Starmer: Trump and me are still buddies — despite US election legal row

ABOARD THE PRIME MINISTER’S PLANE TO SAMOA — U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer insisted Wednesday he enjoys a “good relationship” with Donald Trump despite the presidential candidate filing a legal complaint against Starmer’s Labour Party for sending volunteers to campaign for Democrats in the U.S. election.

Starmer dismissed the Trump campaign’s accusation of “interference occurring in plain sight,” and said Labour volunteers had crossed the Atlantic for “pretty much every election.”

The Trump campaign wrote to the Federal Election Commission Tuesday after a U.K. Labour staffer revealed on LinkedIn that almost 100 party officials were heading to campaign for the Democrats in U.S. swing states, ahead of the knife-edge Nov. 5 election.

“Those searching for foreign interference in our elections need to look no further than [the] LinkedIn post,” said the letter, from Trump campaign lawyer Gary Lawkowski. 

But Starmer told reporters on a flight to a Commonwealth summit in Samoa: “They’re doing it in their spare time, they’re doing it as volunteers, they’re staying I think with other volunteers over there. That’s what they’ve done in previous elections, that’s what they’re doing in this election and that’s really straightforward.”

Starmer, who had a two-hour dinner with the Republican candidate in New York in late September, denied it risked jeopardizing his relationship with Trump.

“I spent time in New York with President Trump, had dinner with him and my purpose in doing that was to make sure that between the two of us we established a good relationship, which we did,” he said.

“We had a good, constructive discussion and, of course, as prime minister of the United Kingdom I will work with whoever the American people return as their president,” he added.

Labour said it is not funding the travel or accommodation for the activists, meaning its efforts remain within strict U.S. federal election rules which stipulate foreign volunteers can’t spend more than $1,000 helping candidates. 

But the Trump campaign questioned those sums in its formal letter to the Federal Election Commission, arguing the LinkedIn post suggested Labour could be stumping up costs for the activists. 

POLITICO reported last week how U.K. Labour and the U.S. Democrats, including center-left think tanks in Washington and London, have been co-ordinating in a bid to boost their electoral chances.