President Trump’s abrupt departure from the NATO meeting on British soil was met with a sigh of relief by the country’s Conservative Party, whose members feared his unpredictable nature could undermine their final days of election campaigning.
Instead, they said he helped neutralize an important opposition talking point and otherwise stayed out of domestic politics.
James Cleverly, chairman of the Conservative Party, said Trump had played it just right.
“The United States of America are our closest defense ally in the world, our strongest trade partner in the world,” he told the Washington Examiner during a break in campaigning in northern England, where the Tories hope to pick up seats in next week’s election.
“President Trump came here for a NATO summit, to talk about NATO and he talked about defense,” he said. “I think the Left would have loved it if they’d had a big row with the Americans about the National Health Service. That’s what they desperately wanted. What Donald Trump did was, he talked about defense and the alliance. That was the right thing to do.”
Party officials had been on a knife-edge throughout the visit.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s friendly relationship with Trump, and the president’s low popularity rating in the U.K., made his presence an easy attack line for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. They accused the pair of plotting to sell off the health service to American companies as part of a free-trade deal.
A visit in 2018 got off to a controversial start when Trump accused Johnson’s predecessor Theresa May of being too soft to push through Brexit.
Earlier this year, he arrived in London after criticizing the city’s mayor as a “stone cold loser.”
The result was widespread fear that he could spark a political crisis for the prime minister with barely a week left to the Dec. 12 election.
“I won’t breathe again until he leaves,” is how one minister put it during his stay.
In the event, despite a spat with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over a video of world leaders mocking him, the British news media reported that Trump stayed largely on message.
“It couldn’t have gone any better for us,” said a candidate in one of the party’s key targets in northern England.
