It was hardly a ringing endorsement of the deal. But it could have been a lot worse.
And after the week Sir Keir Starmer has just been through, President Trump’s grudging support for the controversial Chagos deal will have come as a relief.
The good news for the PM was the president signalling he won’t now block the deal the Conservatives and Reform UK have claimed is a surrender.
The bad news is that the president has warned that if anything goes wrong in future, the US won’t hesitate to send in the gunships and take over the islands.
So it’s a rare piece of moderately good news for the PM amid a relentless onslaught from opponents and Labour MPs over his bungling of the Mandelson-Epstein scandal.
The Chagos deal the prime minister had made, the president said on his Truth Social, was “according to many, the best he could make”.
According to many? Who does he mean? Obviously not former ambassador Mandelson. He’s now a disgraced non-person and probably just a distant memory in Washington.
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“Peter who?” they’ll no doubt be saying in the White House these days. “We’ll never forget old whatshisname.”
The news from the White House is moderately good for Sir Keir because only a few weeks ago the president called his Chagos deal “an act of great stupidity” and “total weakness”.
That savage criticism emboldened Conservative and Reform UK MPs and Tory peers at Westminster to attempt to kill the Chagos legislation, which is currently holed below the waterline in the House of Lords.
A few days after the president’s “stupidity” claim, Kemi Badenoch taunted Sir Keir Starmer at PMQs: “We didn’t need President Trump to tell us that. We’ve been saying that for 12 months.”
The president began his statement by claiming he’d had “very productive discussions” with Sir Keir. We know they had a phone call and discussed Diego Garcia on Tuesday.
Read more:
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The prime minister was said to have offered him extra security guarantees and there was another phone call on Thursday before the president’s Truth Social post.
The Chagos deal proposes the UK transferring sovereignty of the islands whilst leasing back a joint UK-US military base on the largest island, Diego Garcia, for an initial 99 years.
But the president’s statement is by no means all good news for the prime minister. There was also a pretty intimidating warning that if anything goes wrong the Americans will flex their mighty military muscles.
“If the lease deal, some time in the future, ever falls apart, or anyone threatens or endangers US operations and forces at our base, I retain the right to militarily secure and reinforce the American presence in Diego Garcia.”
This is, after all, a president who wants to seize Greenland for the United States and even make Canada the 51st US state. Don’t forget, he called Canadian prime minister Mark Carney “Governor Carney”.
The president concluded his Truth Social statement: “Let it be known that I will never allow our presence on a base as important as this to ever be undermined or threatened by fake claims or environmental nonsense.”
That’s a reference to the fact that Diego Garcia is a bird sanctuary for endangered species, including the splendidly named “red-footed boobies”, as well as rare turtles and coral reefs.
But back at Westminster, the battle over Chagos is far from over. Dame Priti Patel MP, the shadow foreign secretary, reacted: “Keir Starmer and Peter Mandelson’s shameful Chagos surrender remains an absolutely terrible deal for Britain.
“The Conservative Party’s view is unchanged. We have led the fight against this appalling surrender and we will continue fighting it to the end.”
There’s also the possibility – and risk for Sir Keir – that the president may change his mind on Chagos yet again. After all, he backed the deal at first, then changed his mind and said it was “an act of great stupidity”.
So the PM might as well be grateful for now and hope for the best.
After all, while the president’s latest Chagos statement may not be brilliant news, it’s the only bit of decent news Sir Keir has had in a dreadful week.
