We need to talk about a problem named Donald…

It was perfectly reasonable to argue there was no need to shed a tear over the downfall of the brutal, illegitimate Venezuelan dictator, Nicolás Maduro, while simultaneously condemning the imperialistic, international law flouting manner in which Donald Trump brought it about.

That was the balancing act open to Sir Keir Starmer but the prime minister chose only to emphasise he wouldn’t be shedding any tears for Maduro while pathetically ducking and diving over any hint of criticism of the US president’s action or even venturing an opinion on the international law question. Not a good look for a human rights lawyer who has made a career out of championing the primacy of international law.

Oddly enough, I found myself on air for GB News on Saturday taking the option Sir Keir had feebly evaded. Yes, let’s cheer Maduro’s downfall while also arguing the illegality of Trump’s military action to remove the president (albeit an election cheating dictator) of a sovereign state in its own capital.

Painfully, as a far from uncritical Labour supporter, I had to concede Nigel Farage had shown more cojones than Starmer by at least calling Trump’s action “unorthodox and almost certainly contrary to international law”. Just maybe, as this column has suggested before, Farage is listening to those Reform strategists warning that playing up his longstanding personal links to The Donald could prove the Achilles heel in his own prime ministerial ambition given the US president’s deep unpopularity here.

Starmer’s Saturday fairy tale

For Starmer, last Saturday was certainly a strange day. It began with him preparing for his pre-recorded interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg for her Sunday morning show. It was planned to be his big New Year reboot in which he pledged to overcome the cost-of-living crisis, pledged to stay as PM through to the next election and denied that the upcoming May elections in Wales, Scotland and parts of England, including London, will represent any sort of referendum on his leadership and his government’s performance. In effect, brushing aside the idea of a leadership challenge. Well, If Starmer truly believes that he must believe there were fairies at the bottom of the Number 10 garden outside as he struggled to bat away Kuenssberg’s awkward questions.

Venezuela? Starmer had to fall back on that being a breaking story as they spoke, effectively admitting the ‘Special Relationship’ hadn’t run to Trump tipping him the wink, and that he’d have to watch the president’s TV press conference several hours later to grasp what had happened. Any criticism of Trump, prime minister? No thanks, Laura.

It was still the line he peddled later on Saturday when he did have to grant a brief TV news reaction. But Starmer’s prevarication over Trump’s Venezuela action almost certainly dials up the prospect of a leadership challenge; for many MPs and ministers and the wider public, it takes his handling of Trump from the status of tolerable diplomatic pragmatism closer to intolerable craven cowardice.

But the lesson of Starmer’s Kuenssberg interview when it aired mirrored that of his recorded Christmas message to the nation. It reinforced the prime minister’s own Achilles heel. The same one this column has laboured repeatedly. Communicating. Both lacked any inspirational, confidence boosting, charismatic quality. Instead they more resembled the delivery style of a provincial bank manager, a small-town solicitor or a time-serving civil servant.

Topsy turvy times for the papers

It wasn’t a good look either when parliament returned from the Christmas recess on Monday and the prime minister elected to stay away and leave it to Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper to deliver the urgent statement on the Venezuela crisis and face the questions in the following debate. It bared Starmer’s absent chest for Kemi Badenoch’s opportunistic pot shot and there was no shortage of mutinous murmurs on Labour’s own benches over Starmer’s stayaway decision.

But if Trump’s Venezuela’s adventure / misadventure (take your pick) put the prime minister on the spot, it did much the same for Britain’s newspapers and broadcasters.

For the papers, there was the initial option of focusing on the derring-do angle of the sheer daring and spectacular success of the US Special Forces operation to abduct a foreign leader and his wife, in their pyjamas, from their own heavily-guarded palace and helicopter them out to a waiting warship. With the airborne Maduro pictured manacled, blindfolded and en route to a New York hellhole jail and then the notorious perp walk into a courtroom amid global headlines and a geopolitical earthquake, it was the stuff of a Hollywood movie and Tom Cruise couldn’t have done it better.

Sample the Mail on Sunday front page featuring the captured leader and the words, ‘Blindfolded and shackled, Nicolás Maduro, the brutal dictator worshipped by the Left, after being dramatically captured by US special forces in a shock-and-awe raid. And as the world reels, a White House declaration… TRUMP: NOW I’M RUNNING VENEZUELA’.

