British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has for now withdrawn from Parliament an unfathomable bill to give the Chagos Islands to China-friendly Mauritius.
On one of the islands is an important military base used by the UK and the U.S., which Starmer wants to spend money leasing as a condition of the giveaway. U.S. President Donald Trump’s resort to emphatic social-media post as a means of conducting diplomacy seems to have again won the day (“Starmer pulls Chagos bill after Trump backlash; Plans to hand islands to Mauritius ‘cannot progress’ amid concerns over 1966 treaty between UK and US,” The Telegraph, January 23, 2026).
Sir Keir Starmer has been forced to pull his Chagos Islands bill in the wake of a US backlash over the deal.
The legislation was expected to be debated in the House of Lords on Monday, but was delayed on Friday night after the Conservatives warned it could violate a 60-year-old treaty with the US that enshrines British sovereignty over the archipelago.
Donald Trump turned against the Chagos deal earlier this week, saying that Britain’s plan to hand the Indian Ocean territory to Mauritius was “an act of great stupidity”.
Under the terms of Sir Keir’s deal, the UK would hand over the archipelago to Mauritius and lease back the Diego Garcia military base, a facility built there in the 1970s that has been used by UK and US forces….
Asked last night if Mr Trump would be willing to tear up the 1966 treaty and allow the transfer of Chagos to go ahead, the US state department referred back to the president’s criticism on Tuesday when he said: “The UK giving away extremely important land is an act of GREAT STUPIDITY.”
In his January 20 Truth Social post, Trump observed that China and Russia had doubtless “noticed this act of total weakness.” The UK’s plan to give away the Chagos Islands “is another in a very long line of National Security reasons why Greenland has to be acquired [by the United States]. Denmark and its European Allies have to DO THE RIGHT THING.” An enemy country that managed to conduct a successful covert operation to remove the shift key from Trump’s typewriter would do much to undermine U.S. foreign and domestic policy.
The Telegraph:
The legal significance of the old treaty and whether the new legislation would effectively override it was also unclear.
Much depends on whether Mr Trump’s position on the Chagos deal has genuinely changed or—as Sir Keir has claimed—that this was only being used to force a change in Britain’s Greenland stance.
If Downing Street tried to press ahead without Washington’s approval, it could face a bruising battle with the US state department….
The agreement struck in December 1966 between the UK and the US said the Chagos Islands “shall remain under United Kingdom sovereignty”.
The treaty, registered with the United Nations a year after the archipelago became British Indian Ocean Territory, was agreed as part of discussions around the use of Diego Garcia by the UK and US for defence purposes.
Starmer had already retreated by the time I last posted on this subject. My delinquency in neglecting to incorporate this development is nothing, however, compared to the U.S. president’s delinquency in neglecting to harass the Brits months earlier about this dumb deal. We can’t assume that the Starmer government’s plan to turn over the Chagos Islands has breathed its last breath. But making it happen will at least be tougher now.
