I was in the room when Trump backed Starmer over Chagos. This is why his U-turn is so bizarre
S.ir Keir Starmer has shown in recent months that he is no stranger to changing his mind.
From farmers’ inheritance tax to welfare reform, U-turns have become central to this Labor government; This left Sir Keir’s backbenchers disappointed.
But none of the prime minister’s reversals have been as sudden and unexpected as Donald Trump’s conclusion that the UK’s deal to give the Chagos Islands and the key Diego Garcia air base to Mauritius was “an act of gross stupidity” that stunned Downing Street this morning.
Not least because the president was more than on board after Sir Keir’s team meticulously laid out a plan to secure the islands’ future less than a year ago.
I was even in the Oval Office for the first meeting between Starmer and Trump in February last year.
Shortly after Sir Keir extended the invitation for the King’s historic second state visit to Trump, the US president took a question from a reporter about the controversial plan to hand over Chagos to Mauritius.
Trump was expected to be skeptical and even veto the plan, which is vital for both the UK and the US due to the Diego Garcia air base on the islands.
Instead, the president said: “I have a feeling it will work out very well. I think we will tend to move in line with your country.”
This was despite lobbying by Nigel Farage and others to veto the deal, and the then foreign secretary David Lammy suggesting they would not go ahead with the handover if Trump opposed it.
This statement, backed by a formal agreement from Secretary of State Marco Rubio in May, paved the way for Sir Keir to deliver the Chagos agreement.
Not much has changed since then. To be fair, the cost to UK taxpayers (not the US) of more than £30bn, issues over the fate of the Chagossians, the fact that the deal was still deadlocked in parliament and questions about nuclear weapons on the islands all arose, but most of these were issues at the time.
So why did Trump make such a spectacular U-turn?
Independent He knows that opponents of the deal have not stopped lobbying and begging the US president to intervene and stop it. It looks like their message may have gotten through after all.
But is that really enough for the president to actually admit that he was wrong last year?
The more likely explanation is Greenland. Trump now understands that the international legal logic that the islands belong to Mauritius also applies to Denmark’s ownership of Greenland. And he really wants the US to take control of Danish territory, as we’ve seen with his aggressive language and tariff threats.
The Labor Party government’s claims that it has no choice but to hand over the islands according to international law will not be of any use to the White House administration and may actually further increase the grievance in Greenland.
But perhaps there is a broader problem here. Sir Keir has made a name for himself among international leaders as the “Trump whisperer”.
He persuaded the US president to agree on a number of issues, including a better trade deal than the one given to the EU and Chagos. But this latest development perhaps indicates a deterioration in the relationship between two ideologically distant men.
If Starmer’s ability to influence the capricious US president is waning, that’s bad news indeed. Its foreign policy generally acts as a bridge between the US and Europe, but if this were removed Britain would be greatly weakened.
Starmer kept Trump sweet with his state visit last year, but it seems that even the prospect of a reciprocal visit from King Charles to the US is not enough to convince the US president to be a reasonable man.
The Prime Minister drew some applause at an emergency press conference yesterday when he stood up to Trump on behalf of NATO ally Denmark. But Trump, not a man who forgives easily, saw clearly that this was a betrayal and that his statements about Chagos were a new front in what was increasingly an adversarial relationship.
