Keir Starmer’s nationwide safety adviser is to journey to Washington because the UK authorities tries to steer Donald Trump to not rip up the Chagos Islands settlement, the Guardian has realized.
Jonathan Powell, who negotiated the Chagos deal earlier this autumn, is drawing up plans to go to the US capital within the coming days, 4 authorities sources mentioned.
Powell, who labored for a decade as Tony Blair’s Downing Road chief of workers, is searching for early conferences with Trump’s crew forward of the president-elect’s inauguration on 20 January.
One senior supply mentioned the journey, which can contain different authorities figures, wouldn’t be narrowly targeted on the Chagos Islands however function a chance to introduce Starmer’s authorities to the incoming Trump administration.
UK ministers are involved that Trump will block the deal to cede management of the Chagos Islands, the place the US and UK have a joint navy base, to Mauritius. Diego Garcia, the island the place the bottom is situated, will stay beneath UK management for not less than the subsequent 99 years.
The settlement was struck by Powell final month after two years of negotiations, which had been initiated by Rishi Sunak’s authorities.
The US election end result has thrown the handover into query, nevertheless. Trump’s choose for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, warned in October that the settlement posed “a critical risk” to US nationwide safety by ceding the islands to a rustic allied with China.
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK chief, warned this month that Trump’s crew considered the cope with “outright hostility” and would attempt to problem it. “Diego Garcia was described to me by a senior Trump adviser as crucial island on the planet so far as America was involved,” Farage advised the Commons.
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Powell, who’s about to take up the nationwide safety adviser function, has been in Mauritius this week the place the federal government he negotiated with has suffered a landslide defeat amid a wiretapping scandal.
In Washington , he’ll search to steer Trump’s advisers that the deliberate handover secures the way forward for the Diego Garcia base.
UK ministers have insisted that uncertainty over the islands’ authorized standing threatened the bottom’s operation and that the deal had help from throughout the US safety system. Joe Biden’s administration has provided its public backing to it.
Stephen Doughty, the minister for North America, mentioned this month that Trump’s administration can be “briefed on the complete element of this deal” to “allay any issues”.
Though 11 rounds of negotiations for it had been held beneath the earlier authorities, a number of high Tories have attacked the settlement.
Priti Patel, the shadow international secretary, has mentioned it could “give away a key strategic asset” within the Indian Ocean. Tom Tugendhat, the shadow safety minister, has claimed it might result in China establishing its personal navy base within the Chagos Islands.
Mauritius has lengthy argued it was compelled to provide the Chagos Islands away in return for independence from Britain in 1968. About 2,000 individuals had been forcibly displaced from their properties within the Sixties and Seventies in what has been described as against the law in opposition to humanity and some of the shameful episodes of postwar colonialism.
5 years in the past the worldwide courtroom of justice issued an advisory opinion condemning the UK’s continued management over the Chagos Islands. David Lammy, the international secretary, has argued that with out a deal a binding judgment in opposition to the UK appeared inevitable, jeopardising the way forward for the bottom.
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