Keir Starmer and Donald Trump dine for 2 hours

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer held a two-hour dinner with U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump in the first face-to-face meeting between the pair.

The Labour leader and former president dined at Trump Tower in New York on Thursday night (early Friday morning in London) after Starmer delivered a speech at the U.N. General Assembly.

The two men discussed the “longstanding friendship between the United Kingdom and the United States and the importance of continuing to develop the strong and enduring partnership between our two countries,” according to a U.K. government readout.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

Once the meeting was finished, Starmer headed for the airport to return home to Britain.

The prime minister was unable to fix a time to meet Trump’s Democratic electoral rival Kamala Harris. The fact he was still willing to meet one candidate and not the other — an unorthodox approach — indicates the new British government’s eagerness to win over the possible next occupant of the Oval Office.

The Labour administration is in charm-offensive mode after senior figures criticized Trump in the past.

U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who also attended the meeting at Trump Tower, once called the Republican a “woman-hating, neo-Nazi sympathizing sociopath.”

And just this week, Border Security Minister Angela Eagle said the Republican emboldened racist rioters in Britain with his anti-immigration rhetoric — earning a rebuke from his presidential campaign.

Even Starmer criticized Trump numerous times in the past.

On one occasion in 2019, after the then-president backed Boris Johnson for the Conservative leadership in Britain, Starmer tweeted: “An endorsement from Donald Trump tells you everything you need to know about what is wrong with Boris Johnson’s politics and why he isn’t fit to be Prime Minister.”

But all that appeared to be water under the bridge in New York. “I actually think he is very nice,” Trump said about Starmer during a press conference in Trump Tower ahead of the meeting. “He ran a great race he did very well,” he said about the Labour election win in July. “It’s very early but he is popular.”

However, the candidate was more enthusiastic about his old friend, Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage. “I think Nigel is great, I’ve known him for a long time,” Trump mused.

“He had a great election too, picked up a lot of seats, more seats than he was allowed to have actually. They acknowledged that he won but for some reason you have a strange system over there, you might win them but you don’t get them. Nigel is a fantastic person.”

Less than two hours before meeting Trump, Starmer delivered what could be interpreted as a thinly veiled message to the candidate, who has been critical of the U.N.

London fears that Trump could pull funding from the U.N. if he wins the presidential election, POLITICO revealed this week.

“People talk about an age of polarization, impunity, instability and an unraveling of the U.N. charter. And I feel a sense of fatalism has taken hold,” Starmer told the General Assembly. “But our task is to say no … This is the moment to reassert fundamental principles and our willingness to defend them. To recommit to the U.N., to internationalism, to the rule of law.”

The British PM had spoken to Trump once in the past by phone after the first assassination attempt against the former president.

He mooted meeting both Trump and Harris during a visit to Washington two weeks ago but neither was available.