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Keir Starmer knew his first post-summit press conference as prime minister would always be a significant moment.
After a solid and quality first international outing since his election victory, where he was warmly welcomed by his fellow world leaders at NATO, Starmer was to conclude his trip to Washington DC with an equally good and solid performance in front of reporters.
Few people realise the amount of preparation that goes into what often seem like superficial occasions, but on the plane home, Starmer shared with reporters that between a succession of bilateral meetings and NATO council meetings, he and his team had prepared for every possible issue.
It all seemed simple and then of course, as often happens, the unexpected happened.
Just before the press conference, Starmer lined up with other NATO leaders on stage behind Joe Biden to welcome the hero of the event.
“President Putin!” the American president announced, as the visibly embarrassed Ukrainian Voldymyr Zelensky stood beside him, waiting to take the podium.
To be fair to Starmer, he didn’t flinch from the shock of the moment, which reverberated around the world and caused an eruption in American politics. He merely applauded, in a kind of robotic reaction.
But what was going on in his head was quite different.
“You know you have to tear it up,” he admitted of the detailed preparation for the press conference that would take place a few minutes later.
So Starmer suddenly found himself facing a barrage of questions about the US president’s health and his fitness to lead the free world.
His responses from the podium were convincing. He focused on the success of the conference and avoided anything that could be perceived as a direct comment on the president himself. He did not go as far as Germany’s Olaf Scholz or France’s Emmanuel Macron in endorsing the American president’s fitness, but he gave the impression of doing so without saying much directly.
Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, his responses earlier in the day had already seen him step on a political landmine on the same issue, demonstrating his lack of experience in a subtle but significant way.
In a short interview broadcast on the BBC, political affairs editor Chris Mason asked Starmer whether Biden was “going senile”. Mason had carefully checked the meaning of the word beforehand to ensure it did not imply a specific medical diagnosis.
As the Cambridge English Dictionary points out, the word means “displaying weak mental abilities due to advanced age.” That seems entirely true of the 81-year-old president.
Starmer gave an instant, natural but poorly executed reaction to the question: “No.”
Although he later clarified that he had immediately allowed the gaggle of travelling British journalists to utter a series of headlines like “Biden is not senile”. In a way that put that thought in the mind of the prime minister rather than in that of his interviewees.
He made a similar mistake when he went to the United States to a rally with journalists. When asked if he would deliver the pay rises that unions were demanding for their members, he also said “no.” That response immediately caused a stir among union leaders in the country, to the point that a senior Downing Street official tried to intervene to get lobbyists touring with the prime minister to change their tune.
Schoolboy mistake was the phrase that came to mind.
Starmer had clearly realised his mistake at the press conference, although he was probably more worried about being sued for the apparent hypocrisy of telling Nato partners that they must all spend 2.5% of GDP on defence and not giving his own government a timetable for achieving that target.
But if Starmer ever had a honeymoon – and it is doubtful that he did – the Biden controversy has ensured that it will not last long.
Just after arriving in Washington, actor and Democratic activist George Clooney published an op-ed in the New York Times calling on Biden to drop out of the presidential race. He joined a number of congressional figures, and behind the scenes, the voices grew even louder.
Starmer spent much of Thursday preparing for his visit and looking at profiles of various leaders in anticipation of what seemed an inevitable victory. His chief of staff and former senior civil servant Sue Gray has prepared a book of profiles of world leaders.
But he probably did not anticipate such a political storm surrounding the American president.
When the two men had their bilateral meeting in the Oval Office, it seemed from the start – when the media were invited to attend the opening remarks – like a visit to a venerable elderly relative in a nursing home.
Biden’s voice was a quiet, raspy whisper. Starmer spoke slowly and loudly, sitting there, his legs wrapped in intense nervousness that something might go wrong.
After public banter about England’s football victory and Biden’s support for Starmer to reverse some aspects of Brexit, the two men managed to have what everyone inside described as a good meeting that went well beyond the allotted 45 minutes.
In fact, Biden didn’t make a single mistake throughout the summit. But then the Putin/Zelensky moment happened and as the Downing Street group headed to the official plane to take everyone home, the US president gave an atrocious press conference in which he also managed to confuse Vice President Kamala Harris with Donald Trump.
To be fair to the prime minister, while he was traditionally chatting to reporters on the plane home, he made no mistake in defending the president for leading a successful summit. With a prison crisis brewing, union anger and a potential rebellion over the two-child child benefit cap, he may have been relieved that attention was elsewhere.
But even in what should have been a victory summit for the new prime minister, the controversy surrounding Biden showed that political realities have quickly taken over and he will have little or no room to misstep.
