Chris Mason: Can opposites Trump and Starmer find common ground?

The prime minister’s own colleagues have called him “Mr Rules”, external as a way of summing up the essence of his character, what makes him tick.

There is even a name for this that academics have used – “the juridifcation of politics, external” – meaning “a reliance upon legal and quasilegal, i.e. rules, norms, conventions, procedures, means to address substantive matters of public policy.”

The thing is, to state the obvious, the man now in the Oval Office is the polar opposite on pretty much every single word of that.

But perhaps, some ponder, all this shouldn’t be overstated.

“Most foreign leaders annoy Trump to some extent,” one close observer told me.

The key, many believe, will be dealing with the new president in a way that he likes and, so the theory goes, may work.

So out with long-winded presentations of foreign policy minutiae and in with ideas that either contribute to his ‘America First’ agenda, while securing wins for the UK too, or help the President cement his place in history perhaps in the Middle East or Ukraine.

We can expect the prime minister to fly to Washington pretty soon to meet President Trump at the White House.

It will mean Sir Keir and Foreign Secretary David Lammy will be able to stop constantly referring back to the chicken dinner they had at Trump Tower in New York in September of last year when they met Trump for the first time.

Precisely when Sir Keir finds himself on a plane over the Atlantic, and which leaders are invited before him, will be pored over – and there are clearly some, such as Georgia Meloni, the Prime Minister of Italy and the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, who are ideologically much closer to the president than Sir Keir will ever be.