Sir Keir Starmer’s one-time chief of staff has revealed how a Donald Trump diatribe over fat Scottish foxes almost derailed his first call with the PM.
Morgan McSweeney, who left Downing Street earlier this year amid anger over the Peter Mandelson scandal, was in the room for many of Starmer’s big moments as Labour leader.
In his first ever public interview, released today, he spoke about his regret for the handling of the winter fuel payment and his boss’s comments about Israel’s actions in Gaza.
But an eye-catching anecdote about the historic first call between Starmer and Trump as leaders of their respective countries has generated attention for its bizarre details.
McSweeney told Nick Robinson’s Political Thinking podcast that Trump is ‘much funnier’ than he expected him to be.
He explained: ‘The first call that Keir had with the president, he got into a conversation about windmills.
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‘[Trump] started saying, “Britain is a beautiful country, but you have too many windmills” – fine, he was making his point, he’s made that publicly enough times.
‘Then he started to say, “The windmills are killing your birds, the birds are falling by the windmills, foxes are eating those birds…”
‘At this point, the officials who were in the room are barely able to contain themselves, because he was extremely funny. But this was the first call between the Prime Minister and the President, and everyone wanted to be professional but were struggling to hold it together.’
McSweeney continued: ‘He went on to say that as 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.
‘And this was the first call between the President and the Prime Minister. You just thought, this is going to be so very, very different.’
Asked whether Starmer burst out laughing, McSweeney said: ‘He just held it together, I don’t know how. He just absolutely contained himself, no one else in the room did.’
He added that the president was ‘definitely’ trying to be funny and was not just sincerely airing a grievance.
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It certainly is not the first time Trump has brought up his hatred for ‘windmills’ – his name for power-generating wind turbines.
Last December, he posted an image of a dead falcon beside a turbine in Israel on his Truth Social site and claimed it was a bald eagle in the US.
And at a St Patrick’s Day event at the White House in March, Irish Taoiseach Micheal Martin suppressed a smile as Trump ranted about them ‘destroying those gorgeous Scottish fields’.
The now-president’s animosity goes back at least to his time as a businessman fighting a windfarm off the coast of his golf course near Aberdeen.
McSweeney said Starmer was ‘always prepared’ to stand up to Trump ‘when the time was right’, but he was not willing to be ‘performative about his politics’.
He listed the president’s comments on British soldiers, Grok, Greenland and the Iran War as moments when the PM chose to publicly criticise the White House.
Elsewhere in the interview, McSweeney spoke about the impact of an LBC interview in October 2023 in which Starmer appeared to say Israel ‘has the right’ to withhold water from Gaza.
The then-leader of the opposition and his aides said he was actually answering an earlier question, but his comments prompted intense criticism.
Asked what he would do differently, McSweeney said: ‘We’d have been faster to correct the record on what he said.
‘I think that was the main thing. I don’t think he was being an apologist at any point.’
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