Can Keir Starmer save the Chagos deal?

Keir Starmer’s painstakingly thrashed out plan to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius is facing renewed challenge.

Donald Trump originally backed the deal, under which the UK would relinquish sovereignty of the archipelago in return for a 99-year lease on the crucial US-UK Diego Garcia military base. But he began to waver after intense lobbying from US and UK politicians, including Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch. And now, perhaps irked by the UK’s refusal to allow him to use the British base there to launch potential attacks on Iran, he’s said the deal would be “a big mistake”.

UK opponents of the deal are now “increasingly optimistic they can block” Parliament from voting it into law and “force Starmer into a U-turn”, said The i Paper’s deputy political editor Arj Singh.

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What did the commentators say?

The amount of time, effort and political capital Labour has spent over this deal may seem “odd”, said former Foreign Office special adviser Ben Judah in The Sunday Times but “it was not human rights waffle or some misguided fantasy about pleasing the global south that brought us to this point”. Following a 2019 International Court of Justice “advisory opinion” against continued British ownership of Chagos, both the UK and US risked losing access to the strategically vital military base or, worse, it falling into the hands of China.

The problem for Starmer is that the “three-step logic” driving the deal “cannot be expressed in a Tweet, or by a government spokesman, without causing diplomatic pain and embarrassment”. This means the deal is open to attack “from all sides for what it is not”: “woke” lawyer activism, “a misguided soft power exercise drawn up by brain-dead diplomats, even treason”. Actually, it is “a piece of Realpolitik firmly grounded in geopolitical trade-offs”.

Despite his latest salvo on Truth Social, Trump “hasn’t explicitly stated whether he will veto the Chagos agreement”, said Kamlesh Bhuckory and Ellen Milligan on Bloomberg. “The UK government is looking into whether he has the power to do so”, aware that former Tory leader, Iain Duncan Smith, a vocal critic of the deal, has said it will fail without US support.

Mauritius, for its part, has accused a group of Chagossians, who have “settled” on a remote island in the archipelago, of staging a publicity stunt to scupper the deal. There are also reports that Mauritius “may launch legal action for compensation” if the treaty is cancelled, said The Telegraph’s editorial board. This only shows that “the financial aspect of this deal is far more important to Mauritius than the spurious claim to sovereignty under international law”. Trump’s “new-found antipathy” has offered Starmer “a way out of the hole he has dug for himself. He needs to take it.”

What next?

Starmer “has to get the treaty ratified before May or it fails”, said David Maddox in The Independent. The government has pulled plans for a vote in the House of Lords on Tuesday but there is still “some small hope” for the PM with signs that Liberal Democrat peers may abstain when the vote returns in early March. Even then, it still has to return to the House of Commons for final ratification.

Whatever brickbats have been thrown his way, Starmer has been praised for “his international statesmanship” but “now the Chagos nightmare suggests even that is unravelling for this ill-fated PM”.