Trump says fighting ‘has got to stop’ and threatens 100% tariffs on Putin
Donald Trump has announced a weapons deal and threatened 100 percent Russian tariffs after holding talks with Nato chief Mark Rutte.
The US President said Nato will co-ordinate the distribution of the weapons to Ukraine – so the United States will send weapons to Nato and Nato will then deliver them to where they need to go.
He added that Russia would face what he called ‘secondary’ tariffs if a peace deal is not reached within 50 days.
“We’re going to be doing very severe tariffs if we don’t have a deal in 50 days,” the US president said.
Patriot missiles, ammunition and air defence will be part of the deal, the US President and Nato chief confirmed.
It came Kyiv and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky lobbied for weapons support for weeks.
Mr Trump has grown increasingly disenchanted with Mr Putin after he resisted Washington’s attempts to negotiate a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia.
“I thought we should have had a deal done a long time ago, but it just keeps going on and on an on,” he said today.
In pictures: Trump-Nato chief meeting
Missiles and ammunition part of deal: Nato chief
When asked if Patriot missiles are being sent to Ukraine, Trump replied: “everything, it’s everything.”
The US president went on to say that countries who send their own Patriots to Ukraine will receive replacements from the US.
For his part, Nato chief Rutte said the entire deal is about “missiles, ammunition”.
Trump’s frustration growing at time taken for peace deal
Donald Trump has said he thought he had a deal “about four times” with Russia on the Ukraine war.
“And here we are still talking,” the US President said, adding that people on both sides keep dying.
“I thought we should have had a deal done a long time ago, but it just keeps going on and on an on.”
Trump praises Nato defence pledge, Ukrainian courage
Trump has said Ukrainians “continue to fight with tremendous courage” despite losing equipment.
The US president also praised the Nato defence pledge to increase defence contributions from two percent to five percent by 2035.
Trump says Putin a ‘tough guy not an assassin’
Donald Trump has said Putin is a “tough guy” but not an “assassin”.
“I don’t want to say he is an assassin – but he’s a tough guy,” the US President said.
It comes as Trump said he was tired of Putin not honouring their discussions.
“I say well that was a nice phone call and then missiles are launched into Kyiv or some other city and I think – well, that’s strange,” he said.
Ukraine to get ‘massive numbers of military equipment’: Nato chief
Nato’s chief added that the decision means Ukraine will get “really massive numbers of military equipment” for missiles, ammunitions and air defence.
Rutte thanked President Trump and said the decision was good news for Ukraine.
Europe is ‘stepping up’: Nato chief
Speaking alongside Trump, Nato chief said that Europeans were “stepping up”.
“This is really big,” Mark Rutte said, adding that Europeans will pay for Ukraine to maintain its defences.
The Nato chief said the latest decision build on the success of the Nato summit.
US will send ‘top-of-the-line weapons’
Trump has said that Nato will co-ordinate the distribution of the weapons to Ukraine.
“We’re going to make top-of-the-line weapons” and send them to Nato, who will then send them onwards.
Trump threatens Russian tariffs, if peace is not reached in 50 days
Speaking after a meeting with NATO chief Mark Rutte, Trump has threatened what he calls secondary, 100%, tariffs if a peace deal is not reached within 50 days.
“We’re going to be doing very severe tariffs if we don’t have a deal in 50 days,” he said.
Deal made to send weapons: Trump
Speaking after a meeting with NATO chief Mark Rutte, Trump has said they have made a deal to send weapons to Ukraine but that the United States will not be paying for them.
German backpacker speaks out after being found alive in Australian outback
A 26-year-old German backpacker found alive in Western Australia‘s remote outback has revealed that a car crash and head injury left her disoriented and lost for 11 days.
Carolina Wilga trekked through one of the most sparsely populated and remote places in the world after her van became bogged in the Karroun Hill Nature Reserve.
Against the odds, Ms Wilga stumbled upon an unsealed access road, where a chance encounter with farmer Tania Henley led to her rescue.
“Some people might wonder why I even left my car, even though I had water, food, and clothing there,” Ms Wilga said in her first public comments since being found on Friday afternoon.
