Starmer, Meloni or even Putin - who is the real Trump whisperer?

Ian Bond, deputy director of the Centre for European Reform, a London-based think-tank, said: “I’m not sure that you can have a strategy for dealing with Trump, because Trump himself is not strategic.

“What you can have is tactics and flattery clearly works for as long as it works.

“But it doesn’t guarantee that Trump will keep doing what you want him to do beyond the moment when he forgets that you’ve been flattering him. Europeans seem to have concluded that confronting Trump achieves nothing – which may or may not be true. Flattering Trump buys you time.”