Starmer deserves his humiliation over the giveaway of Chagos

It is a deal so bad that only Keir Starmer could have negotiated it. With the assistance of the brightest and best of the UK Foreign Office, the Labour government agreed to an arrangement that would hand over territory containing an Anglo-American military base to an unfriendly country, condemn its former inhabitants to permanent exile, and pay tens of billions of pounds for the pleasure.

I’m talking, of course, about Chagos (officially, the British Indian Ocean Territory), which has briefly caught the attention of the world’s most powerful man. This morning, amid a flurry of Truth Social posts about his designs on Greenland, US president Donald Trump’s gaze briefly alighted on this small, tropical archipelago on the other side of the planet. And he did not hold back in his criticism of Britain’s plans: ‘Shockingly, our “brilliant” NATO Ally, the United Kingdom, is currently planning to give away the Island of Diego Garcia [the largest of the Chagos Islands], the site of a vital US Military Base, to Mauritius, and to do so FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER’, he wrote. ‘The UK giving away extremely important land is an act of GREAT STUPIDITY.’

Trump’s reaction has widely been described as a major about-turn. But, in truth, his team has veered all over the place on the Chagos question. In October 2024, when Starmer initially agreed to hand over the islands, Marco Rubio, then still a US senator for Florida, reportedly warned that this would allow ‘Communist China’ to spy on the US Navy, given Mauritius’s alliance with China. Yet in February 2025, when Starmer visited the Oval Office, the US president said he was ‘inclined to go along with’ the UK’s proposals. And by May, when the deal was signed between the British and Mauritian governments, Rubio, by now US secretary of state, welcomed it. He claimed that Trump himself had ‘expressed his support for this monumental achievement’, hailing the deal that would cede sovereignty to Mauritius, while Diego Garcia would be leased to Britain for the next 99 years.

Of course, Trump’s motivation for bashing Starmer’s deal now has little to do with the Chagos Islands themselves. The real prize for the US president is in a different hemisphere entirely, as he freely admits. In a bizarre non-sequitur, the US president’s Truth Social post goes on to say that the Chagos deal is ‘another in a very long line of reasons why Greenland has to be acquired’ by the US. This smackdown over Chagos, this attempt to humiliate Starmer and Britain on the global stage, is clearly part of Trump’s broader pressure campaign against the European powers, in his bid to seize Greenland for the US.

Nevertheless, it really should not have taken Trump’s intervention to put the brakes on the dreadful Chagos deal. Whichever way you spin it, this arrangement has never been in Britain’s national interest, nor the interests of the Chagossians who call the islands their home. It poses a risk to Western security interests, handing sovereignty over a territory, where almost 400 UK and US troops and 2,000 contractors are based, to a country that’s allied to China. The cost of leasing back Diego Garcia from Mauritius is also eye-watering. Although the Labour government tried to present the cost as just £3.4 billion, the true figure is believed to be 10 times as much, at around £34.7 billion.

So what on Earth possessed Starmer to sign up to such a risible deal? What leverage was a tiny island like Mauritius able to gain over Britain?

Starmer’s eagerness to give away the territory stems in part from his government’s undue reverence for ‘international law’. In 2019, the International Court of Justice said that the Chagos Islands should be given to Mauritius. But this was not a legally binding ruling. The UK had no legal obligation to respond – or ‘no reason whatsoever’ to act, as Trump correctly puts it. Yet this is a Labour government that, as attorney general Lord Hermer has repeatedly insisted, puts international law at ‘the heart’ of its foreign policy. It wants to go over and above what the law actually says. Even, it seems, when this conflicts with the national interest, common sense or moral principles.

More misguided still have been Starmer’s attempts to present his capitulation as a blow for decolonisation. In October 2024, he announced the deal as a means of ‘addressing wrongs of the past’, referring to the British Empire taking control of the islands back in 1814. Yet in handing sovereignty to Mauritius, he is merely trading its ownership from one colonial master to what would essentially be another.

Worse, this has been done over the heads of the Chagossian people themselves, who have never been consulted on what should happen to their homeland. In the 1960s, around 2,000 islanders were cruelly deported by the British to make way for the US-UK military base. Many initially lived in Mauritius, but were treated so terribly there they sought new lives elsewhere, including in the UK. Any hopes of them returning have been dashed. Not least since many of them support the UK’s continued sovereignty of the islands – a view that is criminalised by Mauritius, with imprisonment of up to 10 years. That is a strange form of ‘liberation’.

The Chagos deal is an act of wilful self-sabotage. It is bad for British interests, dangerous for Western security and it throws the Chagossians under the bus for good measure. It should have been scrapped long before Trump’s rantings on Truth Social.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.