Donald Trump isn’t known for giving gifts, but he delivered one to Tory leader Kemi Badenoch overnight, wrapped in a big bow. UK prime minister Keir Starmer, meanwhile, got the proverbial lump of coal.
The US president may have been irked by Starmer’s mild public admonishment of Trump on Monday as “wrong” for threatening to take over Greenland. Overnight in British time, Trump retaliated by taking to social media to mock “our ‘brilliant’ ally” Britain.
Trump chided Starmer for agreeing to hand back to Mauritius the Chagos Islands, where the US has a military airbase at Diego Garcia.
Starmer’s domestic rivals such as Badenoch’s Tories have lambasted the UK prime minister over the deal, which has yet to clear the House of Lords. The Tories and even some of his own Labour MPs believe Starmer acted weakly in the face of risks to British and US security – China is active in the region. The prime minister, however, says the opposite because the future of Diego Garcia base is guaranteed with a century lease.
Starmer was careful to get Trump’s imprimatur for the Chagos deal earlier this year, when their mutual bonhomie was in fuller flow. Trump, to the surprise of many at the time, suggested he was okay with the decision when he said in February he was “inclined to go along” with it and that it could “work out very well”.
Now, in the midst of the diplomatic maelstrom over Greenland, Trump appears to have changed his mind and has trained his sights on the Chagos agreement.
He took to his social media platform Truth Social to decry Starmer’s “act of GREAT STUPIDITY [sic] and total weakness”, which he said would benefit China and Russia. His sarcastic dismissal of Britain as “brilliant” in quote marks has gone down badly in Westminster, where there is growing unease that the relationship carefully cultivated by the UK leader with his notoriously unpredictable US counterpart could unravel.
The irony is the Chagos deal could be a template for a Greenland resolution: an example of how bigger western military powers can have their security concerns addressed in a compromise with a smaller nation worried about its sovereignty.
On Tuesday, Starmer risked upsetting Trump further. His government gave formal approval to a planned Chinese huge new embassy to Britain that the Tories and others argued could be used as cover to tap into sensitive financial data from cables near the City of London.
The giant institutions of Wall Street all have a presence in the area. Yet plans for the embassy on the site of the Old Royal Mint Court near the Tower of London in eastern central London show its basement could come within a single metre of the cables. Badenoch has criticised the decision. Will Trump do the same again?
Dan Jarvis, the UK’s security minister, on Tuesday afternoon addressed the House of Commons, where he had to shout over the rowdy Tory benches. He said Britain’s security services had agreed that the consolidation of China’s London presence from seven London sites to one actually had “clear security advantages”. He said Britain had acted to secure the cables, without giving further details.
That didn’t placate the Tories. What about Trump? Starmer is widely seen to have allowed the Chinese so-called “super embassy” to smooth the way for a visit to Beijing later this year to meet president Xi Jinping and to boost economic ties and defrost UK-Sino relations that have been in a cool-box for several years.
Starmer’s delicate balancing act of staying close to Trump, while trying to derisk the UK’s over-reliance on the US, continues.