“The answer is: I lost control of the car and rolled down a slope. In the crash, I hit my head significantly. As a result of the accident, I left my car in a state of confusion and got lost.”
During those 11 nights, police said Ms Wilga survived on minimal food and sourced water from rain and puddles.
She also found shelter wherever she could, including in a cave, as she faced extreme weather.
The nights got extremely cold, police said, and without her vehicle she was totally exposed to the elements. It also rained heavily for a couple of days.
Ms Wilga’s vehicle was found first, a day before she was spotted on the road just 15 miles from her abandoned van.
She thanked her supporters and everyone who helped search for her.
“I am certain that I survived only thanks to this incredible outpouring of support,” Ms Wilga said in the statement, released by the Western Australian Police Force.
“The thought of all the people who believed in me, searched for me, and kept hoping for me gave me the strength to carry on during my darkest moments.”
Receiving treatment for her minor injuries, including many mosquito bites, as well as emotional support, Ms Wilga remains in hospital and has been in contact with her family in Germany.
Rescuers had held grave fears for Ms Wilga after so long in the wilderness. The German backpacker is the second person to have gone missing in the area in the last 12 months.
Man decapitated girlfriend before texting her mother pretending to be her
A man who murdered and decapitated his girlfriend before texting her mother pretending to be her and searching for internet pornography has been jailed.
Ewan Methven was sentenced to a minimum of 23 years behind bars on Monday after admitting murdering his 21-year-old girlfriend Phoenix Spencer-Horn.
Methven murdered her in the home they shared in East Kilbride on 16 November 2024.
He also admitted decapitating her body and texting her mother, pretending to be her.
Methven, who is now 27, killed Ms Spencer-Horn after the couple ordered a takeaway.
Earlier that day, he had complained to his girlfriend that her waitress shifts made him “lonely”.
The High Court in Glasgow was told that Methven attacked Miss Spencer-Horn, stabbing her 20 times, including 10 times in the face, before mutilating her body and severing her head.
Methven had also strangled her, searched for internet pornography 170 times and made repeated attempts to buy cocaine, before spending the weekend driving around in Miss Spencer-Horn’s red Corsa, and texting her mother pretending she was still alive, according to prosecutors.
He texted: “Hey sorry I’ve just woken up xxx” before searching for pornography, the court heard.
On 18 November, at about midday, he dialled 999 and told a call-handler: “I had a psychotic break and killed my wife.”
He said: “We were messing about, I take steroids and was taking cocaine and alcohol, I think there was something else in it … it was f****** horrible.”
He was transferred to a senior police officer, and said: “I just want to go to jail”, and added: “I have been out my face, I can’t remember what happened. I have been driving about all weekend.”
Police officers discovered Miss Spencer-Horn’s mutilated body hidden under a towel. Methven admitted attempting to remove the limbs and torso from her body with a knife or other instrument.
Defending, Tony Graham KC, said, in 2024, Methven realised he had an addiction problem, and had written a letter to the judge saying “in relation to the harm that could cause, it could only be harm to himself”, regarding cocaine, steroids and other drugs.
Mr Graham read from the letter, which said: “I know how loved Phoenix was and how she made her family complete. I can’t believe I’ve taken her from them.”
He told the court: “Mr Methven is in a position where he can offer no explanation as to why the course of events which led to Phoenix’s death took place, other than his own self-administration of drugs.”
He said that Methven “insists he has taken the life of a person he loved, and appreciates he has caused an enormous void in that family”, and “struggles to reconcile how he could have caused that destruction”, the court heard.
Mr Graham said that Methven had been “taken into family home of Phoenix’s family and appreciates in that that two-year period he was adopted into that family”, and described the murder as “a betrayal”, the court heard.
However, he said Methven could not explain why it happened, and added: “He has flashbacks but no real memory as to how things progressed to this destruction of human life.”
Imposing a life sentence, Judge Lord Matthews said Methven had admitted a “truly dreadful crime”.
