Keir Starmer keeps Trumps’ silver necklace gift – for a price

Keir Starmer has paid to keep a personalised silver necklace given to him by Donald and Melania Trump, transparency records show.

The necklace was the only gift Starmer chose to keep after he hosted the US president for a historic second state visit in September.

The Trumps also gave the prime minister a golf club and a set of silver cufflinks, both personalised, but these were retained by the Cabinet Office. A pair of cowboy boots, given to Starmer’s wife, Victoria, by the Trumps has also been held by the department.

Under government rules, ministers cannot keep official gifts worth more than £140 unless they pay the difference between £140 and the gift’s value. The value of the necklace has not been disclosed, and Downing Street declined to give details.

During the state visit, in which the Trumps were hosted at Windsor Castle, Starmer gave the president a ministerial red box embossed with the presidential seal and title, and the first lady a silk scarf designed by Ukrainian children.

Though largely symbolic, the gifts exchanged between prime ministers and US presidents have triggered controversy in the past.

When Gordon Brown visited Washington in 2009, he presented Barack Obama with an ornamental pen holder crafted from the timbers of the anti-slavery ship HMS Gannet. Obama’s comparatively generic gift to Brown, a DVD box set of 25 classic American films, was seen as a diplomatic blunder.

Gordon Brown meets Barack Obama in Washington in 2008. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

No world leader is likely to match the gift that Qatar gave to Trump – a $400m (£305m) luxury Boeing 747 to serve as the new Air Force One – which has generated huge backlash in the US.

Trump has so far avoided controversy over his own gift choices, though he has been accused of giving people fake jewellery before he entered politics. The actor Charlie Sheen claimed that Trump once gave him fake diamond and platinum cufflinks as a wedding present.

Sheen told The Graham Norton Show in 2016 that Trump had handed over what he said were platinum diamond cufflinks from the American jeweller Harry Winston. Six months later Sheen had them checked by an appraiser.

“She took the loupe, spent about four seconds and kind of recoiled from it – much like people do from Trump,” he told Norton. “She says: ‘In their finest moment, this is cheap pewter and bad zirconias.’ And they’re stamped ‘Trump’.”