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At what point does realpolitik tip over into nakedly facilitating conflict of interest/corruption? I only ask in the strictest hypothetical terms after reading that Keir Starmer’s government has been exploring whether golf bosses could host the 2028 Open championship at Donald Trump’s Turnberry resort in Ayrshire. Sorry, but no. It’s almost as if the prime minister is compiling material for a seminal 2025 business manual. Call it The Art of the Kneel. Perhaps Starmer could ask the Treasury to “explore” buying a load of Trump meme coins.
According to reports, Donald Trump has frequently mentioned in his phone calls with the prime minister that he’d prefer it if the Open returned to Turnberry. As so often with this particular caller, the reply to this should simply be, “And I’d prefer to be talking to Mickey Mouse, but we’re all making compromises.” Failing that, just go with: “God, you always want MORE, don’t you? Scotland invented the great game of golf. Have you said thank you ONCE?” Unfortunately, the actual reply seems to have been: “Capital idea, Mr President! How can we make that happen?”
And so it is that officials from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport are said to have been sounding out the R&A – which organises the Open – as to the potential obstacles to Turnberry hosting the championship, an event almost as lucrative as it is prestigious. Turnberry has made a profit precisely once in the past 10 years, and is currently one of the many operating companies run by Trump’s sons, Uday and Spewday. It lost £1.7m last year, but the advent of a major championship would certainly turn that around. Alas, the R&A effectively suspended Turnberry from the list of eligible Open venues over the matter of the January 6 attack on the seat of US democracy, which the club’s owner had, of course, fomented.
But the new R&A boss, Mark Darbon, has made more positive noises about the course, at the same time as stressing that infrastructure at the location remains a challenge given how much the event has grown in size in recent years. Darbon has previously said that keeping pace with that growth would require 60,000 hotel beds. I can only imagine what the prime minister is thinking. “Wait, so someone would need to build some more hotels? What a great opportunity for some lucky business genius …”
Honestly, why doesn’t our permanently ingratiating government go the whole hog and start putting money into Trump’s crypto project, which this week saw the president announce he’d have dinner with the top 220 holders of his $Trump cryptocurrency token – a pledge that promptly earned him and his allies $900,000 in trading fees in under two days. One senator called this “the most brazenly corrupt thing a president has ever done”, somehow not adding the words “since maybe last week”. After all, we are dealing with a man who turned the White House lawn into a car sale for his friend Elon Musk, on a date that feels about a million years ago, given how much has happened since. But, upon checking, turns out to have been only last month. And as discussed here way back then, these are not the vibes of a nation whose best days are ahead of it, which is why sinking to Trump’s level feels as humiliatingly post-moral as it is strategically useless.
To the consternation of a huge and growing number of people in the UK, we are already giving him a second state visit, Starmer having produced the King’s invitation on camera in the Oval Office two months ago, with all the excruciating flourish of a magician pulling a hat out of a rabbit. The diplomatic diarists are supposedly zeroing in on a run of dates in September for that horror show, which last time saw D-day veterans and British troops being “inspected” by a draft dodger who described trying not to get STIs in 1980s Manhattan as “my personal Vietnam”. Enduring another round of this is supposedly our best card.
Yet what have we got out of playing it? Not tariff exemptions, or security guarantees for Ukraine – or indeed security guarantees for ourselves. No world leader has ever got anything out of inviting Trump into their gifting suite, yet they keep doing it, perhaps imagining that repeating the same play multiple times and expecting different results is the definition of statecraft.
Evidently, another bauble must always be found. To anyone who thinks about it for more than 10 nanoseconds, even discussing the possibility of returning the Open to Turnberry while Trump is president lays you open to being involved in mucky inducement. But weirdly, giving personally valuable gifts in supposed exchange for preferential treatment seems to be legit when the recipient is the president.
We can only speculate quite why civil servants should be required to conduct these grubby little feasibility studies. Perhaps Starmer is too cowardly or wet to find a way of explaining to Trump that obviously it wouldn’t be appropriate, and has instead kicked the president’s persistent inquiries down the chain, in the hope that someone else will make the decision instead. Maybe the guy who runs the golf. That would be an interesting impression for a country to give of itself, wouldn’t it – the idea that the only thing stopping Starmer from leaning wholly into an obviously immoral quid pro quo is the width of the A719. And that that the person who makes the tough decisions isn’t the prime minister, but the chief executive of the R&A.
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Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
