On Thursday at 7.30pm US eastern time, a half-hour past midnight British and Irish time, US president Donald Trump posted an announcement on his Truth Social platform about trade relations with the UK.
Cue a sharp intake of breath in a British establishment battered and bruised by Trump’s whiplash-inducing tendency to make surprise pronouncements on trade. This particular message, however, appeared to be positive for Britain.
As the UK’s king, Charles, and queen, Camilla, flew home after their successful four-day state visit to the US, which took place against the backdrop of political angst between the two countries, Trump announced that in honour of the royal couple he was removing tariffs that targeted Scotch whisky (he misspelt it as the Irish and US “whiskey”).
“I will be removing the Tariffs and Restrictions on Whiskey [sic] having to do with Scotland’s ability to work with the Commonwealth of Kentucky and Whiskey and Bourbon,” he said.
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The tariffs had badly damaged the Scotch industry. Within three hours, the British king responded with a folksy message thanking the US president for his “warm gesture”.
“His majesty will be raising a dram to the president’s thoughtfulness and generous hospitality as he departs the US after a most enjoyable state visit,” said a spokesperson for Buckingham Palace.
The move was hailed in Britain as an example of the soft power wielded by the British royal family. It was also grasped on to as evidence the king may have helped to salvage the much-vaunted US-UK “special relationship”, which has come under heavy strain recently over the jousting between Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, and Trump over Iran.
Mandarins in the UK’s foreign office will have cooed over the ensuing avalanche of articles in the British press declaring the “special relationship” alive and well.
Yet a closer reading of the teetotal Trump’s Truth Social whisky missive suggests it included a backhanded swipe at Starmer that is generally being ignored in London.
“People have wanted to do this [axe the tariffs] for a long time,” wrote Trump. “The King and Queen got me to do something that nobody else was able to do, without hardly even asking!”
The coded message seemed clear: Trump would never have done this for Starmer. The US president, then, clearly still hasn’t swallowed the beef between them.
The US-UK “special relationship” may still exist, but currently, in practice, it only does so between Trump and the king, who is reportedly his pen pal. It is certainly not transmitted at a political level through the US president’s rickety relationship with Starmer.
For two months now, Trump has snarled at Starmer for initially refusing to allow US bombers to use UK bases to hit Iran, and also for refusing to send UK forces to secure the Strait of Hormuz. “This is not Winston Churchill we’re dealing with,” sneered Trump.
Starmer, meanwhile, has abandoned his old policy of ignoring any provocations by Trump, instead leaning into the row by declaring himself “fed up” with the US president – a very British wording of diplomatic chagrin. Jousting with Trump has also done Starmer no harm with his skittish backbenchers and the UK public, who generally dislike Trump.
Charles’s four-day visit to Washington, Virginia and New York was preceded by restatements of the US-UK row on both sides.
On the Friday, just three days before the Charles arrived, a leaked Pentagon email revealed the US was considering ways to punish Britain for its stance on the Iran conflict. It suggested the US might review its traditional policy of neutrality on the decades-old dispute between Argentina and the UK over the Falkland Islands.
Were Trump to give succour to his friend Javier Milei, the Argentinian president, on this issue, it would drag US-UK political relations to a fresh nadir.
Meanwhile, leaked comments published last week by the Financial Times revealed the level of realisation in the British establishment that, whatever they might all say in public, there is an acceptance that the US-UK “special relationship” is not what it was.
The comments revealed that Christian Turner, the UK’s ambassador to Washington, told a group of students in February the notion of the special relationship was “quite nostalgic ... quite backwards-looking, and it has a lot of baggage about it”.
“I think there is probably one country that has a special relationship with the United States – and that is probably Israel,” said Turner.
A whiff of the political ructions was there, even as Charles gave his good-humoured address to the joint houses of congress.
In between the dozen or so standing ovations and the bipartisan US goodwill towards the king, he seemed to take a coded swipe at Trump by declaring the UK military “lies at the heart of Nato”. Trump has repeatedly criticised the military alliance.
George Robertson, the former head of Nato and one-time UK defence secretary, warned last week that the US-UK relationship may never be special again unless Britain invested heavily in its depleted armed forces to prove it could pull its weight in the military alliance.
For now, though, Britain’s government can warm its cockles on Charles’s whisky diplomacy while knowing that, with Trump, there is no saying what might happen next.
[ Keith Duggan: King Charles gives slyly provocative speech to CongressOpens in new window ]
