The U.K.’s top officials struggled to contain their laughter after President Donald Trump used his first phone call with the prime minister to raise an unexpected concern: fat foxes.
The former chief of staff to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer revealed an amusing anecdote from the pair’s first call that left officials battling to keep a straight face.
“So the first call that Keir had with the president, he got into a conversation about windmills,” Morgan McSweeney told the BBC.
While Trump, 80, has frequently criticized Britain’s embrace of offshore wind farms and repeatedly urged Starmer, 63, to ditch clean energy in favor of fossil fuel extraction, what he said next was something U.K. government officials never saw coming.
“Then he started saying, ‘The windmills are killing your birds. The birds are falling around the windmills, and the foxes are eating those birds,’” McSweeney recalled Trump telling Starmer.
Trump apparently went on to claim that the foxes had become lazy after feeding on the birds and had grown so overweight that “people no longer knew what kind of creature they were because they were too fat.”
“At that point, the officials in the room were barely able to contain themselves because it was so funny,” McSweeney said, adding that everyone was determined to remain “professional” given that it was the first phone call between the two world leaders.
While wind turbines do result in some bird fatalities, studies consistently show they kill far fewer birds per unit of electricity generated than fossil fuel energy sources, which Trump has repeatedly recommended Britain should rely on instead.
Despite Trump’s concerns, there is no empirical evidence to suggest that foxes in the U.K. are becoming larger.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“We thought, ‘This is going to be so, so very, very different,’” Starmer’s former chief of staff said, reflecting on expectations around Trump’s presidency and U.K.–U.S. relations.
That prediction appears to have held true, with Trump’s second term marked by repeated questionable claims about the state of the U.K., including an instance in which he prematurely suggested that Starmer would resign before the British Prime Minister had made any such announcement.
“Keir Starmer will resign as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on June 21, alongside criticism of the U.K. leader’s record, claiming he had “failed badly” on immigration and energy and calling for greater North Sea oil production, before signing off: “I wish him well! President DJT.”
The following day, Starmer confirmed his resignation in an emotional statement outside Downing Street.
Trump made the prediction without speaking to Starmer, with Downing Street telling The Washington Post that the two leaders had not discussed any resignation.
The post prompted surprise even among seasoned political journalists, with Robert Peston of the U.K. broadcaster ITV writing on X that the announcement was “pretty extreme, even by his standards.”
Nominations for a potential leadership election to replace Starmer will open on July 9 and close on July 16, with Andy Burnham, 56, considered the most likely candidate to succeed Starmer as U.K. prime minister.
