If British newspapers and broadcasters were prize fighters, they would be punch drunk in the face of the frenzied, nonstop onslaught of the man who considers himself the undisputed, unpredictable, unbeatable heavyweight champion of the world, aka President Donald Trump.
Or, to borrow the title of that classic 1993 coming of age movie ‘Dazed and Confused’, the distinct feeling the UK media has as it struggles to come to terms with the ‘New World Order’ of Trump 2.0.
Look no further than the fate of Trumpian fan boy Boris Johnson, as depicted and debunked in the current edition of satirical magazine, Private Eye. Under the headline ‘Boris Spiked’, the Eye tells the tale of the Bojo column that didn’t appear in its usual Daily Mail spot last Saturday.
“Today, President Zelenskyy was in the White House, to sign what I believe is an excellent deal for both Ukraine and America,” he pontificated. “It is barely more than a month since his inauguration, but Trump is changing the global conversation in important ways — and in favour of honesty and progress. This does not, repeat not, mean that Trump wants to betray Ukraine, or even to decouple from Europe... I am optimistic, first because Putin has all sorts of reasons to try to get out of the mess he has made, and second, because the Trump White House is committed to a sovereign Ukraine”, predicted our former prime minister who has been competing with Nigel Farage and Piers Morgan for the title of Trump’s numero uno UK media cheerleader / apologist.
Ah, the perils of early deadlines and Trumpian unpredictability. The column, penned before Zelenskyy had even stepped into the White House that fateful Friday, went live on the Mail website at 4.51pm on Friday afternoon. Precisely 35 minutes later, Trump and his VP JD Vance launched their infamous, thuggish (and almost certainly pre-planned) humiliation of Ukraine’s heroic war leader, and Zelenskyy’s unceremonious expulsion from the White House premises for the crime of refusing to be bullied.
As Private Eye revealed: At 6.22pm, the Mail’s social media honchos released the video plug Johnson is contractually obliged to record to plug his next day print column. It coincided with Trump’s own furious posting saying Zelenskyy could only return “when he is ready for peace”. Otherwise known as when you’re ready to do as you’re told, sign a minerals deal without US security guarantees.
Both the online version of the Boris column and his promo video were hastily scrubbed from the internet and — without explanation — Johnson’s column was missing from its Saturday print slot. Hardly surprising, given the Mail’s Saturday splash was hugely pro- Zelenskyy and fittingly headlined in caps: A SPECTACLE TO HORRIFY THE WORLD.
But as Private Eye also suggested, readers missing Boris’s column could revisit online his Valentine’s Day ode to Trump (only one of many flattering offerings) in which he declared: “To listen to the wailing at the Munich Security Conference, you would think that Donald Trump has pulled out of NATO and cravenly capitulated to the Kremlin... the valiant Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been sold down the Dnieper, that Ukraine was done for and that a new darkness covers the face of Europe’...which Johnson dismissed as ‘the usual anti-Trump hullabaloo of the liberal media’. Quite how Boris will address things in his next column will be quite a challenge methinks!
Fleet Street's continued backing for Zelenskyy
Given the Mail titles, along with virtually every other UK national paper and the majority of columnists, have continued to support Zelenskyy, lament Trump’s refusal to commit to firm security guarantees in any ‘peace’ deal with Putin and flag up the US president’s bizarre blame gaming of Ukraine for a war triggered by the Russian dictator’s brutal and illegal invasion. Plus, the Trump / Vance / Musk triumvirate’s appetite for savaging the Ukrainian president while barely even whispering any serious condemnation of Putin. (As co-author of an early book on the Ukraine War, I clearly recall Donald Trump still calling the Russian leader a ‘friend’ and a ‘genius’ as the invasion got under way.)
