LONDON — It was March when Gretchen Whitmer bumped into Morgan McSweeney in London while on a trade visit to the U.K.

Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan and potential hopeful in the 2028 U.S. presidential election, and McSweeney, the chief of staff to embattled British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, discussed Labour’s landslide victory in its 2024 general election campaign, said a person who recalled the encounter.

There, Starmer’s chief of staff accepted an eye-catching gift from Whitmer — a £90 “Michigan Wood” pen. The encounter was a small glimpse of the ties that remain between the U.K. prime minister’s aides and the U.S. Democratic Party, still licking its wounds after a resounding election defeat by Donald Trump and the Republicans.

It was also indicative of something else: McSweeney’s personal desire to build a coalition and playbook for center-left parties to win and govern worldwide, with Starmer at its heart, including and going beyond just the U.S. Democrats.

That desire was undimmed in recent months, according to four people with knowledge of the conversations, despite Starmer and McSweeney firefighting crises (and falling poll ratings) in office.

Labour’s engagement with the Democrats has faded to the background since Trump’s reelection last November, not least because of Starmer’s efforts to charm the president — Trump’s gilded state visit to Britain starts on Sept. 16 — and the fact the Democrats have no candidate to charm.

But that may change soon. The Starmer-friendly think tanks IPPR and Labour Together and U.S.-based Center for American Progress (CAP) will take a “Global Progress Action Summit” — previously held in Canada — to London for the first time on Sept. 26.

Events planned so far include the newly minted justice secretary and deputy prime minister, formerly the foreign secretary, David Lammy — a friend of Barack Obama — in conversation with past (and perhaps future) Democratic hopeful, Pete Buttigieg. High-profile further speakers are expected to follow.

McSweeney has been a key figure behind the scenes in recent months shaping thinking around the conference, said the four people referenced above, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity. That’s despite him battling political turmoil at home — which in the past fortnight has included the departures in disgrace of Starmer’s deputy, Angela Rayner, and his ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson, and a reshuffle of both his Cabinet and No. 10 staff.

A second, private day at the conference is planned for staff, where Labour government aides can swap notes with counterparts from nations such as Australia and Spain, whose socialist government’s proposals to tackle a housing crisis are being watched closely in No. 10.

One of the four people said: “Morgan sees Keir as being a leader among global progressives.” Another said: “We’re trying to write kind of a blueprint or playbook of what it means to be a center-left government in the era that we’re now in” — one where neither left-wing populism, nor a return to the shared “Third Way” politics of former leaders Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, are the answer.

In Britain, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has a huge poll lead and is promising to deport hundreds of thousands of people. Public disillusionment with establishment parties — and Starmer, the process-driven former lawyer — is high. No. 10 aides are looking at artificial intelligence and social media’s impact on society, an aging population, a public sector in need of reform, growing Chinese might and public unease at mass migration — problems plaguing governments everywhere — and believe “deliverism” is the way forward. It might not work.

So how close really can Labour and the Democrats get right now — and can they teach each other more than just how to lose ground? POLITICO talked to more than a dozen politicians and strategists, several on condition of anonymity, in a bid to find the answer.

There is no Democratic candidate

The first difficulty with meeting the Democrats is obvious. Who are you supposed to meet?

The party structure is different to Labour, which almost always has a leader. A senior figure in a U.K. think tank said: “It’s not like you can speak to the equivalent of Keir Starmer in opposition and start to build relationships.”

Labour MP Emily Thornberry, the chair of Britain’s cross-party foreign affairs committee of MPs which went to Capitol Hill over the summer, said: “I wasn’t, for example, being taken to see Democrats and being told, ‘Oh, this is a rising star, we think that this guy or this woman is worth cultivating, because we think that they are future leaders.’

“No, it was all about who we think are the movers and shakers on the Hill. Or who we think might be — we haven’t even worked it out yet.”

Enter, then, an army of center-left think tanks to fill the void. The CAP, Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) and Third Way all have regular contact with U.K. counterparts about Democratic renewal. “Britain has proven a useful place for them to have those conversations that they can’t have easily in the U.S.,” argued the senior think tank figure quoted above.

Others involved in this transatlantic dialogue include the U.S.-based Open Markets Institute, the former home of Biden antitrust guru Lina Khan, and the Sunrise Movement, as well as the U.K.-based Future Governance Forum, backed by a roster of Starmer donors, and the Labour Climate and Environment Forum.