Lord Matthews said: “At 21 years old, she was standing at the threshold of what should have been a long and fulfilling life. You were a trusted member of her family but betrayed that trust.
“For reasons no one will ever understand you strangled her and stabbed her 20 times, including 10 in the face. You robbed her of all dignity in death by decapitating her and trying to dismember her.
“For two days after, you indulged in drug abuse and watching pornography, contacting her mother and pretending to be her.”
He added: “The way you treated this innocent young woman after her death meant her family did not have the comfort of saying goodbye to her.”
The judge told Methven: “The letter by you answers none of the questions which must be plaguing the family. You blame the effect of substances but that is no excuse.”
Urgent search for Briton who went missing on solo hike in Italy
A 33-year-old British man has gone missing after going on a solo hiking trip to Italy.
Matthew Hall, from Hull, disappeared from Chiavenna, Lombardy, on 9 July. He was declared missing after he failed to check out of his accommodation, the B&B Ploncher hotel, on 11 July.
The last contact he had was at around 1.20pm on 9 July, when he sent a photo to a friend from the cross on the Daloo Alps, above Chiavenna, according to a Facebook post.
He has not been heard from since, and his phone is turned off.
Italian media reports that Mr Hall sought advice from management at the hotel upon his arrival on 8 July and then was not seen again. Staff reportedly assumed the Brit had missed breakfast for the following few days due to leaving early in the morning for hikes.
But when Mr Hall missed his checkout, staff at the hotel grew concerned and decided to check his room. There, they found his documents, personal belongings and his luggage, and they decided to raise the alarm.
The hiker also failed to check in for his flight back from Milan to Manchester on 12 July, after having begun his trip on 5 July.
His mother, Sara Foster, said she believed her son was planning an eight-hour trek before he went missing. She said he had been wearing a beige top and sporting a black backpack when he disappeared. He is around 1.78 m tall and with brown hair.
Italian and British officials have been alerted to his disappearance, and a rescue operation is underway. Italian media reported that the rescue teams are searching the territory above Borgonuovo di Piuro, considered the most likely starting point for Mr Hall to be found.
Ms Foster said she was grateful to the Italian police and rescue workers for their help. She said they had been keeping her regularly updated on the search.
She told the BBC that her son was an avid Hull KR rugby league fan who “loves his trails and walking”.
“We’d got lots of photos from him from the Saturday to the Monday and then it seemed to be a blank,” she said.
“If you’re walking around Chiavenna just keep an eye out. We just want him to come home.”
A FCDO Spokesperson said: “We are supporting the family of a British man missing in Italy and are in contact with the local authorities.”
The uncomfortable truth behind this year’s Wimbledon champions
A tradition once discarded but now an annual convention, the iconic dance between the men’s and women’s singles champions took place at the Wimbledon Ball on Sunday night. Jannik Sinner and Iga Swiatek, two natural introverts, smiled and laughed their way through a shake and a twirl at the Raffles London hotel in Whitehall. It was an endearing sight.
Both were well-deserved first-time champions at the All England Club in their respective finals over the weekend. Sinner downed his arch rival and defending champion Carlos Alcaraz, five weeks on from his French Open heartbreak, while Swiatek claimed the first double bagel in a Wimbledon final in 114 years.
But both, inescapably, had an elephant lurking in the corner of the ballroom.
Last year, to the shock of the sporting world, Sinner and Swiatek failed drug tests. Sinner twice tested positive for the banned anabolic steroid clostebol, first at the Indian Wells Masters tournament in March 2024 and then in an out-of-competition sample eight days later.
The case was only made public four months later, prior to the US Open, when the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) cleared Sinner of any wrongdoing. By February of this year, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) entered a “case resolution agreement” with Sinner, handing him a three-month suspension. Sinner accepted the offer, keen to avoid a lengthy legal battle.
WADA accepted the cause, which read that Sinner’s physiotherapist Giacomo Naldi cut his finger on a scalpel and used a spray, which was “easily available over the counter in any Italian pharmacy”, containing clostebol to treat his finger. Naldi then gives Sinner a daily full-body massage and the Italian player later tested positive.
