Sir Keir Starmer's former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney has disclosed that Donald Trump's bizarre diatribe about overweight Scottish foxes almost derailed the first call between the two leaders. McSweeney, who left Downing Street earlier this year amid the Peter Mandelson scandal, recounted the incident in his first public interview on Nick Robinson's Political Thinking podcast.
Trump's windmill rant
McSweeney explained that Trump launched into a conversation about wind turbines, saying: 'Britain is a beautiful country, but you have too many windmills.' He then claimed the turbines were killing birds, which were being eaten by foxes. 'The foxes ate so many birds, and became lazy, they became fat, and as they became so fat people no longer knew what kind of a creature they were, because they were too fat. There were these fat foxes walking around Scotland eating dead birds,' McSweeney quoted Trump as saying.
The officials in the room 'were barely able to contain themselves,' McSweeney said. 'Everyone wanted to be professional but were struggling to hold it together.' Starmer himself 'just held it together, I don't know how. He just absolutely contained himself, no one else in the room did.'
Context of Trump's windmill obsession
Trump's animosity toward wind turbines dates back to his business days, when he fought a windfarm off the coast of his golf course near Aberdeen. At a St Patrick's Day event at the White House in March, Irish Taoiseach Micheal Martin suppressed a smile as Trump ranted about turbines 'destroying those gorgeous Scottish fields.' In December, Trump posted an image of a dead falcon beside a turbine on Truth Social, falsely claiming it was a bald eagle in the US.
Starmer's approach to Trump
McSweeney said Starmer was 'always prepared' to stand up to Trump 'when the time was right' but was not willing to be 'performative about his politics.' He listed moments when the PM publicly criticised the White House, including over Trump's comments on British soldiers, Grok, Greenland, and the Iran War.
In the same interview, McSweeney expressed regret over the handling of Starmer's October 2023 LBC interview, in which the then-opposition leader appeared to say Israel 'has the right' to withhold water from Gaza. 'We'd have been faster to correct the record on what he said,' McSweeney said. 'I don't think he was being an apologist at any point.'
