areas where decisions from Washington could have consequences for the UK and, where necessary, to be beefing up plans to minimise the possible damage. If there has not been already, that means that all departments should be asked how vulnerable their operations and issues are both to deliberate acts by Washington but also to the unintended fallout from changes in US approach.
Keir Starmer will no doubt be hoping that after the initial hyperactivity, Trump calms down and he can reassert a degree of control over the news agenda. But even if that is too much to hope for, he needs to ensure that he has the people and processes in place to drive forward his domestic programme.
There are big decisions coming up – on how to manage the downgrade in UK growth and fiscal prospects at the Spring Statement; how to accommodate more defence spending in what was already promising to be a bloody Spending Review; how to develop a convincing approach to welfare reform; how to improve health service performance while also tackling the longer-term drivers of demand. And there is more – the government will need to hold its nerve on planning, where it may be assailed from both sides, for being too radical and not radical enough and, potentially, also net zero where the political consensus has now broken down.
Starmer needs to ensure his home team – individual secretaries of state, an enforcer who can genuinely speak for him and his own policy and political advisers – can drive all these forward in the way he needs, even as he is forced to shift his focus elsewhere.
One big element of that will be to beef up his No 10 operation – to act not just as his eyes and ears across government, but also as people able to push his priorities forward, without constant reference back. At the end of the year he made a few critical appointments – but his team still looks underpowered on domestic and economic policy, with none of the big hitters that characterised the Blair policy unit. Nor does he have any of the capacity for longer-term thinking that used to sit in Blair’s strategy unit. That is a gap he needs to remedy fast.
**By [Jill Rutter](https://ukandeu.ac.uk/author-profile/jrutter/), Senior Research Fellow, UK in a Changing Europe.**