Sir Keir Starmer will spend the coming days preparing for a crunch showdown with Donald Trump where he will try to convince the President to step back from his heated rhetoric on Ukraine.
The Prime Minister is due to meet Trump at the White House on Thursday – their first face-to-face conversation since the American election.
Starmer has shied away from criticising the President directly over his claims that Volodymyr Zelensky is a “dictator” and that Ukraine was responsible for provoking its invasion by Russia.
Other European leaders have taken a more direct approach, including Emmanuel Macron – who will meet Trump in Washington on Monday.
Early next week Starmer is expected to hold high-level talks in London with officials likely to include Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Jonathan Powell, the National Security Adviser, to prepare a strategy for his encounter with Trump.
The UK’s approach will be to try and “take the heat out” of the debate on Ukraine by “injecting a sense of calm”, a Whitehall source told The i Paper.
Starmer will also emphasise to Trump that he agrees with the President about the need for Europe to spend more on its own defence – in the hope that this helps persuade the US administration to move closer to Britain’s position on the Ukraine war, in what the Government sees as a “transactional relationship”.
Insiders expect him to argue that if the UK is expected to help lead a future peacekeeping force on the ground in Ukraine – which would cost British taxpayers billions of pounds – it should have a voice in negotiations on the peace agreement with Russia.
Starmer’s team is in contact with Macron’s ahead of the two leaders’ separate visits to the US, and following a summit in Paris this week where Britain and France emerged as the most likely leaders of a European security guarantee for Kyiv.
But the UK Government regards the two men’s roles as significantly different, with Macron mostly representing the views of EU member states while Starmer aims to be “a bridge between the US and Europe”, a source said.
Russia has so far stated that it will not accept the deployment of troops from Nato countries to Ukraine as part of any peace deal.
Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, has expressed an increased willingness to green-light a relatively rapid increase in defence spending from 2.3 per cent of GDP to 2.5 per cent, a rise of around £5bn a year.
Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey on Friday became the latest senior politician to call for an immediate increase in the military budget.
He told the BBC: “I don’t think there’s an easy solution, but we have put some ideas on the table. One idea we have put is to increase the digital services taxes, a tax on about 20 multinational companies with turnovers of over £500m and we would raise it from the current 2 per cent to 10 per cent.
“That would raise the vast bulk of what you’d need to move quickly to the 2.5 per cent of national income spending on our defence and our country’s defence.”
Any increase to the digital services tax would be controversial given Trump’s closeness to the US tech giants.
The Lib Dems are calling for the budget to rise to 3 per cent over time, a view increasingly echoed by military veterans and senior Conservatives.
Davey urged the Prime Minister to speak frankly to Trump next week, saying: “It is a very difficult visit, there’s no doubt about that, but I do think you have to speak to your friends honestly and openly.”
On Wednesday evening, Starmer spoke to Zelensky in the wake of the US President’s “dictator” claim and reassured him that the UK regards him as Ukraine’s legitimate leader despite the postponement of elections while the country is still under martial law.
Ministers have compared Zelensky to Winston Churchill, who did not hold a general election until the end of the Second World War, but have been careful not to criticise Trump directly on the issue.
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