Keir Starmer has chosen not to get into a war of words with Donald Trump.

As a former acting Labour leader, Harriet Harman remains a highly-respected figure in the party.

When she talks – as she does every week on the Electoral Dysfunction podcast – people tend to listen.

So when the usually-loyal peer took the unusual step of criticising Keir Starmer’s approach towards dealing with Donald Trump, eyebrows were raised.

The prime minister, Harman said, needs to take a leaf out of Tony Blair’s book and be bold enough to tell a US president when he is wrong, as she believes he is over his tariff policy.

″[The government] don’t seem to be able to be telling the country what I think the country needs to hear them saying, which is that what Trump is doing is a bad thing,” she said.

“I think that there is a danger if the prime minister, who is the leader of the country, is not telling the story about what is actually happening.

“I don’t mean gratuitous insults, but I mean actually owning the narrative. And this was a very small example back when we were in government after 1997, when the US put steel tariffs on our country, and Tony Blair as prime minister did say this is unacceptable, this is wrong, it’s unjustified.”

Warming to her theme, Harman went on: “It feels as if there’s a kind of restricted vocabulary amongst ministers at the moment where........

© HuffPost