Donald Trump is going to turn Starmer’s Britain into an international laughing stock

Grandfather Robert Blackstock, a retired engineer from Nottinghamshire, became the “Brenda from Bristol” of this election campaign when he asked Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer during Wednesday night’s TV debate: “Are you two really the best we’ve got to be the next prime minister of our great country?”

Like the woman who responded to Theresa May’s snap election in 2017 with “not another one!”, this 74-year-old spoke for a nation that appears to be on the brink of some sort of political harakiri. The mood seems to be: “I can’t bring myself to vote for the Tories even though I know Labour will be even worse.”

But if we thought things were bad in the UK, spare a thought for our transatlantic brethren, who are having to choose between a man facing a custodial sentence and a president who cannot finish a sentence. It’s enough to make “broken Britain” look like BarbieLand.

After Joe Biden’s near catatonic performance on Thursday night, accurately described by Tim Stanley in this newspaper as not so much a debate as a “medical emergency”, Donald Trump is looking increasingly likely to serve a second term in the White House.

Assuming that Biden isn’t replaced – and let’s be honest, the Democrats have known about Sleepy Joe’s fragile state for quite some time now – it hardly seems fathomable that Americans could choose the doddery 81-year-old over Trump after this. The Democratic demand for any Republican nominee to be “morally” fit for office loses its potency when voters are wondering if their actual president is fit for office, full stop.

One thing’s for certain. Should The Donald return to the Oval Office in a cloud of orange smoke, it will leave a potential Labour government in a very uncomfortable place, which could have significant ramifications for Starmer’s first year in No 10, if he does triumph on Thursday.

Indeed, Britain is about to get a Left-wing government at the precise moment when not just the United States but many other Western nations are moving sharply to the Right too.

Is it really going to feel savvy for the UK to push full-steam ahead towards net zero, for instance, when America could soon be prioritising economic growth and Europe is already reining in the Greta Thunberg fan club?

Trump has made no secret of his desire to embrace oil, gas and cheaper energy. In Europe, meanwhile, green parties took an absolute drubbing in the European Parliament elections earlier this month, casting doubt over the future of the European Green Deal.

Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, launched the plan to much fanfare in 2019 as a response to a surge in “climate emergency” scaremongering. But it has since become a target for Right-wing parties, who blame it for some of the bloc’s economic woes in the wake of farmers’ protests, inflation and rocketing energy bills after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Critics have long claimed that arbitrary net zero targets are a recipe for bankruptcy, but now electorates around the world seem to be waking up to the fact that they are in danger of making them poorer and colder.

Not the Labour Party, however. This week, The Telegraph revealed a secret recording of Darren Jones, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, admitting that Labour’s plan to decarbonise the economy could cost “hundreds of billions” of pounds.

Mr Jones told a public meeting in Bristol that private capital would have to be used to upgrade infrastructure, but “public subsidy” would still be required alongside that. It was already going to be a hard sell to taxpayers – but it will be even harder if Britain’s energy bills remain among the highest in Europe – and vastly bigger than Americans’ bills under a second Trump presidency. Can the UK really afford to be an international green outlier?

On migration, Britain is similarly going to appear completely out of step with the international mood. Labour looks set to continue with its slavish devotion to international courts and conventions at the expense of a populace that has long been demanding more robust border controls. While this has not been the “immigration election” that Nigel Farage, the Reform leader, had wanted, the subject has dominated conversations during the campaign, with polls suggesting that immigration is a priority issue for about two in five British voters.

How will Starmer’s kowtowing to his legal friends look in the face of Trump potentially ordering mass deportations and the French contemplating a referendum on migration, should Marine Le Pen’s National Rally secure power? We would widely be considered the softest touch in the West, a hand-wringing international laughing stock as everyone else responds to voters’ concerns and gets a grip on who can enter their country.

If Trump wins again, America will start pushing back against the excesses of woke. He is even said to be planning a free national “American Academy” that bans “wokeness or jihadism”, funded by punitive levies on other universities. By contrast, if Labour wins power, we can expect Britain to double down on extreme trans policies, critical race theory and all the other divisive nonsense pushed by the so-called “progressive” Left. Kemi Badenoch, the women and equalities minister, this week described Labour’s new Race Equality Act as “morally repellent”, because it would classify the workforce by race.

Labour has also committed to making it easier for people to change their gender legally and ban so-called trans conversion therapy – even though the shadow health secretary Wes Streeting has admitted he was wrong to say in the past that “a trans woman is a woman”.

When the rest of the world appears to have changed its thinking on this issue, we have Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, suggesting that a trans woman with a penis should still be able to use a woman’s lavatory.

But perhaps the biggest worry is how Starmer will perform on the world stage opposite Donald Trump 2.0. Is the Labour leader really up for taking on the mantle of leading the free world’s defence of Ukraine, if the US decides to take a step back? How will Labour react if Trump ridicules a Left-wing British government, which he is likely to do if past performance is any guide?

Obviously, Starmer could go full Sadiq Khan or David Lammy, who have called the former president “a poster boy for racists” and a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath” respectively. But that would destroy the special relationship, and where would that leave the UK then?

If Thursday night’s US television debate has blown up Biden, then a Trump presidency could be about to do the same for Starmer’s fledgling Labour administration.