Starmer’s gamble at Chequers: £150 Billion US investment turns pageantry into power

Six months after Keir Starmer beamed as he handed Donald Trump a handwritten invitation from King Charles — the first time any US president has been offered a second state visit — the two men met today at Chequers. The carriages and banquets are over. Now comes the more challenging part: politics. 

For the prime minister, Chequers was never just a photo op. It was a calculated attempt to turn ceremony into substance — and this time, he delivered. The UK secured a landmark £150 billion package of US investment, anchored by a tech prosperity deal expected to support 15,000 jobs across Britain. For Starmer, who has staked his premiership on restoring economic credibility, that is political gold dust: tangible gains he can sell on factory floors and in tech hubs alike. 

The backdrop could hardly have been more challenging. Just days earlier, Washington ruled out tariff relief for Britain’s struggling steel industry. Ukraine’s fate still hangs in the balance, with Kyiv looking for security guarantees that Trump has so far resisted. Against that, Starmer needed to prove that closeness to an unpredictable president could still yield results. He did so by leaning in, not holding back — embracing the risks of association with a leader who remains toxic to much of Labour’s base. 

The scale of his personal investment makes the gamble striking. He didn’t just authorise Trump’s second state visit; he delivered the invitation himself. By tying his reputation so closely to a volatile partner, Starmer bet that Britain could once again bend American politics towards its interests. At Chequers, he showed what that looks like in practice: binding capital into Britain’s future industries, with the promise of jobs and growth. 

Yet the risks remain. Trump’s commitments are famously transactional; what is pledged today could vanish tomorrow in a single post on Truth Social. And within Labour, some will see Starmer’s embrace of Trump as a betrayal of values, however large the cheque. Still, history suggests that Britain has rarely regretted getting closer to Washington. From Churchill and Roosevelt to Blair and Bush, the “special relationship” has amplified British influence far beyond its weight. Post-Brexit, that matters more than ever. 

The question now is whether Chequers proves a turning point or a one-off win. If Starmer can turn this investment into visible prosperity — new energy deals, tech clusters expanded, workers in jobs that wouldn’t exist without US capital — then the gamble will look like foresight. If not, he risks appearing as a supplicant who rolled out the red carpet for little more than headlines. 

At Chequers, the pageantry gave way to politics and, this time, to hard numbers. £150 billion.15,000 jobs. A tech deal to shape the future. Whether history remembers this as a masterstroke or a misstep will depend not just on Trump’s whims but on whether Starmer can turn a symbolic gamble into lasting national gain.