Sir Keir Starmer has in recent months shown he’s no stranger to changing his mind.
From farmers’ inheritance tax to welfare reform, U-turns have become central to this Labour government, much to the frustration of Sir Keir’s backbenchers.
But none of the prime minister’s backtracking has been so abrupt and so unexpected as Donald Trump’s conclusion that the UK’s deal to give away the Chagos Islands, with the crucial Diego Garcia airbase, to Mauritius was an “act of great stupidity”, which will have stunned Downing Street this morning.
Not least because less than a year ago, after Sir Keir’s team had painstakingly explained the plan to secure the future of the islands, the president was very much onboard.
In fact, I was there in the Oval Office in February last year for that first meeting between Starmer and Trump.
Shortly after Sir Keir handed over that invitation to Trump from the King for a historic second state visit, the US president took a question from a reporter on the controversial plan to hand over Chagos to Mauritius.
Trump was expected to be sceptical, or even veto the plan, which was vital for both the UK and US because of the Diego Garcia airbase on the islands.
Instead, the president said: “I have a feeling it is going to work out very well. I think we will be inclined to go along with your country.”
This was despite being lobbied by Nigel Farage and others to veto the deal, and the then foreign secretary David Lammy suggesting that if Trump opposed it, they would not go ahead with the handover.
The Chagos Islands have been at the centre of an international diplomatic row (CPA Media Pte Ltd/Alamy/PA)
So that statement, backed up later by a formal agreement from secretary of state Marco Rubio in May, is what paved the way for Sir Keir to get the Chagos deal done.
Not much has changed since. True to say, the cost of more than £30bn to the UK taxpayer (not US one), issues around the fate of Chagossians, the treaty being bogged down still in parliament, and questions over nuclear weapons on the islands have all emerged, but most of these were issues back then.
So why has Trump U-turned so spectacularly?
The Independent knows that opponents of the deal have not given up lobbying and begging the US president to intervene and stop it. It seems that their message may have got through after all.
But is that really enough for the president to effectively admit he was wrong last year?
The more likely explanation is Greenland. Trump now understands that the same international law logic used that the islands belong to Mauritius applies to Denmark’s ownership of Greenland. And, as we have seen with his bellicose language and tariff threats, he really wants the US to take control of the Danish territory.
Arguments by the Labour government that it has no choice under international law but to hand over the islands will not wash with this White House administration and actually may just fuel the Greenland grievance more.
Starmer may no longer be the ‘Trump whisperer’ – and that’s bad news (PA)
But there is perhaps a wider issue here. Sir Keir has made a name among international leaders as “the Trump whisperer”.
He got the US president to agree on a range of things, including a better trade deal than the one given to the EU as well as Chagos. But this latest development perhaps shows that the relationship between two men who are ideologically far apart is deteriorating.
If Starmer’s ability to influence the capricious US president is waning, then that really is bad news. His foreign policy generally is to act as the bridge between the US and Europe, but if that is removed, it leaves Britain greatly weakened.
Starmer had kept Trump sweet with last year’s state visit, but it seems not even the prospect of a reciprocal visit to the US by King Charles is enough to tempt the US president to be a reasonable man.
The prime minister won some plaudits yesterday at his emergency press conference standing up to Trump for a fellow Nato ally, Denmark. But Trump, not a man who easily forgives, has clearly seen that as a betrayal and his remarks on Chagos are a new front in what is increasingly spiralling into a hostile relationship.
