Donald Trump arrived in London late on Tuesday, stepping off Air Force One at Stansted holding hands with his wife, before being choppered off to Winfield House in Regent’s Park for the first night of his unprecedented second State Visit. On Wednesday Trump will wake up, get himself an OJ (or Fanta), meet with Ambassador Warren Stephens, the Arkansas banking tycoon who possesses the quintessential Southern gentleman manners, one of the reasons he was handed the role, before being ferried again to Windsor Castle and its 1 000 rooms. There will be a tour of the estate, he’ll meet with various royals and inspect the Guard of Honour. Later he will visit the tomb of the late Queen, witness a Red Arrows flyover, before sitting down for the State Banquet where he and King Charles will make speeches.

On Thursday he’s set to visit the Prime Minister’s country residence, Chequers, which is almost certainly the last time he’ll see Keir Starmer in it.

If you had told Donald Trump that this future lay in front of him in the early 1980s, when he was sitting in a limousine alongside his consiglieri Roy Cohn, driving up and down Manhattan streets discussing who the latest grifter in New York real estate theatre was, he would most likely have looked at you funny. If you had told him all this the day he heard that Deutsche Bank was calling their facility to the Trump Organisation, the next step of which was bankruptcy, he would probably have shaken his head. But here he is: a second State Visit, in a country that, despite its defaults and best intentions, is learning to admire him.

The expectation before the tragic events in Utah last week was that Trump would raise the issue of free speech in the UK, particularly in light of what emerged during the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on the EU’s and the UK’s increasingly aggressive policing of expression. That changed over the course of the weekend.

Keir Starmer is entering the fighting-for-his-life stage of his premiership. The economy is shot and growth has flatlined (inflation is, as of writing, stuck at a 19-month high), he lost one of his most important links to blue-collar Labour when his deputy tried to avoid paying property taxes, his attempt to evade approaching the IMF for a bailout by assembling a team of student campus economists has been met with jeers, and his proposal to begin deportations to France crashed horribly when powerful activist and charity forces managed to impede the scheduled exit flight of one illegal immigrant. One.

But the Peter Mandelson affair is a different level of trouble. Mandy, as he’s unaffectionately known, is the greatest British political operator of his age, but his great weakness is, and has always been, powerful men with cash. Invariably this weakness drew him into whatever racket Jeffrey Epstein was running, and the two became close, to the point where Mandelson described him as his “best friend.” How could Starmer not have known this before appointing him ambassador to the United States? As a lawyer?

He must have known. But whatever mental gymnastics he applied in okaying the selection are simply inapplicable to Labour backbenchers and other critics. There should be a saying for political indiscretion along the lines of: “there’s trouble, then there’s Jeffrey Epstein trouble. And the two are completely… different.”

So the story goes that Trump’s team, led by his bruising Chinese-American Communications Director Steven Cheung, approached him on Friday with words to the effect of, “it’s probably not the right time to humiliate folk.” After having witnessed the cold-blooded assassination of a dear friend, Trump was possibly a little battle-weary, so acquiesced.

That doesn’t apply to the UK media, so expect the joint press conference scheduled for Thursday to feature a whole bunch of English metrosexual male reporters asking questions about Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, his commitment to free speech in light of multiple sackings across America of people who’ve celebrated Kirk’s murder, his tariff policies, and whether or not the US economy is actually growing (something that a soaring stock market is struggling to justify in the way it previously could).

Trump’s team will have no doubt prepared him for the prospect of being rumbled by the likes of ITV’s Paul Brand or The News Agents’ Lewis Goodall. These are reporters who think like Redi Tlhabi, i.e. their own politics first, who’ve amassed followers lulled into conviction that this approach is the most informative.

Then there are the marches, but there is no Trump blimp this year. With the weather promising to be appalling, these performative nothingnesses are scheduled to take place miles from Windsor. At a time when Trump was under intensified but fake scrutiny for “collusion” in the giant Russia scam, as he was in 2019, there was a place for London protests. Now, it’s different.

So very different. Cabinet ministers in the UK, men and women, who’ve insulted the President have so far failed to improve the circumstances and fortunes of their own constituents, falling instead into luxury-belief philosophies relating to the inconsequential. Just Trump’s presence alone is humiliation enough here, and a chance to reflect on whether it’s a good idea to run your mouth off about your “values” being better than others. Will they take it? I suspect not.

Laziness begets entitlement begets stupidity begets stripping the imagination. There is a lot for South Africa to learn in what will unfold, and pursuant analyses. The first is to play to people’s strengths. The second is to exorcise the demons of persecution and its complexes. Indiscriminately.

Nobody in the ANC, so fiercely protective over the international relations portfolio, has ever thought to play to strengths, evident in the shambolic Oval Office summit in May. There was no, “President Trump, we would love you to visit Leopard Creek or many of the Garden Route’s golf courses.” Or, “at halfway house, it would be an honour for us to deliver a bucket of Nando’s chicken, which we are certain will challenge your preference for KFC.” Or, “sadly we can’t operate any of the aircraft those bastard Swedes hawked us, but we do have many beautiful choirs, and one will be waiting for you at the 19th hole.”

Countries need each other for different reasons. Those reasons are always strong, and mostly just.

This visit is set to illustrate that, and ridicule those who sneer otherwise.