Starmer to meet with Trump to 'establish a relationship'

Sir Keir Starmer is to meet with Donald Trump later tonight.

It is believed to be the first meeting between the current UK prime minister and former - and potentially future - US president.

The pair is set to meet overnight UK time, which is the evening in New York, where Sir Keir is currently located while on a visit to the UN.

David Lammy, the Labour foreign secretary, has met Mr Trump's vice presidential candidate, JD Vance.

Speaking to journalists, Sir Keir reiterated he wanted to meet both Mr Trump and Kamala Harris ahead of the November vote.

However, meeting the Democrat is hard due to the "usual diary challenges".

Sir Keir said: "It'll be really to establish a relationship between the two of us.

"I'm a great believer in personal relations on the international stage.

"I think it really matters that you know who your counterpart is in any given country, and know them personally, get to know them face to face.

"So it's really along those lines. I won't go into what we'll actually discuss, obviously, but that's the purpose of it, as you'd expect, ahead of the election."

Asked if a Trump presidency would leave Ukraine exposed, Sir Keir said the nature of the "special relationship" between the UK and US "always sits above whoever holds the particular office".

"The US people will decide who they want as their president, and we will work with whoever is president," he added.

"I'm not going to speculate on what any particular issues may be on the other side of the election."

Speaking ahead of the meeting, Mr Trump said he thought Sir Keir was "very nice".

He said: "I actually think he's very nice. He ran a great race, he did very well, it's very early, he's very popular."

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Mr Trump went on to praise Reform UK leader Nigel Farage as well, saying: "I think Nigel is great, I've known him for a long time."

"He had a great election too, picked up a lot of seats, more seats than he was allowed to have actually.

"They acknowledged that he won but for some reason you have a strange system over there, you might win them but you don't get them."

This appears to be a misunderstanding of how the UK's first past the post system for elections chooses MPs - Reform won fewer seats compared to its vote share because it came second in many seats.