As for Swiatek, the Pole accepted a one-month suspension after testing positive for the prohibited substance trimetazidine (TMZ) in August. It is a medication used to treat heart conditions, but Swiatek was found to have been “at the lowest end of the range for no significant fault or negligence” by the ITIA. It only became public in November, after the 2024 season concluded.
Swiatek explained that the positive test was caused by a contaminated supply of the non-prescription medication melatonin, which she uses to help with jet lag and sleep issues, provided to her by her physio. The product was contaminated during manufacturing, an investigation concluded, resulting in an extremely low trace of TMZ.
In both cases, the reasoning has been accepted by the authoritative bodies involved. What is less digestible, for fans of the sport and various sections of the locker room, is the notion of preferential treatment for two of tennis’s top players.
Swiatek’s one-month ban covered the Asian swing of tournaments after last year’s US Open. Sinner’s three-month suspension this year took place between the Australian Open in January (which he won) and the French Open in May. He was even back a day before his home tournament, the Italian Open.
Neither missed a Grand Slam. As such, it was not an uncommon viewpoint that it all looked a little too convenient.
Three-time Grand Slam champion Stan Wawrinka stated he “didn’t believe in a clean sport anymore” after news of Sinner’s three-month ban and the timing of it. World No 4 Jessica Pegula said after Swiatek’s suspension that it “seems so hit or miss with how people get punished.” Nick Kyrgios, rather more bluntly, lamented both cases, and simply posted an asterisk on X (Twitter) after Sinner’s Wimbledon triumph on Sunday night.
By contrast to Sinner and Swiatek, British doubles specialist Tara Moore was provisionally suspended for 19 months after testing positive for banned substances boldenone and nandrolone in 2022. The ITIA, eventually, accepted her testimony that she had eaten contaminated meat while competing in Colombia, but only in December 2023, by which point Moore had lost her ranking points and a heap of potential prize money.
“I guess only the top players’ images matter,” Moore wrote on X last summer, after Sinner’s case became public.
“I guess only the independent tribunal’s opinion on the top players is taken as sound and right. Yet, they question them in my case. Just makes no sense.”
It would be far easier to overlook the muddy waters surrounding Sinner and Swiatek in the last year. Both showed exceptional technical and athletic skill in their triumphs on the grass of SW19 in the last fortnight. And both have their integrity intact, after episodes which will no doubt have kept them awake at night. Sinner hinted as such, saying in the media theatre after his win on Sunday: “It has been everything except easy.”
But there is a genuine undertone of whether they, particularly Sinner, were fortunate to be competing at Wimbledon at all. To call the length of their suspensions and the timing favourable would be an understatement. For the winners of the most prestigious tournament in the world to have been shrouded in such contentious cases, in just the last 12 months, is a damaging and uncomfortable look for tennis.
Are we all just working for Zuckerberg?
Musicians have always been the ones to speak truth to power. To challenge the status quo. To start the rebellion. They have always been the ones brave enough to stand up and say: “Stop. You cannot control my voice. You cannot control me”.
But when it comes to social media platforms, that power of freedom is just an illusion. The truth is: they just controlled us. They divided us. They strangled the reach of our voices through their algorithms, and made us work for them for free.
This always amazes me with much loved pop icon Taylor Swift, who has worked to build her instagram audience to 280 million followers – “Follow me on Instagram” she lovingly advocates to her audience – and yet, she only has an average of 1.5% of her audience tap the like button on her posts. She has to turn off comments because of the hate and she cannot direct people back to her website – not because they don’t love her, but because Zuck is controlling her reach.
And if the biggest pop icon of our time is being controlled by Meta’s algorithms, what hope does any other artist and musician have?
The reality is that if Swift could actually reach her audience with a post, and 280 million people actually saw it, she would be double the size of NBC in the US and one of the biggest media channels in the world. And when hateful comments are eliminated, she could turn on comments and have personal engagement from real people. And when she can link people back to her website from posts, she will have hundreds of millions of people back to her own website.