The MoS front page strapline; ‘AMERICA ON THE WARPATH’ with a 5-page analysis. That included a perceptive piece by Mark Almond, director of Oxford-based Crisis Research Institute and headlined ‘Oil and China, not drugs, are the REAL reasons for this invasion’. He also warned: “The US could be involved in a foreign war it can’t stomach.”

Predictably, the paper sought to embarrass Starmer by linking his ‘squirming’ Saturday reaction to a piece by its political editor, Glen Owen, headlined: ‘Left lionised a despot whose starving people had to eat cats’. To be fair to Starmer, unlike Jeremy Corbyn, his track record hadn’t run to ‘lionising’ Maduro and his regime which drove around nine million Venezuelans, including many of its best and brightest, into fleeing the country.

Trump’s new world order?

By Monday, however, the implications for the global world order that has existed since World War II, was triggering a more balanced approach. Although the Mail’s front-page lead sought to continue damaging Starmer with the headline, ‘PM FACES REVOLT BY LABOUR’S MADURO APOLOGISTS’ it also carried blurbs for three inside columns. Trump cheerleader Richard Littlejohn’s, ‘If only Starmer would show such ruthlessness’, Andrew Neil’s ‘Emperor Trump’s ambitions should terrify Greenland’ and Stephen Glover’s ‘This will only embolden the world’s bullies’.

Neil’s piece was particularly prescient, written before Trump revived his threat to annexe Greenland, as he briefed journalists on Air Force One during the flight back from Florida to Washington. In his column, Neil pulled no punches with: “Good riddance to Maduro but I fear any chance of peaceful regime change will be squandered on the altar of Emperor Trump’s narcissistic imperial ambitions.” In a sense it was a sequel to his powerful December 27 column headlined: ‘A president ignorant of history and with scant regard for democracy will accelerate America’s retreat from Europe in 2026 …WE ARE ON THE BRINK OF A HISTORICAL TURNING POINT – AND IT SHOULD TERRIFY US’.

Trump’s revived Greenland threat certainly sent a collective shiver down the spines of Europe’s leaders. Not least coming hours after Katie Miller, the wife of Trump’s powerful deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, trolled Denmark by posting a map of Greenland festooned with US flags overlayed with the word ‘soon’ in caps.

Can NATO survive Trump’s ticking timebomb?

Tuesday’s Mail front page rightly splashed ‘GREENLAND RAID WILL FINISH NATO, TRUMP IS WARNED’, quoting the stark message from Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen at the prospect of the US leader forcibly seizing the semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, a NATO ally. Trump insists that the US needs Greenland, the world’s largest island, for both national security reasons and to exploit its huge Arctic natural resources.

The Greenland threat brought Starmer the closest he’d come to challenging Trump when European leaders and US negotiators met in Paris on Tuesday and a gathering to discuss the Ukraine war turned into an unequivocal declaration of support for Denmark and Greenland’s sovereignty. It was effectively a ‘hands off’ warning to Trump, which Starmer endorsed, while carefully avoiding any direct criticism of the US president by name. Then came the US’s provocative, headline-grabbing, NATO-imperilling response on Tuesday reinforcing Trump’s determination to acquire Greenland and by military force if necessary!

It was, as BBC Political Editor Chris Mason put in a website article a demonstration of Trump’s “head-spinning unpredictability”.

Inevitably, Venezuela and Greenland figured prominently in the first PMQs of 2026 on Wednesday. With Starmer robustly supporting the UK’s commitment to send troops into Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire and strongly supporting Greenland’s independence. But he also dodged the best efforts of Lib Dem leader Ed Davey to get him to directly criticise Trump, give a view on the legality of his action over Venezuela or whether it would be the end of NATO if the US president carried out his threat to militarily annexe Greenland.

On Tuesday, the Mail’s seven pages of coverage included reporting former MI6 chief Sir Alex Younger’s prophetic BBC interview admitting: “The world is now ruled by men who think might is right. We see, essentially, the world now governed by the idea that might is right and I think Donald Trump embodies that.” The ex-spy chief went on to argue that the UK’s refusal to formally accuse Trump of breaching international law leaves it open to hypocrisy allegations after the British government declared Russia had breached international law following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Interestingly, the Mail has now switched the tag line for its coverage from ‘America’s Venezuela coup’ to ‘America’s New World Order’.

Tuesday’s Guardian front page had also carried the US president’s Greenland attack threat to NATO, although its main story focused on a striking image of Maduro and his wife being manhandled en route to a New York court room and his claim to be a prisoner of war, still president of Venezuela and innocent of all the charges levelled against him.

