🔗 Share this article

Welcome back. It’s the second day of the official visit, and after the pomp, today’s policy. Donald Trump is leaving Windsor Castle and traveling to Chequers, where he will have confidential meetings with the prime minister before the two statesmen hold a news event.

In his speech at the official dinner last night, Trump employed some unexpectedly elegant and lovely analogies to describe the US/UK relationship. He said:

We are united by the past and faith, by affection and speech and by profound ties of society, custom, roots and destiny.

We’re like a pair of tones in a single harmony or two verses of the shared composition, each impressive on its own, but genuinely designed to be performed together.

The prime minister supports his use of strategic compliments with Trump by saying it benefits the UK and, with Downing Street revealing US investments in the UK totaling £150bn, there is proof to suggest it’s successful.

But, to go back to Trump’s metaphor, there are others who argue that, if anything is being “exploited” in all of this, it’s Britain.

On the Today programme this morning, Nick Clegg almost expressing this view. As a ex- Lib Dem deputy PM in the 2010-15 government, and a former president of global affairs at Meta, he is ideally positioned to speak on the relationship. Clegg stated on Today that the AI funding being revealed for the UK were “minor offerings from the tech industry table”. He added he thought the UK had become over-dependent on American technology. And he elaborated:

Owing to the very close alliance we’ve had with the United States, expectedly in the historical period, I think we’ve been quite unconcerned about this significant reliance … both in the government and the business sector, on US technology.

I strongly to believe that is now changing because the divide – regardless of the formalities of the official trip by Donald Trump this week – the bilateral schism, in my view, is real.

I think the US – and we have been on warning for this for ages – are shifting their attention to the Pacific. They have much less allegiance to the transatlantic relationship.

So my view is, eventually, the nation’s policymakers need to learn to pose alternative questions to how we can offer the red carpet to American investment, despite its value. We need to ask ourselves questions about how we can foster and scale … our own technology companies to the size they should be.

Clegg stated the UK confronted “a huge dilemma”.

We’ve got to learn, in tech matters, as much as in so many other areas, to depend more on our own two feet, rather than just depend to the US’s coattails.

While that benefited us well for a period, I think that’s no longer going to be the model that succeeds for us going forward.

The following outlines the schedule for the day.

• 10am: Donald Trump exits Windsor Castle
• Late morning: Melania Trump and Queen Camilla see Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House in Windsor and Frogmore Gardens
• 10.45am: Trump is expected to reach at Chequers, where he will hold bilateral talks with Keir Starmer. The two leaders are also speaking at an gathering for executives, and viewing items from the Winston Churchill archive at the residence, the designated country residence of the PM. And there will be a sky show by the Red Devils.
• Approximately 2.30pm: Starmer and Trump hold a briefing at Chequers.