This is possible! This is the new world of social media that we have built at WeAre8. This is true creative and economic freedom. We unlock the algorithms so people’s followers actually see them, we have built AI to eliminate abusive comments, we encourage people to link from the platform back to artists’ websites. In the world of 8, Swift won’t just be singing half time at the Super Bowl, she will be buying the rights to host the superbowl on Taylorswift.com.
Today she is working for Mark Zuckerberg. And so are 2 billion other people. But the future at 8 brings real transformation and hope. When you unlock the algorithms, when you elevate the voices of artists, when you eliminate the controls and share the economics, everything changes.
Musicians can get discovered, they can be elevated and reach their audiences. They can get much bigger brand deals and they can release music independently. And most importantly, they can create the music they want to bring to the world – not just create sounds that they think an algorithm would like. In the world of 8, every artist wins.
‘We the people’ are the largest unpaid workforce in human history. And every artist on the planet is controlled by Meta algorithms. Because let’s be honest, are we really imagining anymore? Or are we just optimising?
We live in a world where your song, your art, your wild idea about space-funk cello solos can’t even reach your own damn audience unless it performs well on the algorithm. The art of rebellion, the beauty of raw expression now has to come with captions like “Wait for it…” and “This will blow your mind 🤯.” Otherwise? It dies.
And if John Lennon was around now, would Imagine even break through the noise? Would he be told by some TikTok growth hacker to add a dance move and remix it with Doja Cat to make it trend? Would the song that once gave us chills… get five seconds of attention before someone swipes up to watch a dog play the piano?
We’ve been told that data is the new oil. But let’s be clear: your creativity, your joy, your mental health, that’s what they’re drilling for. You post, they profit. You create, they control.
It’s no accident that most platforms don’t let your message reach your people unless you pay. They designed it this way. The people with the power to inspire, to challenge, to change the world are throttled unless they play the game, the casino…Zuck’s casino.
This is the moment we flip the script. This is the moment we reclaim our value. And this is the moment that we rediscover our infinite value in the world.
And the funny thing is that evil always destroys itself. And musicians will rise and speak truth to power again in a way that the world has never seen. Because this time, 8 is here to supercharge their voices, and the 8 technology has been built to elevate, share, and give control to artists – and all people. And this new world is so much more entertaining than the social feeds of the past.
Meta actually means ‘dead’ in Hebrew. I am surprised Zuck didn’t do a quick Google search of that before he renamed a company that now has a market cap of 1.7 Trillion dollars. But like every David and Goliath story that has come before, Meta has an achilles heel. And that is their obsession with power, control and greed: no matter what the cost to people and society.
The winners in the new world of 8? Well, everyone: every artist, every musician, every community, charity, publisher, sports team, brand and person. Everyone standing together and breaking free. Because I speak on behalf of all the artists I know, we’ve had enough of the control, the trolls and of working for you for free.
As the band Queen said: “I want to break free”. And now is the time to do it.
Zoe Kalar is the founder and CEO of the social media platform WeAre8.
WeAre8 has announced 8Fest, a three-day virtual event hailed as the world’s first social media music festival. Running from July 11-13, the algorithm-free festival is dedicated to pure music discovery, with lineups curated by industry insiders and a mission to spotlight fresh talent on a global stage.
Download the WeAre8 app today to follow 8fest and be a part of the future of social media.
Excavation begins at Irish mother and baby home where 796 infants found in septic tank
The bodies of hundreds of infants who died in an Irish mother and baby home are to be recovered from a septic tank where they have lain hidden in an unmarked grave for decades.
As excavation work starts at the mass grave, which is thought to contain the bodies of 796 babies, it is hoped it will be possible to identify some of the remains before they are given a proper burial,
The painstaking process, expected to last two years, comes more than 10 years after historian Catherine Corless first uncovered the shocking secrets of St Mary’s mother and baby home in Tuam, County Galway.
In 2014, she found there were no burial records for hundreds of infants and young children who died between 1925 and 1961 at the home for unmarried mothers run by the Bon Secours sisters, a religious order of Catholic nuns.
When Ms Corless visited the site, now a housing estate, she learnt how two boys had lifted a broken concrete slab near a children’s playground in the 1970s and seen bones inside.