Claire Ainsley, a former aide to Starmer who is now the director of the PPI’s project on center-left renewal, said: “Looking at who’s going to be the next candidate is actually only one part of the equation. The other part of it is which faction, if you like, is going to get their candidate to emerge?”

With Bill Clinton in the 1990s, she argued, “you build the platform and the candidate emerges. It wasn’t as if Clinton came with all these ideas — you had to build a platform.” But this becomes a battle of competing ideologies too, with different think tanks lobbying for the kind of center left they want to see.

Building a network

Third Way, the D.C.-based Democrat-friendly think tank, talks to people “both in and adjacent to No. 10” and “a variety of folks in government,” said Senior Vice President Josh Freed — though most conversations are informal and not at the level of elected officials.

Likewise, Labour’s recent former General Secretary David Evans, now an adviser to PPI, has been to the U.S. with Ainsley to speak to Democratic strategists, including at a Denver summit in April. The pair are due to attend a similar behind-closed-doors “retreat” in Las Vegas on Sept. 13, where speakers will include Obama’s former chief of staff (and potential presidential hopeful) Rahm Emanuel.

The PPI has its eye on talented governors such as Whitmer, Colorado’s Jared Polis, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, newcomers such as North Carolina’s Josh Stein and former governors such as Rhode Island’s Gina Raimondo, who also served in Joe Biden’s cabinet as a commerce secretary.

Shapiro and Whitmer in particular, argued PPI President Will Marshall, embody an “impatience with government bureausclerosis” — a battle occupying Labour in the U.K. Friendly think tanks like to hail Shapiro for fixing a key interstate in just 12 days after it collapsed.

In the U.K., PPI is interested in center-left ministers such as Lammy, Wes Streeting, Bridget Phillipson, John Healey, Ellie Reeves, Alison McGovern, Torsten Bell, Kirsty McNeill and Lucy Rigby, along with new junior ministers such as Kanishka Narayan and Mike Tapp.

Democratic former Congressman Tim Ryan — who ran unsuccessfully for president in 2020 as well as against the now-Vice President JD Vance in a 2022 Ohio Senate race — came to the U.K. in July, facilitated by the PPI, and held briefings with Labour MPs and peers. Ainsley and Deborah Mattinson, a pollster and former Starmer adviser who works with the PPI, presented research on swing voters who are becoming disillusioned with center-left parties.

Ryan also met Starmer at a pre-arranged encounter during an event in parliament and the two spoke about politics, said one person who was there.

Marshall said the PPI-Labour relationship “withered” in the years the hard-left Jeremy Corbyn led Labour, but the history goes back to 1989, when he met Patricia Hewitt, a center-left think tanker in the political wilderness, who would become a Cabinet minister under Tony Blair.

The government can help

Labour isn’t in the wilderness this time — at least not yet — and has the levers of government to help.

The U.K. Embassy and consuls general will play a role in building links between the government — in a non-party-political way — and potential Democratic runners and riders. Diplomats will keep tabs on rising stars and gather contact details for their teams, and this will likely kick up a gear when the picture becomes clearer after the U.S. midterm elections in November 2026. This, of course, is true of Republican rising stars too. “We do have the advantage of the machinery of the Foreign Office network to deal with that,” said one former Labour adviser.

There are always two tracks, the adviser added — cross-party, pragmatic relationships with U.S. administration figures come first, “but clearly, you also have your political family that you are part of, and the alliances that you have as fellow progressive political leaders.”

Such fellow leaders could include California Governor Gavin Newsom, whose pugilistic and Trump-mimicking social media style has made waves with Democrats, or JB Pritzker, the Illinois governor whose deep pockets as the heir of a hotel fortune could allow him to self-fund a presidential candidacy.

These tracks can sometimes appear to overlap. Starmer gave the job of ambassador to Washington D.C. — usually reserved for a civil servant — to Peter Mandelson, a close ally of McSweeney and long-time operator on the center left (although he was also quick to cultivate relationships with Trump’s MAGA right). Mandelson was due to be briefed on this month’s summit before he was sacked on Thursday over revelations about his friendship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Likewise, Emily Thornberry’s choice of meetings in Washington this summer was guided by diplomatic officials, and the embassy would sometimes have someone taking notes in the room.

But Trump and the Republicans are by far the priority, at least for now.

Thornberry recalled of her visit: “The impression I got was that reengaging with however the Democrats emerge is on the back burner, waiting for things to happen — because the pressing issue is trying to understand what the hell is going on under the Trump regime. So that’s the priority.”

