Keep calm and carry on: Starmer is right to duck the tariffs brawl

With Donald Trump wildly declaring trade wars on everything from uninhabited islands to penguin colonies, the PM’s caution is commendable, says John Rentoul

Rather unexpectedly, Keir Starmer has flourished as things go wrong abroad.

His calm demeanour may not make any practical difference to the global economic disaster unleashed by Donald Trump, but it might make the British feel better – not least as they enjoy the schadenfreude of other countries being hit even harder.

The prime minister is right, I think, to ignore the siren voices urging him to stamp his feet and denounce the US president. That would be easy to do, as every respectable economist knows that tariffs hurt both sides, buyer and seller.

Everyone knows that Trump’s trade war will put up prices for Americans. But let Ed Davey point that out; most people recognise that it is not in the national interest for the prime minister to wade into the saloon-bar brawl that Trump has started.

It would be easy, too, to make fun of Trump for declaring a trade war on penguins – among the territories on his tariff list are the uninhabited Heard and McDonald Islands belonging to Australia in the sub-Antarctic Indian Ocean. The president has also announced tariffs on Diego Garcia, the US base in the Chagos Islands, which is inhabited only by American and British service personnel.

These details – not to mention the 41 per cent tariff announced on the Falkland Islands – suggest that the scorecard brandished by Trump in the Rose Garden on Wednesday is not the final deal. Sensible, therefore, for Starmer to put on his “keep calm and carry on” T-shirt and say that the negotiations with the US will continue.

He understands that the drama of the Trump White House is mostly for show, and not the last word. The details can always be negotiated more quietly later – either before the new tariffs come into effect at midnight (US time) on Saturday, or afterwards.

The president is engaged in theatre, playing the part of a gangster who looks after his own family – the American people – and takes the fight to their enemies, even the penguins of the Indian Ocean.

His Rose Garden speech was like a Royal Variety Performance of bombshells aimed at foreigners. The flourish, flamboyance and wild overstatement were the point of the show: “Liberation Day”, “Make America Wealthy Again”... It seemed designed in part to deflect attention from the absence of any reference to the US’s two biggest trading partners, Mexico and Canada – more details to be sorted out later.

The White House formula for calculating the tariffs, with its Greek letters concealing a simple measure of a territory’s deficit or surplus with the US, is like one of those scientific equations in a shampoo advert – designed to make detergent look impressive.

When Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, spoke this morning of “hysteria and hyperbole”, we might for a moment have thought he had gone rogue and was describing the favourite devices of his own president. It took an effort to remember that the Trump administration has gone through the looking-glass, and that Rubio was talking, on arrival at a Nato meeting in Brussels, about the “global media” that have accused the US of undermining the organisation.

Rubio said the US was “going to remain in Nato”, and that President Trump “is not against Nato”. In other words: don’t pay too much attention to what he says; judge him on what he does.

That is why the approach taken by Starmer, who gives the impression of a family solicitor urging people not to panic as the disaster unfolds, is probably the right one for him to adopt. The financial markets do not seem to believe that Trump will follow through on the imposition of tariffs in full, or for long. As the turbulent waters clear, it may be that a global recession will be averted.

Even so, we should be clear about the seriousness of the threat to the world economy. Tyler Cowen, the US economist, said: “This is perhaps the worst economic own-goal I have seen in my lifetime.”

But we should also be clear that what small leverage Britain might have over the Trump administration depends on – as Starmer said this morning – “our ability to keep a cool head”.