Mary Moriarty, who lived in a house near to the site, told the BBC before her death that she had gone to see what the boys had found and “fell in a hole”.
Inside, she saw hundreds of “little bundles” of cloth, which had gone black from rot and damp and were “packed one after the other, in rows up to the ceiling”.
The authorities initially believed the remains were from the Irish famine in the 1840s, when the site was a workhouse where many people died, and the spot was covered up again.
However, Ms Corless’s suspicions about the missing children were officially confirmed in 2017 when an Irish government investigation found “significant quantities of human remains” in a test excavation of the site. The bones were not from the famine: they were of children aged from about 35 weeks’ gestation to two or three years old.
A baby had died at Tuam every two weeks, on average. They were buried, without coffins, one on top of another in the 9ft-deep underground septic tank.
On Monday, after a decade of tireless campaigning on behalf of these infants, digging finally began at the site to recover their bodies in order to give them a proper burial.
“There was no will to do anything for those babies except leave them there and put a monument over them,” Ms Corless said as families and survivors of the home visited the site last week. “But this was a sewer system, and I couldn’t give up on them. They were all baptised; they deserve to be in consecrated ground.”
A major commission prompted by Ms Corless’s work found that 9,000 children had died in similar homes across Ireland in the 20th century.
In 2021, Irish premier Micheal Martin apologised, saying: “The most striking thing is the shame felt by women who became pregnant outside of marriage, and the stigma that was so cruelly attached to their children.
“I apologise for the profound generational wrong visited upon Irish mothers and their children who ended up in a mother and baby home or a county home. As the commission says plainly, ‘They should not have been there.’”
The Bon Secours sisters also offered a “profound apology” after acknowledging that the order had “failed to protect the inherent dignity” of women and children at the home in Tuam.
Anna Corrigan, 68, who discovered that she had two older brothers who were born while her mother was a resident at the home, was among those to visit the site before excavation began.
“These children were denied every human right in their lifetime, as were their mothers,” she said. “They were denied dignity – and they were denied dignity and respect in death. So I’m hoping that today, maybe, will be the start of hearing them, because I think they’ve been crying for an awful long time to be heard.”
After researching her family history, Ms Corrigan found that her mother had given birth to two sons at the home: John Desmond Dolan in February 1946, and William Joseph Dolan in May 1950.
At his birth, John was recorded as weighing 8lb 9oz and healthy. When he died at just 14 months old, the cause of death was given as measles, with his notes also claiming that he was a “congenital idiot” and “emaciated”.
John is listed as one of the 796 babies uncovered by Ms Corless’s research. William lacks even a death certificate – there is merely a note in the nuns’ files from the time, which reads: “Dead 3rd February 1951.”
“I just want truth or answers or closure,” Ms Corrigan told The Sunday Times. “If they are in that pit, at least I can tool on my mother’s headstone ‘pre-deceased by her two sons John and William’. It’s truth, closure, finality, answers.”
PJ Haverty, 73, who was separated from his birth mother aged one and raised at the home until he was seven, described it as a “prison”. He said that he and others linked to the home were shunned and treated like “dirt” when they attended school.
“We had to go 10 minutes late and leave 10 minutes early, because they didn’t want us talking to the other kids,” he recalled.
“Even at breaktime in the school, we weren’t allowed to play with them – we were cordoned off. You were dirt from the street.”
The work at the burial site, which is being undertaken by the Office of the Director of Authorised Intervention, Tuam (ODAIT), will involve exhumation, analysis, identification if possible, and re-interment of the remains at the site.
ODAIT leader Daniel MacSweeney said the excavation will work to international best practice when it comes to forensic standards.
The work will involve a long, complex process of recovering all the remains within the site and then separating the “mixed up” skeletal specimens by sorting them by age and using processes to assess sex.
It is hoped that identification of some of those buried can take place with the assistance of DNA provided by families, as well as other records. The team will also attempt to establish the cause of death where possible.
