Keir Starmer said US President Donald Trump phoned him while he was watching his beloved Gunners take on Paris St Germain last night to discuss the new US-UK trade deal
Keir Starmer has revealed that Donald Trump called him to haggle over trade while he was watching Arsenal crash out of the Champions League.
The Prime Minister said the US President phoned him while he was watching his beloved Gunners take on Paris St Germain last night to discuss the new US-UK trade deal. Speculation had been mounting that a pact to reduce Mr Trump’s punitive tariffs on trade was close to being agreed after weeks of intense negotiations. But the timing of appeared to blindside Downing Street.
Today, the President and the PM announced a “breakthrough” trade deal, which Mr Trump said would be “so good” for both countries. He lavished praise on the PM, saying: “The US and UK have been working for years to try and make a deal and it never quite got there. It did with this Prime Minister, so I want to just congratulate you.”
READ MORE: Donald Trump announces ‘breakthrough’ UK-US deal on call with Keir Starmer
It is the first agreement the White House has reached with a country since Mr Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on global imports to the US.
No10 said the new deal will mean US tariffs on steel and aluminium will be reduced from 25% to zero in a boost for the struggling industry. Car export tariffs will reduce from 27.5% to 10% for a quota of 100,000 UK cars.
Mr Starmer revealed that he had not been aware of the exact timing but insisted he hadn’t been bounced into it by the US President.
Pressed by the Mirror at a speech at a Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) plant in the West Midlands, he said: “I wanted to get a deal over the line and I’m not ashamed of that, because I knew how important it was, particularly for JLR, that we got a deal over the line and we got it over the line in a timely manner.”
He added: “No I didn’t know the exact day, I wouldn’t have been having my phone call with President Trump half way through the second half of the Arsenal-PSG game had I planned it better. But that’s the way it turned out.”
US Ambassador Peter Mandelson also quipped about the last-minute call during President Trump’s Oval Office announcement. Standing behind Mr Trump, he said: “Thank you very much indeed for that very typical eleventh hour intervention by you – your phone call to the PM – demanding even more out of this deal than any of us expected.
Lord Mandelson said the deal was “not the end, it’s just the end of the beginning”. He added: “There is yet more we can do in reducing tariffs and trade barriers so as to open up our markets to each other, even more than we are agreeing to do today.”
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