Fresh off the plane from the political trip of the decade, The Mirror’s Political Editor Lizzy Buchan revealed just how tense that plane ride to Washington D.C. really was.
“I don’t think anyone on that trip really slept at all,” Buchan divulged how normal proceedings were interrupted on this special flight as Keir Starmer flew to Washington to speak with Donald Trump.
“The stakes on it were so high that we got on the plane and we did the Prime Ministerial huddle right at the start… Clearly everyone was a bit tense so everyone wanted to kind of get on with it.”
Keir Starmer warned the journalists on the private plane that “there is a lot I probably can’t answer right now.”
Speaking on The Division Bell podcast, Buchan explained that Keir’s tight lips were because he was “terrified that one stray comment gets reported and US President Donald Trump goes ballistic and the meetings off!”
Inside the Oval Office Buchan said, “there was definitely an air of nerves”.
“It felt like the stakes were really high, Downing Street was quite stressed…When we got into the meeting room and Trump looked quite relaxed and Starmer looked very tense.”
Tension eased a little in the White House, thanks to a relatively successful UK/US meeting, before Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived the next day and all hell broke loose.
Mikey Smith, Deputy Political Editor of The Mirror, gave his insight on the now infamous Oval Office verbal sparring match between the two presidents: “it got on fine for about 20 minutes, I think and then the look on Zelensky’s face was just, ‘why am I here? Why are there so many cameras?”
