Sir Keir Starmer is attempting to “rush through” the controversial Chagos Islands treaty before Donald Trump takes office as US president on January 20, amid fears the deal could collapse.
The Prime Minister is said to have dispatched his national security adviser Jonathan Powell to Washington in a last-ditch effort to salvage the agreement to hand the islands to Mauritius.
Multiple sources close to policy discussions have told The Telegraph that the UK is racing to convert the initial agreement into a signed legal text before Trump’s inauguration.
The urgency comes as senior Republicans and Trump allies have expressed strong opposition to the deal, citing concerns over China’s influence in the region.
Starmer is attempting to rush through the deal
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Marco Rubio, Trump’s pick for secretary of state, has warned the agreement poses “a serious threat” to US national security by ceding the islands to a country allied with China.
Mauritius’s new Prime Minister Navinchandra Ramgoolam is committed to completing negotiations over Chagos in a private letter he sent to Starmer in the last fortnight, reports The Telegraph. The correspondence was a response to the Prime Minister’s initial letter of congratulations on election victory.
Powell held talks with Ramgoolam earlier this week. He is also expected to fly out to America shortly to attempt to convince figures close to Trump to stick with the deal.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage told MPs that Trump’s team views the agreement with “outright hostility”, noting that a senior Trump adviser described Diego Garcia as “the most important island on the planet as far as America was concerned.”
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Nigel Farage said Trump views the deal with ‘hostility’
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The Pentagon has been asked by Trump’s transition team to provide legal advice on the agreement. However, Foreign Secretary David Lammy has dismissed growing criticism of the deal as “politicking” before elections.
“I’m very, very confident that this is a deal that the Mauritians will see, in a cross-party sense, as a good deal for them,” Lammy told MPs on the Commons foreign affairs committee.
He insisted the agreement had broad US support: “The agencies in the United States think this is a good deal. The State Department thinks this is a good deal and most important of all, the Pentagon and the White House think this is a good deal.”
When challenged about the Mauritian leader describing the agreement as “high treason”, Lammy responded: “Both you and I have said things during an election in order to get elected. He did not say that yesterday.”
Boris Johnson hit out at the deal
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Under the terms of the deal, the UK-US military presence on Diego Garcia is expected to run for 99 years with Britain paying an annual sum, though the costs have not been made public.
Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson has added his voice to critics, telling The Telegraph’s Ukraine podcast that giving up sovereignty of the Chagos Islands amounted to “spectacularly shooting ourselves in the foot”.
He described the deal as driven by “pure lefty politics” and “people who hate the historic legacy of imperial Britain”.
The Government maintains it had no choice but to negotiate the handover after the International Court of Justice ruled Britain’s administration of the territory was “unlawful” and must end.
