Why the UK's David Lammy should be more worried than Kevin Rudd about Trump 2.0
ANALYSIS
Donald Trump’s warning to Kevin Rudd — that he would be gone as Australia’s Ambassador to the United States if he was ‘at all hostile’ — caused quite the stir in Canberra and prompted glee amongst some Labor party types who feared the former prime minister’s track record always made him a liability. However, it is the UK’s Labour Party, and specifically its brash shadow foreign secretary David Lammy, who should be more worried by Trump’s reaction to being told of historical insults.
Rudd in his former capacity at the New York-based Asia Society think tank frequented the media as an expert on China and foreign affairs more broadly. He often used these international appearances to crusade against Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, which he blames for his political assassination at the hands of his Labor colleagues back in 2010 and the poisoning of climate change politics in the US, UK and Australia.
Over time, he also made many assessments of Trump’s presidency, calling him a ‘destructive president’, ‘traitor to the West’ and more. Rudd is hardly alone in critiquing a president who now faces a string of court cases involving 91 felony counts ahead of his re-election bid - including for his role in the January 6 insurrection when a rioting MAGA-supporting mob stormed the Capitol trying to stop the transfer of power to Joe Biden.
But given Rudd successfully sought to be Australia’s Ambassador to the US, his vendettas were always going to catch up with him. The proverbial chickens began their roost when Nigel Farage, the former-UKIP-leader-turned-media-personality recently sat down for an exclusive interview with his pal for GB News.
‘My friends at Sky News Australia wanted me to ask this,’ Farage informed Trump.
That alone was significant and telling. Sky News Australia provides an after-dark platform for conservative and right-wing commentators, similar to Fox and is owned by Murdoch’s News Corp Australia — a company Rudd has unsuccessfully campaigned to have a Royal Commission investigate.
Sky News Australia’s former boss Angelos Frangopolous now runs GB News in London.
‘[Rudd] has said the most horrible things, you were a destructive President, a traitor to the West, and he’s now Australian Ambassador in Washington,’ Farage continued.
Trump’s reaction was swift, characteristic and telling.
Firstly, and perhaps more humiliatingly for Rudd, Trump appeared to have no clue who the former prime minister was. But that didn’t stop him from hitting back in his trademark bombastic fashion.
‘He won’t be there long if that’s the case - I don’t know much about him,’ Trump said.
‘I heard he was a little bit nasty, I hear he’s not the brightest bulb, but I don’t know much about him.
‘If he’s at all hostile, he won’t be there long.’
Trump’s comments are certainly uncomfortable for the Australian Labor government and vindicate some of the concerns held by many current ministers who privately feared that appointing the former PM would revive the chaos they experienced when they sat around his cabinet table.
But Trump left plenty of wriggle room in his statement. Rudd won’t be hostile, so he could likely stay. At any rate, as Australia’s former and well-respected ambassador to the United States, Kim Beazley recently noted, sitting US presidents rarely deal with foreign ambassadors.
Rudd has also worked Congress hard, securing support for passing the AUKUS legislation and building key relationships with Republicans.
That work has won him praise from Australia's centre-right opposition. Former Liberal Treasurer Joe Hockey, who served as Ambassador during the Trump Administration has been quietly helping Rudd forge some of those Republican connections. He told Latika Takes that he hoped for Australia’s sake that Rudd endured in the job under Trump. Beazley, whom Rudd ousted as Labor party leader in 2006, also echoed this sentiment.
So Rudd likely survives.
'Tyrant in a toupee’
But Trump’s vindictive and vicious reaction to being critiqued should worry Australian Labor’s UK sister party led by Keir Starmer, who all polls project, will be prime minister by the time the next US president is inaugurated.
Because the man Starmer proposes to represent Britain abroad and manage the UK’s most important alliance has a long history of saying far worse things about Trump than Kevin Rudd ever did.
In 2018, the would-be foreign secretary David Lammy wrote in Time magazine, that he would be leading London protests against the ‘tyrant in a toupee’.
‘Usually, we do not welcome presidents of the United States in this manner, but this is no normal president,’ Lammy huffed.
‘As in much of the rest of the world, Donald Trump is incredibly unpopular in the United Kingdom.’
‘He is also a profound threat to the international order that has been the foundation of Western progress for so long.’
Lammy said Trump’s threats on NATO were as logical as arson. But Trump himself has recalibrated his renewed threat to withdraw from the alliance, saying his comments were ‘part of a negotiation’ aimed at making allies pay more, something that is now happening, although mostly as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
At that march, Lammy said Trump had lined up with neo-Nazis and the Klu Klux Klan and spat in the faces of the Second World War veterans who had fought fascism.
Unlike Rudd, a low-level diplomat, Lammy as the foreign secretary of a critical ally will be much harder for Trump to ignore.
If Trump was ready to threaten retaliation over Rudd’s comparatively milder critiques, could and would he do business with someone who called him a ‘tyrant in a toupee?’
Having accused Trump of racism, it is all but impossible to see how any of Lammy’s first encounters with the so-called special relationship wouldn’t be framed around his free character advice, given the dominance of the subject of race in the US news media.
It’s possible Lammy, like Rudd, may scrape through. Perhaps Trump will be persuaded to let bygones be bygones or he will be distracted by much larger fish in his metaphorical frying pan.
Lammy too could choose to go on a charm offensive, although balancing that against his barnstorming brand at home will require a political dexterity that may be difficultt to ultimately reconcile.
It is also hard to see how Lammy will deliver on his quest to ‘restore Britain’s influence in the world’ and execute his ‘progressive realism’ foreign policy if indeed it is a Trump White House he is forced to deal with. Or how he would extract a trade deal out of a Trump Administration that he told me in an interview Labour would strive to achieve if elected.
Certainly, Hockey’s advice for British Labour, and anyone trying to navigate a Trump White House, is to flatter the man in public and go hard in private.
Lammy, when asked about his previous comments, said many UK backbenchers, including the current foreign secretary David Cameron, have made unflattering remarks about Trump.
He added that ‘of course’ he would work with Trump but the real question is, would Trump?
Agree about Lammy and Rudd. But this article for me highlighted the Murdoch world's and the right's connections and influence. As you will know "Sky After Dark" in Australia has a tiny audience. Yet commentators can call on Farage to raise issues with Trump. Many Sky After Dark commentators also write for the "Australian" broadsheet - again a small audience and you know what Cater, Sloan and Sheridan are going to say before they have even said it. It would be really nice to have a bit more diversity of opinion in these mastheads. I find the UK Spectator under Fraser Nelson with Katy Balls, Isabel Hardman and especially Cindy Yu so much more perceptive and diverse than its Australian edition under Rowan Dean.