Thornberry recalled a surprising bond between MPs and some Republicans, because many of them had links to the U.S. military. “For these guys who’ve actually been under fire with Brits, they have a very different relationship with Britain than Democrats, who see us as, you know, their liberal friends from across the pond — but they have lots of liberal friends across the pond,” she said.

Don’t wake the beast

Bonding too closely with Democrats is fraught with danger. Labour officials are still scarred by a row during the 2024 U.S. election, in which Trump’s campaign accused Labour of “blatant foreign interference” after activists went to volunteer for Kamala Harris’ campaign.

Many Labour activists privately saw it as the weaponization of the sort of routine campaigning that would usually pass without comment. The row erupted after Labour’s Head of Operations Sofia Patel told would-be volunteers: “We will sort your housing.”

One Labour volunteer who went to the U.S. said: “It was a foolish, ill-advised LinkedIn post, and it wasn’t even properly true, because many of us were just organizing ourselves into groups — former staffers, current staffers, who were warm and interested — it wasn’t all organized by the party. Lots of us had just got ourselves into a group, booked ourselves into an Airbnb and a hotel and booked the same flights.” People paid their own way and many avoided posting on social media, the volunteer said.

The danger hasn’t passed. While Starmer is seeking to define himself as a friend of Trump, many Democrats define themselves by resisting him. Formal contacts with Democratic politicians are rare for Starmer and his aides these days, though the PM met with House and Senate Minority Leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer at the NATO summit in July.

Mike Williams, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said Starmer’s government is focused on making sure the “U.K. is in a decent place with regards to Trump.”

Just keep talking

The conversations continue regardless. Organizers behind this month’s London summit are hoping for representatives from most center-left governments in Europe and others from further afield. McSweeney has relationships with people in progressive think tanks in the U.S. and other countries, is close to former Biden and Obama officials and attended the Democratic National Convention last year alongside Matthew Doyle, Starmer’s then-director of communications.

One former Labour staffer argued, however, that party HQ actually cultivated stronger links with the Australian Labor Party (ALP) than it did with the Democrats before Britain’s 2024 election. Labour hired Aussie strategist David Nelson to help run its general election campaign last year, alongside a second, more junior former Australian Labor staffer.

Evans and Ainsley of the Progressive Policy Institute went to Australia to meet the ALP this past June. “Politically, we’re more similar to Australia than anywhere else in Europe,” the former Labour staffer added. “Their electorate behaves more like ours.”

Despite all his domestic woes, Starmer’s allies believe he can still lead the pack. “There is a method and a recipe that worked for the center left, and it worked to get Labour into power … It is having a clear leader, vision and program to change the lives of working people for the better,” Ainsley said.

She added: “Where center-left governments drift from that as their priority, it’s where they come unstuck.”

At the Denver summit in April, PPI’s Marshall said Democrats were asking Evans “ ‘How did you all win? What did you do? How did you win back those Red Wall constituencies in the July election last year?’ ”

But Starmer is now drifting in the polls, and his critics have also accused him of a lack of vision. The conversations now are not just about how to win — but how to rebuild. “Conceivably, we learn the most from failure,” said Williams of CAP. “I think there’s a lot to learn.”

Some failures unite most center-left strategists — like needing to focus on voters’ wallets rather than distant economic indicators. Marshall said part of his conversations with British MPs in early 2024 were “reality therapy about the Biden administration and Bidenomics.” Until Biden’s crushing defeat, he said, many center-left politicians including in Britain were looking to his strategy as the answer.

Other issues, such as migration and gender politics, are thornier. Williams argued: “Do I think that we’re learning the right lessons yet? No. The folks [in the U.S.] who are pushing this whiplash back to the center and saying that we need to be tough on immigration, we need to push back on transgender rights — I think they’re dead wrong.”

And for Freed of Third Way, Starmer would benefit from pushing the bureaucratic part of his personality aside. “Far be it for me to give advice to someone who successfully won an election and is leading a government,” he said. “But I think the thing that we’re seeing in general is that this is not a moment for buttoned-up, cautious, precise leaders. That this is not the moment to only go on controlled interviews where you know the questions and it’s only going to be 15 minutes. It’s not the moment where you’re unwilling to share insights and glimpses of yourself, of who you are, of the passions you care about.”

Freed then put it more directly: “The blunt challenge of the moment is, this is like two owners of football clubs talking to each other. The Democrats just got relegated. The other [party, Labour], let’s be blunt, looks like [it] might be relegated — they’re in a relegation battle at the very least.”

For football fan Keir Starmer, it’s a battle that may define his legacy.

Shia Kapos contributed reporting.