Trump’s enduring presence will have a bearing on UK election and beyond

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Good morning. Donald Trump will have to campaign for the Republican presidential nomination from court. For more on the US side of that story, sign up to Swamp Notes (premium FT subscribers can get the newsletter by clicking here). But Trump’s fate, and the trajectory of the US in general, is, obviously, a story with huge implications for everyone else. Some thoughts on what it means for Westminster in today’s note.

Living within our means

You can essentially guarantee that in the next election, both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer will claim that they will stick to something an awful lot like Jeremy Hunt’s financial plans. But it is also essentially guaranteed that, after the election, they will end up doing something else.

Starmer’s caution on tax-and-spend is, essentially, the same strategy pursued by Tony Blair from 1994 to 1997, and by David Cameron from 2005 to November 2008 (more on that later). And the political rationale for it remains incredibly strong: loss aversion is a powerful thing (that can mean bias towards the status quo), and like Blair, the Labour leadership don’t want their path to Downing Street to be blocked by anxieties over tax.

But the policy situation is very different. One of the reasons why Blair and Gordon Brown were able to keep their promise to “stick to Tory spending limits” is that they were able to cut defence spending, in large part because of the end of the cold war.

As our excellent “rise of the middle powers” series helps to illustrate, the next government will face a much more complex and fraught geopolitical situation. And over in the US, there is every possibility that Donald Trump will become not only the Republican candidate (as Lauren Fedor joined us on the Political Fix podcast to explain) but also become president for a second time.

Now, there are lots of reasons why that would be bad for Americans. But from the perspective of Starmer or Sunak, the alarming thing isn’t simply that Trump — who has boasted that he could “settle” the war in Ukraine in a day — might win, it’s that the whole Republican party is moving in a Trumpy direction as far as Ukraine is concerned. And as Gideon Rachman set out recently, the whole of US politics is moving in that direction on free trade and globalisation.

Given there are life-and-death consequences for others in Europe as a result, it feels a little crass to point out that these things have big implications for what the UK prime minister will have to do in office: but nonetheless, it’s true.

Now try this

I had a lovely long weekend. I was educated and delighted in equal measure by our wine issue. I really enjoyed reading Yuan Yang’s obituary of Isabel Crook, a British centenarian who became a Maoist, and Imogen West-Knights on Bradley Cooper’s prosthetic nose.

Top stories today

• Flight disruption to last for ‘days’ | A system-wide failure of the UK’s air traffic system yesterday that left thousands of passengers stranded is “going to take some days” to resolve, the UK’s transport secretary said.

• Parked plans | London mayor Sadiq Khan has shelved plans for a zero emissions zone in central London that would have levied a charge on drivers of all combustion-engined vehicles, marking a shift in his politically contentious crackdown on pollution. 

• Pollution rules changed to boost housebuilding | Ministers will announce plans today to scrap UK environmental rules that developers say have prevented tens of thousands of homes from being built in recent years.

• ‘Lefty lawyer’ attacks fuel hate mail | Since UK immigration lawyer Jacqueline McKenzie was singled out by the Conservative party, she has received a torrent of death threats, hate mail and racist abuse. All the main legal associations rallied around her, accusing Tory politicians of fostering a threatening climate for many members of the profession.

• ‘Crime week’ tussle between Home Office and police | Police chiefs have suggested the home secretary is interfering with their operational independence by demanding forces pursue all reasonable crime leads at a time when their resources are being outstripped by a rise in offences, the Guardian’s Matthew Weaver reports.