In fairness, both British media and politicians, along with their European counterparts, can be forgiven for feeling decidedly dazed and confused by the daily turbulence emanating out of Washington, often in the shape of semi-coherent verbal missiles launched from Trump’s ‘Truth Social’ platform, without warnings to allies (and even, in some cases, without alerting senior figures in his own administration). Witness the decision to instantly freeze military supplies to Ukraine. Witness the decision to halt intelligence sharing with Kiev — announced while Keir Starmer was talking up the need for US / UK collaboration to cross-party support at PMQs on Wednesday. According to my sources, we will soon witness Elon Musk depriving Ukraine of access to his Starlink satellite system which would deliver a crippling blow to its vital battlefield communications.
The March 6th Times report focused on Ukrainian MPs and defence officials warning that the Trump administration’s decision would also seriously impair the ability to protect population centres, “dooming” hundreds of civilians to death or injury. So much, it seems, for the US president’s much-trumpeted desire to “stop the killing”.
Despite their strong support for Ukraine, UK newspaper headlines tell a depressing story too. Just a few samples suffice. ‘Zelenskyy could lose in months without advanced US weapons’, across a 2-page Times spread (March 5th). Even before Zelenskyy’s White House humiliation, the Daily Mail splashed ‘TRUMP APPALLS WORLD WITH ‘DICTATOR’ BLAST AT ZELENSKYY’ (February 20th). The same edition carried a Dominic Midgley article posing the headline question millions are asking: ‘Murky business deals? Blackmail? What REALLY makes the tough guy US president seem liken putty in Putin’s hands?’
Positive reviews for Starmer visit, initially
For a time, the UK headlines were positive after Keir Starmer’s White House meeting and that clumsily theatrical, amateur magician act on camera pulling King Charles’s invitation for an “historic second state visit” for Trump out of his inside pocket. (*Trump already knew it was coming btw.)
‘WHAT AN UNLIKELY BROMANCE!’ gushed the Mail’s front page over a photo of Trump and Starmer shaking hands. On the Ukraine crisis, if nothing else, the Mail has joined the cross-party chorus of praise for the prime minister’s handling of a situation that resembles a diplomatic tightrope walk with a ticking timebomb beneath it. Inside, ‘A promising start for PM and Trump’ was the leader column headline. Similar sentiment dominated the coverage in The Times, The Mirror, The Sun, Telegraph, Guardian et al.
Yes, there were more sceptical, cautionary voices. Matthew Parris in a Times Comment column said: “As Sir Keir Starmer crawled and Donald Trump patronised, instant commentary was that this encounter was going well. The tone was surprisingly ‘warm’, said breathless pundits. Going well? Yes, if to watch a British prime minister dancing upon a monster and tickling its fancy is to watch an encounter ‘going well’,” raged Parris.
A personal declaration of interest here, as someone who once knew Trump well personally. In the wake of the Trump / Starmer ‘love-in’, as the Mail also dubbed it, I said on air and wrote online; “BEWARE, the euphoria might not last beyond the weekend.” Usually, journalists love being right in their forecasts but not for me this time when I predicted Zelenskyy would be presented with a minerals deal, sans meaningful Trump security guarantees, that he could hardly sign... although I didn’t anticipate the obscene scale of the contrived Trump / Vance ambush. Obscene? Certainly, when Trump declared it “great television” before Zelenskyy, a guest head of state, was kicked out of the White House for not dancing to ‘King Donald’s’ tune. Or when Zelenskyy was mocked by POTUS for ‘hating’ Putin... not an unreasonable viewpoint when your country has been invaded, tens of thousands of troops and civilians slaughtered and maimed, women raped and children abducted.
Historian Patrick Bishop produced a particularly powerful critique of the Oval Office debacle in a March 1st Mail guest column. Under the headline, “This was a public punishment beating – they must have run out of champagne in the Kremlin.”
His opening paragraph spoke volumes… “Last night we watched the death of decency in American politics live on our television screens.”
Rogue state?
