Men of steel

“What British industry needs and deserves is not a knee-jerk reaction,” intoned the minister, “but a cool and clear-headed sense of Britain’s national interest.”

The subject was tariffs and Donald Trump. The Man From Mar-a-Lago had said No again, this time to foreign steel. The questions were whether he meant it, whether he could be persuaded to change his mind, and how this would affect Britain’s already beleaguered industry. The answers were a series of pithy shrugs. 

Trump is, it doesn’t need saying, not like other presidents. If any other president had suggested, on his way to a football game, that it might be time for America to stop paying its debts, the result would have been a market riot. When Trump says it, traders are unmoved. He probably doesn’t mean it, or if he does, he’ll have forgotten by tomorrow, or changed his mind, or if he hasn’t, someone will talk him out of it. 

This gives the president a kind of paradoxical power. He can say anything he likes, and the rest of us have to work out whether this is a real thing, or noises that sound pretty close to sentences but carry no actual meaning.

None of the British parties know how to deal with Trump. For the Conservatives, Harriet Baldwin neatly but probably unintentionally articulated their confusion. The tariffs were our fault, she suggested, because “years of student politics-style insults hurled at the president by the frontbenches opposite has put our relationship in jeopardy.” Her implication was that Trump is so petty-minded that he would take a wrecking ball to his and our economies out of spite. Presumably she intended the president to take this as a compliment.

Lewis has the air of a shiny-skinned wooden puppet whose head might at any moment spin round shouting “gottle of geer!”

How many conversations had the minister had with US trade representatives, Baldwin demanded to know. And when was the government going to “obtain a big, beautiful free trade agreement” with Trump? Like, though she didn’t say it, the ones that Canada and Mexico had believed they had until a couple of weeks ago.

Rising to respond was Douglas Alexander, a junior minister at the Department for Business. Watching him felt like a flashback to a previous age. To some of us Alexander will always be the promising youngster who won Paisley South in 1997. Thanks to the SNP landslide of 2015, he disappeared from Westminster for a decade, and we have barely seen him. Now he is back, a streak of grey hair the only hint that he is, somehow, 57. 

“Well, well,” Alexander began, with the air of a man who is looking forward to saying all the things he is about to say. Despite his junior rank, he is one of the most experienced members of the government, with four years in the Cabinet under his belt. He swatted aside “the big, beautiful deal that they contemplated and abjectly failed to secure.” As for Baldwin’s questions about meetings with his opposite numbers? “It may have eluded her attention, but we do not yet have a confirmed US Trade Representative.” Perhaps, he went on, she thought ministers should seek a meeting with the Secretary of Commerce? “Alas,” he said, “this job too remains currently unfilled, pending Senate approval.”

It was an incomplete answer, in the sense that we were left with no sense of how the government planned to respond to all this, but it did achieve the political goal of showing that neither did the opposition, beyond vaguely hoping that Trump would be nicer to them. 

Few others have any better ideas. There were only 25 MPs in the chamber. “The new president has a speciality,” Alexander said, pausing to choose his words with care, “in generating uncertainty. It’s part of his style of negotiations to create uncertainty as to what will happen next.”

Julian Lewis suggested that Trump might drop the tariffs if Britain dropped its plan to give away the Chagos Islands. Alexander said he would leave such discussions to the ambassador. “Tempting though it is,” he added, “to indulge in the hypothetical negotiating strategy as ventriloquised through the honourable gentleman.” Lewis does indeed have something of the air of a shiny-skinned wooden puppet whose head might at any moment spin round shouting “gottle of geer!”

James Wild said this had happened because Labour wasn’t yet spending 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence. But not, he didn’t add, because the Conservatives hadn’t spent 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence. 

Trump did have some fans in the chamber. “President Trump is playing a blinder with his tariff strategy,” said Sammy Wilson of the DUP. “Canada, Mexico, Colombia have all fallen into line when he has threatened tariffs.” The DUP probably feel obliged to support a fellow Orange Man, but this was an insight into the party’s negotiating genius, that has left their constituencies on the other side of a trade border from their workplace. Alexander was too diplomatic to point out that Canada and Mexico’s “concessions” had largely been reannouncements of actions Trump had been unaware of. Perhaps we could appease the president by promising to allow McDonalds into Britain.

Reform’s Richard Tice suggested that the tariffs weren’t a real problem. If a trade war escalates, it will be interesting to see whether Reform sticks to its Trump-loving stance, which, though unpopular with British voters, is quite important to Nigel Farage’s television work across the Atlantic.

Not, so far as we could tell from Alexander, that ministers have any intention of escalating things. He repeated his line about “a cool and clear-headed sense of Britain’s national interest” later in the session. If I were a steelworker, I’d worry that my job might have to be sacrificed in the name of that national interest.