It was all going so well. The Prime Minister’s love-in with Donald Trump on Friday only needed Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s signature on his country’s US-brokered potential peace deal to round it off. But the smiles and handshakes couldn’t put the brakes on the disaster that followed.
After the US/UK bromance, even the anything-but Labour backing Telegraph had to force out the words ‘Starmer the Charmer’.
Without question it was a triumph, canoodling The Donald into going back on his claims from only a few days earlier that Ukraine somehow sort of invaded itself and its leader is a dictator.
Getting him to make the right noises about maybe leaving UK out of his trade wars crosshairs was no mean achievement either.
Likewise talking the man into not totally uncoupling America from NATO, the security umbrella that’s protected the free world since World War Two.
Maybe our PM’s smarter than the Ukrainian President. Or maybe the poor chap just couldn’t stomach the feeling that he was being ganged up on by the two school bullies in the playground.
Understandable, as Trump and his Vice President’s attack lines came straight out of the Russian dictator’s playbook.
And there can be no doubt Vodka’s been sploshing freely in the Kremlin, with Putin and his henchmen gleefully glued to their televisions.
Upshot, everything’s up in the air, and will remain so until the fires get put out on the already hopelessly fragile bridges.
Starmer’s doing his best to get everyone to calm down, and Zelenskyy’s taking the hint.
But the sense of history being made and unmade in real time is symptomatic of how the new abnormal has become normalised, in just a matter of weeks.
Across Europe’s capitals there’s a widespread but strictly unexpressed view that dealing with Trump is like humouring a small child with severe mental health issues.
Problem being that instead of a teddy bear in his pram he’s got a hand grenade to play with. Hence the need to bring him lots of lovely sweeties in the hope that he won’t have a meltdown.
It was easy enough for Starmer. His invitation to the Donald to come and see the King, the real one, that is, Charles the Buck House guy, was a whole plate of sticky toffee pudding.
That one came for free, unlike his promise to increase UK defence spending, which comes at a high cost both financially and politically.
He’s come in for some stick over his claim that bunging the figure up to three per cent of the nation’s wealth in the next parliament will cost more than thirteen billion pounds a year.
But even if, as respected and independent economists suggest, the bill will be closer to half of that, it’s still a whole chunk of money that we don’t have to spare.
And the decision to take it out of the pot set aside to help people in need from overseas has got another set of nerves jangling, notably on the left of the Labour party.
Anneliese Dodds, the International Development Minister, who didn’t see it coming, has now quit the government in protest.
At least the PM’s on the right side of public opinion, as polls show that way over half of voters think we spend too much on aid as it is.
In point of fact he’d have taken that chance anyway because, unlike Donald Trump, he’s not minded to believe any promise Russia’s actual dictator might make about behaving himself in future.
Instead he’s aligned himself with the ancient Roman author Renatus, who argued: ‘Si vis pacem, para bellum.’ If you want peace, prepare for war.
And not just us, obvs. A point Sir Keir was already getting ready to make to European leaders at the get-together he’d planned to host before he even got on the plane for Washington.
Trump liked the sound of that. Even though he’s made up lots of nonsensical figures about how much support his lot have given to Ukraine compared to the EU, he’d still rather it were less.
And nor does he want to have anything much to do with trying to keep the peace there, assuming there is a peace to be kept. Which is now highly debatable.
That said, if the deal with Zelenskyy can after all be salvaged, and American companies do start digging out rare minerals that Ukraine has and they want, that does act as some kind of insurance.
Putin may have a profoundly warped sense of world history and a menacing vision of the place he’d like to have in it, but he’s not an idiot.
He was wrong to think taking over Ukraine would be a doddle. But he’d be right in thinking that taking out Yankee miners would not be cost-free.
It took the USA a fair old while, after the Germans torpedoed the Lusitania in 1915 in spite of the fact that there were Americans on board, to get involved in World War One.
But when they did … it was curtains for the Kaiser.
As for possible outcomes over the next few weeks and months, The Donald’s currently on-hold plan did have a logic to it.
While any relation between words uttered by Putin and objective truth can never be more than coincidental, Trump’s detractors would say the same about his schemes and benign outcomes.
However, if his efforts in regard to Ukraine can be salvaged, and actually bring an end to the slaughter on remotely equitable terms it would be a feather in his incongruous-looking MAGA cap.
Of course it’s possible that The Donald had already decided the deal didn’t really stack up. And so deliberately engineered the TV confrontation with Zelenskyy so he could walk away from it.
Either way, it’s worth bearing in mind that the Russians revealed their territorial ambitions by annexing the Crimean chunk of Ukraine more than ten years ago.
As a result, even though it’s taken Trump’s ambivalence to concentrate minds, more military and security solidarity this side of The Pond is long overdue.
Little wonder then that all eyes are turning to Starmer’s summit with European leaders and the role he might play in forging a new status quo.
Given that the old one seems to be vanishing before our eyes, failure to find a replacement isn’t looking like an option.
Which is how come Sir Keir might just be on the verge of rescuing his own popularity with the British electorate by carving out for himself a new role as respected international statesman.
The opportunity is suddenly open to him to become a de facto leading figure in the European Union that Britain butted out of a few years back.
Fear of Nigel Farage and his insurgent Reform Party has held the Prime Minister back thus far from going much further than being nicer to our neighbours than the Tories were.
This in spite of his own instincts, plus the considerable damage that nearly all economists agree that Brexit did to the British economy and its manifest failure to deliver on any of its promises.
So could this be the moment Starmer screws his courage to the sticking place?
Those words were first uttered, in Shakespeare’s eponymous play, by Lady Macbeth. And it didn’t end well for her.
But maybe our man will get luckier. These days anything’s possible.
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