“Congratulations President-elect Donald Trump on your historic election,” British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer posted on X at 3:21 a.m. ET Wednesday. The best that can be said about this tepid concession is that Starmer got his concession in before Kamala Harris did.
Make no mistake. This is not the result Britain’s Labour Party wanted. Starmer’s party was heavily invested in a Harris win and did everything it could to bring it about.
On July 4, Starmer won a landslide majority in the House of Commons with the lowest share of the popular vote (33.7%) for a winning party since 1919. Yet within a month, Sofia Patel, the Labour Party’s head of operations, was emailing Labour staffers to “help our friends across the pond elect their first female president.” Patel added, somewhat condescendingly: “Let’s show those Yanks how to win…
