Exclusive:
Alastair Campbell, Labour’s former comms director, writes for the Sunday Mirror – “If they had been serious about using Friday’s meeting to advance a peace deal, they would have talked things through BEFORE calling in the media.”
If Donald Trump had been serious about a peace deal, he would not have blindsided President Zelensky and every other world leader when deciding to call Vladimir Putin.
If he and his vile deputy JD Vance had been serious about using Friday’s meeting with Zelensky to advance that peace deal, they would have talked things through BEFORE calling in the media. The fact that they didn’t suggests to me the entire thing was an ambush, maybe not designed to be as awful as it turned out to be, but an ambush nonetheless.
To those who say Zelensky should have kept his cool, try putting yourself in his shoes … his country is invaded; war crimes are committed against his troops and his people; his life is a 24/7, three-year battle for personal and political survival, an existential battle for his country’s survival. A new US President comes in, blames YOU for starting the war, calls YOU not Putin a dictator, lies about the financial support given by the US and Europe, presents a deal that is more about US finances than Ukrainian security, and expects you not just to sign it but bow down in gratitude while you’re at it.
That meeting showed Trump for what we have long known him to be … narcissistic, thin-skinned, petulant, rude, unserious, and a bully. It showed Vance for what he is too – unpleasant, nasty, ignorant, also a bully. It showed them both as more inclined to stand up for Putin, not democracy or the freedom of sovereign nations to live in peace.
On Sunday Zelensky will get a far warmer welcome, as he joins European leaders at a London summit hosted by Keir Starmer. The British PM had his work cut out meeting Trump, and he passed the diplomatic test with flying colours. The challenges have grown a whole lot bigger now.
He is right to want to keep good relations with the US, and to seek to calm tempers. But this is a moment of truth for Europe. Germany’s soon-to-be new Chancellor Friedrich Merz is right that Europe can no longer view Trump’s America as a reliable ally. Trump has been right that Europe must strengthen its own defences. We never imagined it would partly be because of US unreliability that he would be proven right. But that is where we are. Europe has to show real unity and real purpose; yes, a desire to get things with America in a better place, but also an understanding that right now the man in the White House is more interested in pleasing the man in the Kremlin than he is the man in Number 10, the man in the Elysée Palace or indeed any other European capital.
America elected a disaster. Like it or not, we have to deal with it.
