Ignore angry demos and save dying NATO
Trump and May disrupted by carnival of protest
Friday the 13th is unlucky for some. This Friday is especially so for Theresa May because she’ll be lunching with Donald Trump. For the shy PM (yes, really) it will be an excruciating ordeal. Mrs May struggles with idle chit-chat at the best of times. She’ll have to butter rolls while buttering up a bombastic, bumptious, semi-literate polecat, a pernicious virus infecting the global body politic. And she’ll have to endure the dissembling old stoat speaking weasel words. It won’t be a humdinger day for Trump either. The US ambassador’s residence, where he’ll stay, will be blasted with protesters’ recordings of detained Mexican children crying for their mothers. There’ll be demos in London’s Parliament Square, in Glasgow’s George Square, in Bristol, Newcastle, Leeds, Cambridge and Cardiff. There’ll be Trump-head coconut shys. Organisers range from the TUC to CND, Latin American Solidarity to, er, the Woodcraft Folk. Have fun all, but I won’t be joining you. A one-to-one between the US President and the British PM is too important to be disrupted by a carnival of protest.
Trump may well be one ugly bundle of contradictions, but there are positives. On the plus side, peace with North Korea is still possible. On the minus, so is war with Iran.
I can forgive him for imposing steel tariffs on us because that was an election promise to unemployed American voters, but not for scaring migrant kids half to death. And if ever Twitter had a twit... this one’s a class ‘a’ where the ‘i’ is.
Mrs May must guide him towards what’s left of a post-Brexit trade deal, and away from a deal with Vladimir Putin when he meets the Russian president the following Monday.
She will argue that while poisoning Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal and daughter Yulia was a warlike act, leaving a stash of Novichok behind for innocent civilians to pick up is close to an act of war.
But most of all, Mrs May might have to salvage NATO, the 28nation alliance which keeps Russia in check.
Trump has raged that it is “obsolete” and then, typically, said it wasn’t – before raging again about America picking up 20 per cent of the tab.
He has a point. While austerity Britain chips in the required two per cent of national wealth on defence, rich Germany doesn’t, contributing only 1.3 per cent. At the NATO summit this week, God knows what havoc Trump plans.
NATO works because an attack on one member state provokes retaliation by all. As Europhile Tory PM Ted Heath once told me, that meant the UK gave up her sovereignty in 1949 by joining.
And Brexit won’t bring it back.