“The U.S. supports the deal and the president explicitly recognized its strength last year,” Starmer’s spokesperson told reporters at a lunchtime briefing.
Under pressure
Starmer’s decision to pass sovereignty of the islands to Mauritius has been strongly opposed by politicians on the U.K. right, although the administration believed it had squared the arrangement — which is undergoing its final round of scrutiny in the British House of Lords — with the United States.
Nigel Farage, leader of the poll-topping Reform UK, who has been critical of Trump’s Greenland ambitions, applauded the U.S. president’s Chagos intervention.
“Thank goodness Trump has vetoed the surrender of the Chagos islands,” Farage, an ally of Trump, said in an X post on Tuesday. “The Americans have woken up to the fact that they were lied to. They were told that the UK had no choice but to surrender the Chagos Islands. This was simply not true, and now they are angry with us,” Farage added.
“President Trump is right,” Kemi Badenoch, leader of the center-right Conservative Party, who has also criticized Trump’s Greenland stance, said.
Under the arrangement, struck after months of negotiations, the Diego Garcia military base will remain under U.K. and U.S. control for the next 99 years. The Mauritian government has long claimed it was forced to give up the islands for its own independence from Britain in 1968, and will receive payments from the U.K. for the new set-up.