Starmer will try to calm the situation and focus on May’s local elections, but one thing is clear: our ties with Europe are more crucial than everNobody wins a trade war. You can lose it by greater or lesser degrees: you may be one of the luckier casualties. But that’s about as good as it gets. So, while there will have been initial relief in Downing Street on Wednesday night, a feeling even that Keir Starmer’s placating of Donald Trump looks vindicated, what followed was no victory lap.How could it be, after that grotesquely swaggering show trial the president staged in the White House garden, all the better to jazz up an economic assault on what were once his country’s allies? Come on down, Britain, escaping with just the minimum 10% tariff on its exports to the US and no drive-by insults! Better than Taiwan (32% plus a lecture about how the US used to build all the semiconductors once), Vietnam (“They like me, I like them” but still a brutal 46%), the EU (“very very tough traders” and lucky to get away with 20%) or poor Lesotho, still reeling from the overnight collapse of US aid and now whacked by a 50% tariff. But even lucky Britain still emerged with a 25% duty on cars that the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) estimates