Inside, award winning political sketch writer / satirist superb John Crace chipped in with a wickedly funny column headlined: ‘Starmer on sycophant alert as he refuses to see, hear or speak evil when it comes to Trump’.

Without doubt, how long a self-respecting British prime minister can sustain a pussyfooting approach to Trump following his latest Greenland threat is now a huge, ticking timebomb question.

A tabloid classic

Over at the Mirror on Tuesday, there was a classic tabloid front page. A photo of the Maduros being unceremoniously hustled into court with the headline: Mad Men… Tyrant Captured by Lunatic.

Meanwhile The Guardian’s main Tuesday leader referenced something that particularly struck me when I watched Trump’s rambling, incoherent and boastful Mar a Lago press conference on Saturday. His dishonest assertion that Venezuela’s most prominent opposition leader, Maria Machada, is “a nice woman” who doesn’t have the public support to run the country despite the history of her being banned from standing in the last presidential election because her popularity guaranteed she would win. Despite the fact her less popular deputy was allowed to stand, and still won overwhelmingly until the Maduro regime cancelled the result. Despite the fact, too, that Ms Machada had welcomed Trump’s toppling of Maduro and planned to emerge from hiding and return to the country.

But anti-Maduro contacts in Venezuela are both outraged and unsurprised by Trump’s snubbing of Machada for a number of reasons. Among them that she would want early democratic elections which Trump opposes and that she wouldn’t fully embrace his idea of Venezuela as a vassal state.

Snubbing a heroine

At the time of writing, Maria Machada hadn’t heard a word from the US president. That plays into another of her allies’ suspicions. The memory of Trump’s ungracious response to her winning the latest Nobel Peace Prize he obsessively craved. Given Trump’s long history of colossal vanity and pure pettiness, it’s a theory I certainly wouldn’t dismiss.

Instead, Trump prefers to deal with Maduro’s former VP – now elevated to acting president – Delcy Rodriguez, a woman who was not only exceptionally close to her boss, but privy to all his secrets and fully onside with his brutally repressive regime. That arouses another suspicion among the country’s democratic opponents.

Clearly, the US’s startlingly successful abduction of Maduro had to involve a degree of inside help and betrayal. Despite her continuing public declarations of support and demands for his return home to power, rumours are growing that she could well be among the secret traitors. The next few weeks are likely to establish how true that is, partly depending on how much she bends to Trump’s diktat.

More certain are reports on both sides of the Atlantic that vital information for the raid that captured Maduro came from Venezuela’s onetime spymaster Hugo Carvajal – aka El Pollo or The Chicken, who is in jail in the US after pleading guilty last June to narco terrorism, drug trafficking and weapons charges … matching the rap sheet Maduro himself faces. It’s an open secret that Carvajal recently wrote a personal letter to Donald Trump offering to supply information in return for a reduced sentence. It’s believed that this could result in him being a key prosecution witness at the Maduros’ trial.

Trump’s backlash challenge

Domestically, however, Trump’s Venezuela coup isn’t so far playing as well as the White House hoped. Initial polling suggests only one in three Americans support Trump’s action. It is also further fracturing his MAGA base. With some arguing it flies in the face of his campaign pledge not to involve the US in foreign conflicts. Others portraying it as an attempt to distract from the president’s plunging poll ratings ahead of this year’s midterm elections and his failure to reverse the cost-of-living crisis facing millions of ordinary voters. Others suspect it’s also another attempt to divert attention from more revelations emerging in the unresolved Epstein Files saga.

Next week, Capitol Hill Democrats will step up their opposition to Trump’s Venezuela attack, arguing it breaches the constitutional requirement for Congress to approve any act of war, along with unease over his boasts of forcibly dominating the Western Hemisphere.

Many Democrats strongly oppose Trump’s narcissistic claim to be reviving the 1823 Monroe Doctrine when a US president marked the Western Hemisphere as America’s patch. Except, he now wants it updated to the ‘Donroe Doctrine’ – in line with his recent insistence of changing the name of Washington’s revered Kennedy Arts Center to the Trump Kennedy Arts Center.

As one senior Democrat put it to me: “The legacy of last Saturday has a long way to run. We are very much at the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end.”

There are also some Republicans on Capitol Hill echoing last Sunday’s headline in The Observer: ‘Cuba, Colombia, Canada? Where will the president of peace strike next?’