Sir Keir Starmer’s one-time chief of staff has revealed how a Donald Trump diatribe over fat Scottish foxes almost derailed his first call with the PM.
Morgan McSweeney, who left Downing Street earlier this year amid anger over the Peter Mandelson scandal, was in the room for many of Starmer’s big moments as Labour leader.
In his first ever public interview, released today, he spoke about his regret for the handling of the winter fuel payment and his boss’s comments about Israel’s actions in Gaza.
But an eye-catching anecdote about the historic first call between Starmer and Trump as leaders of their respective countries has generated attention for its bizarre details.
McSweeney told Nick Robinson’s Political Thinking podcast that Trump is ‘much funnier’ than he expected him to be.
He explained: ‘The first call that Keir had with the president, he got into a conversation about windmills.
‘[Trump] started saying, “Britain is a beautiful country, but you have too many windmills” – fine, he was making his point, he’s made that publicly enough times.
‘Then he started to say, “The windmills are killing your birds, the birds are falling by the windmills, foxes are eating those birds…”
‘At this point, the officials who were in the room are barely able to contain themselves, because he was extremely funny. But this was the first call between the Prime Minister and the President, and everyone wanted to be professional but were struggling to hold it together.’
McSweeney continued: ‘He went on to say that as the foxes ate so many birds, and became lazy, they became fat, and as they became so fat people no longer knew what kind of a creature they were, because they were too fat.
‘And this was the first call between the President and the Prime Minister. You just thought, this is going to be so very, very different.’
Asked whether Starmer burst out laughing, McSweeney said: ‘He just held it together, I don’t know how. He just absolutely contained himself, no one else in the room did.’