Trump claimed ‘foxes were getting fat from eating birds killed by windmills’ in first call with Starmer
Sir Keir Starmer's former aide said officials that were in the room during the call were barely able to contain themselves.
Donald Trump claimed in his first call with Sir Keir Starmer that foxes were becoming too fat to recognise after eating dead birds killed by wind turbines, the Prime Minister’s former top aide has claimed.
Listen to this article
In his first-ever media interview, former No 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney said that the Prime Minister “held it together” when the remark was made, while officials in the room were struggling to do so.
Mr McSweeney said he realised the relationship with the US president would be “very unpredictable” when Mr Trump’s campaign filed a complaint after he attended a Democratic Party convention in August 2024.
Labour then “prioritised building those relationships, understanding the politics of the president and his people”, leading to the early charm offensive by Sir Keir’s Government, Mr McSweeney said.
The former Downing Street chief of staff also said Mr Trump was “much funnier than I expected him to be”, as he told a story about the first phone call between the president and Sir Keir.
Read more: New US central bank boss asserts political independence amid Trump pressure
Read more: Donald Trump makes £30million from UK golf resorts alongside billions in crypto earnings
He told the Political Thinking with Nick Robinson podcast: “The first call that Keir had with the president, he got into a conversation about windmills, and he started saying, ‘Look, Britain’s a beautiful country, but you have too many windmills’. Fine, he was making his point; he’s made that publicly enough times.
“Then he started to say, the windmills are killing your birds, birds are falling by the windmills, foxes are eating those birds.”
Mr McSweeney added: “At this point the officials that were in the room were barely able to contain themselves, because it was extremely funny, but this was the first call between the Prime Minister and the president, and everyone wanted to be professional, but were struggling to hold it together.
“He went on to say that as the foxes ate so many birds and became lazy, they became fat, and as they became so fat, people no longer knew what kind of a creature they were, because they were too fat. ”
He continued: “This was the first call between the president and Prime Minister. I thought, this is just going to be so, so very, very different.”
Mr Trump has frequently tilted at Britain’s adoption of what he calls “windmills”: the drive to build wind turbines to generate more clean power, at the same time as the North Sea fossil fuel industry winds down.
Asked how Sir Keir had reacted to the call, Mr McSweeney said: “He just held it together. I don’t know how.”
He later said that the Government’s priority with the USA was making the relationship work, but also insisted that Sir Keir had stood up to Mr Trump when required.
Mr McSweeney added: “The relationship in the UK and US underpins security in Europe. It underpins security around the world. It is a major trading partner.
“We thought Keir would never have performative politics, but he also knew that time would come where he had to stick up for the country, and he did it when the President made his comments about British soldiers… he made it on Grok, when Grok was producing images on X at the beginning of the year, and he did so on Greenland, and then after I left he did it on Iran.”