'We cannot have chaos': Emily Thornberry on the law of war and Labour's struggles

It's okay.

[laughs]

This is the great moment we're in though, isn't it? Where people have to choose what they say about Trump, what they want to say, what they really think, and what they do say.

Do you think we'll look back at this week and think this was Keir Starmer's Love Actually moment, the moment he actually found the courage to stand up to the US president?

I don't think that he hasn't stood up to the American president, as, as you put it, because of a lack of courage.

I think that a calculation was made that it was in Britain's interests to be close to the United States and the presid- the new president in particular because of the need for a trade deal, particularly since we're out of the European Union, and because we needed the Americans to give us support in our fight in Ukraine.

And I think both of those things were the reason that we needed someone to be a Trump whisperer, and much to everybody's surprise, because they're such different characters, actually there was a chemistry, and they do seem to get on.

But, you know, Donald Trump has a way of expressing himself when he's cross, which is not exactly diplomatic, and many people get it in the neck.

And-

What did you think when you heard him say he's no Churchill?

I thought, I wonder what Winston Churchill would make of Donald Trump, to be honest, or w-what I would give for sitting down and having a glass of Armenian brandy with, uh, Churchill and asking him.

Because, you know, obviously, Donald Trump's no, no Franklin Roosevelt, and a very different type of character, and not the sort of person who necessarily was prominent in, in politics, uh, during the Second World War.

So it will be very interesting to see.

There has been so much change.

Um, but I just think, you know, when he gets like that, you have to stand up to him.

I mean, you just can't.

You can't be treated like that.

You have to stand up to someone, and, and Keir has been right to not ju- He stood up to him when it came to, uh, Greenland, when it came to the insults to our forces, and now.

So actually it has been building up.

It, it wasn't just a suddenly flipping to, "I'm going to say that the president is wrong," because he said the president is wrong a few times.

You know-

Yeah

... we've been building up to this.

Now, no one expects Keir Starmer to start talking like Donald Trump or indeed Emily Thornberry calling Donald Trump an asteroid of awfulness.