Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States of America today - but Keir Starmer will not be there.
Instead, the UK government will be represented by Dame Karen Pierce, Britain’s ambassador to the US.
According to many on the right of British politics, this is a huge “snub” for the prime minister.
Previous criticism of Trump by Starmer and much of his cabinet is the reason why the PM has not been given a ticket to the big event, they insist.
However, the awkward truth for Starmer’s critics is that analysis by the highly-respected Press Association shows that no British prime minister has ever attended the inauguration of an American president, going all the back to when records of visits began in 1874.
The US State Department maintains a list of every visit by a UK leader to the country, starting with prime minister Ramsay MacDonald in 1929.
They show that there was no visit by a UK leader to the US in 2021, the year of Joe Biden’s inauguration. Then-prime minister Theresa May did visit Washington DC in January 2017, but not until a week after Trump’s first inauguration.
Barack Obama was first sworn in on January 20 2009, but it was not until early March that year that prime minister Gordon Brown visited the States.
Tony Blair went to America around a month after George Bush became president in 2001, while it also took a month for John Major to visit Bill Clinton after his first term in office began in 1993.
The earliest visit by a UK leader following a US president’s inauguration in the last century was when Alec Douglas-Home crossed the Atlantic two days after Lyndon Johnson was sworn in to office in 1963. He was there to attend the funeral of Johnson’s assassinated predecessor, John F Kennedy.
Starmer’s official spokesman insisted today that it was “entirely normal” for a British PM not to attend a presidential inauguration.
He also insisted there had been no snub for the PM, despite the fact that Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni has been invited to the event.
“Ultimately, the UK and US have got a unique relationship when it comes to a wide range of issues,” the spokesman said.
“And the prime minister and president Trump have already had many conversations about, you know, where we can deepen that relationship, and we look forward to continuing to work together in the years to come.”