While Vance, arguably far more the ideologue than Trump himself, triggered a front-page war of words in the UK in the last couple of days with his apparent mocking of British / French military prowess in a US TV interview. He boasted that a mineral deal was far better than “20,000 troops from some random country that has not fought a war for 30 or 40 years”. It provoked fury among top former British military chiefs in print and on-air, with one branding Trump’s America a “rogue state that cannot be trusted anymore” and another questioning whether the US would honour Article 5 of the NATO charter committing to defend a member of the alliance if they were attacked by Russia. They rolled out via the media the stats on how many British troops had died and been maimed fighting alongside the US in recent years in Iraq and Afghanistan. While maintaining his stance of not attacking Trump or Vance directly, Keir Starmer pointedly elected to open Wednesday’s PMQs by flagging up the anniversary of the deaths of several young British servicemen he named and who gave their lives fighting alongside their US allies. The message was clear enough and Vance’s belated claims he hadn’t been referring to Britain or France wasn’t convincing anyone.
A powerful condemnation of Zelenskyy’s treatment came from Andrew Neil in his March 1st Daily Mail column (the same day Boris Johnson’s column went AWOL). He wrote: “What happened to Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office yesterday was nothing short of a disgrace. The sight of the leader of Ukraine, a country which has been savaged by unprovoked Russian aggression, being ganged up on by President Trump and his vice-president Vance was really quite upsetting. This is a man who, when offered an evacuation flight out of Kyiv two days after the invasion of February 2022, replied, “The fight is here: I need ammunition not a flight”. No one can doubt Zelenskyy’s patriotism or valour and yet Vance tried to intimidate him and then accused him of being disrespectful because he answered back. And when the Ukrainian president said, quite rightly, that Putin could not be trusted, Trump launched a brutal verbal assault of his own, threatening to abandon him and his country unless he did as he was told.”
Neil went on to compare Zelenskyy’s treatment with that of Keir Starmer only 24 hours earlier. Not normally a Starmer cheerleader and not always a Trump critic, he wrote: “Our prime minister may well have done the best he could in difficult circumstances. It could be the basis of future Anglo-American collaboration — or it could all unravel within weeks. With Trump you just never know.”
But the headline on Neil’s column spoke volumes too. “He didn’t get humiliated or shouted at. The brutal truth is Starmer left the White House without the thing he really needed.” The thing being that all-important commitment to a US military back up without which the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ slogan that emerged from the emergency meeting of European leaders in London on Sunday organised by the PM will remain largely a slogan. Without US backup and against Putin’s opposition, the prospect of British, French and other international forces as ‘peacekeepers’ on Ukrainian soil look more a case of fine words than action.
Made for, and by, television
As I watched the astonishing Oval Office debacle unfold, with Trump repeatedly accusing Zelenskyy of risking “World War 3” while then chortling it was all “great television” a rich irony struck me. Here was a history-shifting showdown between two men, neither of whom would be presidents at all without the power of TV. Trump by virtue (or vice) of his role in ‘The Apprentice’ with his trademark ‘You’re fired’ catchphrase and Zelenskyy via being cast as the fictional comedy president of Ukraine before ending up as the deadly serious real deal.
Unless last minute diplomacy somehow prevails, the smart money is on Zelenskyy having to sign Trump’s rare minerals deal without security guarantees. Maybe even bow to Trump’s MAGA brigade demands for his resignation. It appears the last throw of the diplomatic dice could be a combined mission to the White House by Starmer, Macron and Zelenskyy. But it’s a long shot that their attempt at ‘The Art of Persuasion’ can convert the man who considers himself the world champ at ‘The Art of The Deal’. But if there is anything remotely resembling a ‘trump card’ to play, it is Trump’s colossal vanity. Long before he entered politics, he boasted to me that he was determined to be the world’s greatest property tycoon, the world’s greatest casino owner, the world’s greatest boxing promoter, the world’s greatest golf course owner.
Now if only he could be persuaded that selling out Ukraine would, in the eyes of the world, crown Vladimir Putin as the real Master of the Deal?
But a depressing theory comes from a veteran Republican Capitol Hill contact who isn’t a slavish Trumpian. “What if the White House already knows Putin isn’t likely to make enough concessions to sell the story of President Trump as the big winner and secure the Nobel Peace Prize he craves? In that case devising a strategy where Zelenskyy takes the rap would make cruel but cynical sense.”
