Theresa May on Trump relationship: “opposites attract”
Tonight the PM is addressing Republican senators and congress members in Philadelphia. More on her speech later at 8.30 when she’s delivered it.
Mrs May was asked on the plane out about the personality gulf between the vicar’s daughter and the billionaire property developer. Could they really get on?
Mrs May said: “Haven’t you ever noticed? Sometimes opposites attract.”
It was delivered with the slightly flirtatious quality that Theresa May has surprised the Commons with occasionally – lines like “come up and see me sometime” and expressing the hope that Peter Bone MP gets an appropriate birthday present from his wife come to mind. Will she dare to show that side to the President?
A serious chunk at the beginning of the Friday meeting in the White House will be devoted to trying to develop a personal relationship with President Trump. It’s wouldn’t be surprising if the PM chooses that first moment to invite the President to the UK and lay on the right royal welcome with a treacle laden trowel. They will then get into discussions that are expected to touch on a US/UK free trade deal, world trade in general, Russia, Syria and ISIS.
On US/UK trade the Prime Minister said that there was “much that we can do in the interim (ahead of formal Brexit) removing barriers to trade (between the US and the UK).” The US administration has applied quite a bit of energy in their short week in office, one official said, to make sure there’s something to say on all this tomorrow.
Mrs May said that the UK government remains a critic of the use of torture and her aides noted the President in his ABC News interview hadn’t actually signalled a definite change of policy but simply declared his own support for torture and his view that it worked (based on what evidence, if any, it wasn’t at all clear). I wouldn’t expect Mrs May to bring this up in her conversation with the President. Areas of common interest will be focused on, areas of difference rationed.
One area of difference Mrs May might try to make progress on is getting the President to commit in very clear language to Article 5 of the NATO founding charter. A commitment to the principle of defending fellow NATO members if they are under attack is central to the western defence system.
So far in public President Trump has been contradictory: NATO is “obsolete,” or NATO needs serious reform. That ambiguity, the UK government and other NATO allies feel, is completely unacceptable. Mrs May would count it a very big prize if they could get President Trump to commit to it in clear terms tomorrow. It seems strange that such an assurance should have to be sought from the mightiest and most central member of NATO. But then these are strange times.
