WATFORD, United Kingdom — President Trump will minimize his appearances with U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson during the NATO Summit in London Tuesday and Wednesday for fear of harming Johnson’s campaign to remain as prime minister.
Trump arrives in London this evening. Both countries say they are aware of the president’s unique ability to upend carefully planned diplomatic niceties, and Johnson’s main opponent, Jeremy Corbyn, is planning to “weaponize” the visit.
A senior Conservative source said: “Everyone knows how dangerous this could be for Boris, but there’s not much we can do about it.”
The NATO leaders meeting was announced two years ago by Johnson’s predecessor Theresa May. It was seen as a way to demonstrate Britain’s place in the world after Brexit. But the country remains mired in plotting its path out of the European Union, and Johnson’s closeness to Trump plus plans for a free-trade deal with the United States have emerged as key attack lines for the prime minister’s opponents.
A senior British official said planning for the NATO event, held just outside London in Watford, had taken account of the sensitivities of the Dec. 8 election.
“We are trying to keep this in a very separate basket,” he said.
Trump is due to be photographed alongside the prime minister at a welcome ceremony, and they will attend a dinner at Buckingham Palace. But so far, there is no bilateral meeting scheduled. Instead, they will take part in a working lunch along with Estonia, Greece, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, and Bulgaria.
A senior U.S. administration official said further meetings could yet be arranged but that Trump was “absolutely cognizant of not, again, wading into other country’s elections.”
That was too late to prevent him wading into the election last month, when he said Corbyn would be “so bad” for Britain and instead pushed for Johnson to agree to a political pact with Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage.
In return, Corbyn has repeatedly attacked Johnson for being too close to Trump — who is broadly unpopular in the U.K. — and warned of the dangers of agreeing a trade deal with the U.S. Protesters plan to highlight their fears any deal could damage the National Health Service.
Thousands are expected to gather Tuesday in central London and march towards Buckingham Palace, where NATO leaders will be at dinner.
So far, Trump appears to be toeing the line. He has resisted the temptation to renew his long-simmering feud with London Mayor Sadiq Khan in the wake of last week’s terrorist knife attack on London Bridge.
Trump has blamed similar incidents in the past on Khan’s failure to tackle crime. And in June, as he prepared to land in London on Air Force One, he called the mayor a “stone cold loser,” a Twitter tirade that dominated the first day’s headlines of a state visit.
Giles Kenningham, who was a spokesman for Conservative former Prime Minister David Cameron and who now runs PR consultancy Trafalgar Strategy, said Corbyn could still be the loser from Trump’s visit if it forced the Labour leader off his long-planned talking points and election timetable.
“Part of this election is about, ‘How does Britain walk tall in the post-Brexit world?’” he said. “And it is clear that Boris has a good relationship with Trump, and the U.K. needs the U.S. as an ally and vice versa.
“The public want to see that reinforced, irrespective of who is in power,” he said. “This is about positioning the U.K. on a global stage in a post-Brexit world.”
Trump’s pending visit has provoked some of the strongest exchanges in a televised Party leaders debate on Sunday night. Liberal Democrat Jo Swinson said Trump’s demeaning language about women showed he did not share British values.
“The last thing we should have done is to roll out the red carpet for a state visit,” she said of his trip earlier in the year.
It fell to Nigel Farage, leader of the Brexit Party, to defend him.
“It was crass, and it was crude, and it was wrong — men say dreadful things sometimes. If all of us were called out for what we did on a night out after a drink, none of us would” have a job he said.
