Trump Calls Chagos Deal 'Terrible'; Burnham Agrees to Look Again
The first meeting overran its thirty minutes and produced the papers’ unanimous lead: “I don’t support it. I think it’s terrible. It was a terrible deal… I think the prime minister is going to be looking at it,” Mr Trump said of the Diego Garcia lease-back — “Yep,” Mr Burnham replied. The Prime Minister later said Britain would “work to find that resolution between the different sides”; on the Falklands he told the president: “We will stand firm in the face of any threats.” Relations, said Mr Trump, are “more up now than they were with your last prime minister”.
The readout tells you what was traded: Hormuz, migration (“summer small boat crossings were at the lowest in six years”), Ukraine, Jimmy Lai — and Chagos, where Downing Street’s formula, “committed to working with all parties to find a solution”, converts a deal paused since April into one formally reopened, with Nigel Farage declaring it “dead” before the delegations had left the room. £101m a year for a base America uses more than Britain does was always the deal’s vulnerability; a president who dislikes it and a Prime Minister who inherited it now share an incentive to redraw it, and Mauritius has none. The warmth was real — “the top end of our expectations”, said one British official — but the readout’s silence on the AI partnership announced hours later shows what the White House chose not to co-own. Watch for Mauritius’s response and a Commons statement when the House returns on 12 October.