How the second Trump state visit could all go horribly wrong
Now that we know Donald Trump will be making his state visit to the United Kingdom in September, the big question is – will the blimp fly again?
You may recall the blimp – the giant Trump baby balloon that was raised in London during the president’s previous official visits, in 2018, and upgraded to full state visit status in 2019. The 20-foot-high inflatable portrayed an infantile Trump in a nappy with a snarl on its face, like it’d just been told it had lost a free and fair presidential election.
Seemingly inspired by Orville the Duck, the Trump blimp was intended – in the words at the time of its progenitor, Leo Murray – “to make sure he knows that all of Britain is looking down on him and laughing at him”.
It is now (or should be) as honoured and traditional an element of a Trump visit as the lavish banquet and inspecting the guards in their busbies – but will Keir Starmer pressure mayor Sadiq Khan to take that blimp down in the name of Anglo-American relations?
Khan has been singled out for criticism by Trump before and was proud of permitting the airborne satire to take flight over the capital on previous occasions. The now historic artefact is apparently in storage at the Museum of London, though it is occasionally given a test flight to ensure it’s still airworthy, like the Spitfires and Lancaster bombers we like to see fly past on other great occasions.
The sight of the blimp from the window of Air Force One could make the famously touchy president so upset that he might order the plane to turn around and head straight back to Florida. Which would be a shame, because it would deprive us of some great late-summer entertainment.
How big, for example, will the protests be? The British managed 400,000 last time round, including some especially obscene placards up in Scotland, where the president will be taking in a little golf.
The King has wisely opted to sequester the president, first lady and, no doubt, the extended clan at Windsor Castle, which was designed by William the Conqueror (who understood such things), to keep its inhabitants safe from attack. There will be a no-fly (or a no-blimp) zone. If possible, his majesty should make arrangements for any television sets to be removed from the visitors’ chambers and cancel the newspapers.
The prime minister has also sensibly opted for the Trump visit to be held during the parliamentary recess, so that there’ll be no unpleasant demonstrations by the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana at what would usually be a jolly joint address to MPs and peers, as was recently the case for Emmanuel Macron. No chants of “from the river to the sea” will assail the presidential sensibilities.
Nor will the House of Commons have to stage a formal debate on the wisdom of the visit because of a massive public petition, as happened before.
Given previous incidents, I imagine that the president has no doubt already been told that he won’t be able to have the carriage ride through London for “security reasons” – anyway, it might rain and the presidential Cadillac, known as “The Beast”, is both air-conditioned and assassin-proof. Thus, will President Trump be deprived of the courtesy given to President Ceausescu in 1978 and Vladimir Putin in 2003?
Under our impressive anti-terror laws, protests will be quelled, suppressed and kept as far away from Trump’s attention as possible. Most of the jeopardy of mild to severe embarrassment, then, lies with the behaviour of the president himself. Starmer will be more nervous than a chicken hosting a convention of gourmand foxes at what The Donald might say or do during the few days when he will be the centre of attention.
Hopefully, Trump will leave JD Vance at home, but he’s perfectly capable of repeating his own views about irregular migration into Britain (naturally making an egotistical contrast with his own successes on his southern border), calling it an invasion or something. He could repeat his opinions about crime in London.
He might make a big public fuss of Nigel Farage – “great guy, make a fine leader” – and tell Rachel Reeves she’s making a complete and total mess of the economy (albeit that wouldn’t be so controversial).
In fact, based on what I’ve seen and read over the years, there are many things Trump might say. He might praise the likes of Tommy Robinson – most recently in court charged with harassing two Daily Mail journalists, and Lucy Connolly, the Tory councillor’s wife, jailed for inciting racial hatred online following the Southport attacks – as political prisoners.
Or, he might deride the King’s devotion to environmentalism. No one can predict what he might do – or stop him. We know that, by now.
Volatile as he can be, the best that Starmer can hope for from Trump is some warm words on a future US-UK free trade agreement (despite the claims, there isn’t one now), support for Ukraine and the Nato alliance.
More likely, as Theresa May discovered on previous occasions, the Trumps will leave no more of a legacy than another outing for that big tangerine baby.