Many Donald Trump observers have developed two lists. The first is the spectacular successes: stopping illegal immigration; opposing the climate cult; strong backing for Israel; stalling Iran’s nuclear ambitions; pressuring Europe into getting serious about defence; and withdrawing support from the leftist, anti-West UN.

Then there are his actions which have perplexed even his instinctive supporters: talk of Canada becoming the 51st state blowing the chance to defeat the Trudeauites; his reluctance to get tough with Putin; telling protesting Iranians that ‘help is on its way’; and his obsession with owning Greenland.

Trump has now added an important new entry into the first half of the ledger by torpedoing the Starmer government’s bonkers plan to hand sovereignty over the strategically vital US-UK base at Diego Garcia to China-friendly Mauritius, rightly describing it as ‘an act of stupidity’.

Short of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, it’s hard to think of a more insane act by a world power than Starmer’s Chagos surrender plan. It’s especially troubling given it was dreamt up by our supposedly wise old ally, Britain. It reveals Starmer as deeply flawed, preoccupied by post-colonial guilt rather than the defence of Western security.

In 2019, the UN’s International Court of Justice – including Chinese and Russian judges – ruled that when Britain granted Mauritius independence in 1965, its failure to include in its territory the Chagos Islands, established in 1968 as the British Indian Ocean Territory (which includes Diego Garcia), was illegal. Its ‘advisory opinion’, backed by the UN General Assembly, was that Britain should ‘rapidly’ surrender them. This was despite the fact Mauritius accepted financial compensation from Britain for renouncing any claim to the islands. Ceded to Britain by France in 1814, they had always been a separate territory, with no common ethnicity with or history of rule by Mauritius – 2,000 kilometres away – and were included in the colony of Mauritius only for reasons of administrative convenience.

In a rare display of conservatism during the Tories’ recent fourteen years in government, they told the UN to sod off with its Chagos demands. But after Starmer won government he had no higher priority than to surrender the islands. His deal involved transferring them to Mauritius plus an astonishing £34 billion from the defence budget over 99 years to lease back Diego Garcia. Labour claimed that to maintain sovereignty over the Chagos Islands in the light of the UN rulings would not only catastrophically damage Britain’s reputation in the ‘global south’, but could somehow threaten the Diego Garcia base’s future. The real reason was that Starmer and his circle of fellow human rights lawyers, enthusiastically supported by the Foreign Office, feel embarrassed about Britain’s remnants of empire. An anonymous Number 10 advisor described the Chagos deal as ‘mad Corbyn shit’. So strong was Starmer’s obsession with surrendering the territory that he ignored what would normally be deal-breakers for progressives – the rights of the indigenous Chagossians who don’t want to be ruled by Mauritius, and the fact that Mauritius can’t be trusted to protect the territory’s pristine 600,000 square kilometres and 58 islands.

Starmer’s plan was welcomed by the Biden Administration (and of course the Albanese government) even though Mauritius is within China’s orbit and is also a member of the African Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaty, whose fifty signatories could demand inspections of Diego Garcia – regularly used by US nuclear-capable forces over the past half-century – if any suspected that nuclear weapons were present. Moreover, the deal requires Britain to inform Mauritius after any use of Diego Garcia to attack third parties, which would obviously compromise operational secrecy.

Despite strong expectations that incoming President Trump would reverse Biden’s acceptance of the deal, he surprisingly appeared relaxed about it in his White House meeting with Starmer in early 2025. A UK-Mauritius treaty confirming the handover was signed a few months later, an event welcomed by Secretary of State Rubio. But, oddly, Britain did nothing about the 1966 UK-US Diego Garcia treaty, Article 1 of which states that the base ‘shall remain under United Kingdom sovereignty’. Unchanged, Starmer’s Chagos deal cannot proceed.

Why has it taken a year for Trump’s opposition to Chagos to emerge? Cynics speculate that until his second state visit to the UK last September, he didn’t want to rock the boat with Starmer. Since then, it’s been striking that Trump’s honeyed niceness about Starmer (a ‘highly respected man’ doing ‘a very good job’ with ‘a beautiful accent’) has evaporated. Instead, his administration now generates a steady stream of criticism about Britain, especially on abuses of freedom of speech, its refusal to exploit its own energy resources and softness on China. Reform UK and Tory politicians have worked hard supporting senior US security establishment figures to turn Trump against the Chagos deal. It wouldn’t be hard to trigger his consternation about not just giving away prime real estate, but paying a fortune to do so.

Starmer is torn between trying to prove he still has a positive relationship with Trump and appeasing his party’s left which wants him to display contempt for the President. Despite numerous U-turns on other issues, Starmer seems particularly desperate not to admit defeat on Chagos and, at the time of writing, is still, astonishingly, playing with fire by refusing to accept that Trump’s statement accurately represents US policy – even though his government made clear the deal wouldn’t go ahead unless Trump was happy with it. The grim reality is expected to dawn soon with the State Department formalising US opposition to the Chagos deal.

This will be a major humiliation for Starmer. He will try to patch up relations including through the King’s planned visit in April. But the Trump administration, furious with what it now sees as Starmer’s weakness and dishonesty over Chagos, has lost trust in Britain.

The Chagos fiasco is only one of the headwinds Starmer’s unloved government is facing. Haemorrhaging support to both Farage’s Reform UK and the Greens, Starmer faces ominous approaching elections – at least in those places where he hasn’t managed to cancel them. Leftist vultures circle.  But whoever takes over, expect three more years of woke-green broken Britain, with the added disaster of the Anglo-US special relationship in deep disrepair.