London is going back to the negotiating table over its plan to hand the Chagos Islands back to Mauritius, Defence Secretary Wes Streeting confirmed on Wednesday. The move follows a blunt intervention by US President Donald Trump, who told Prime Minister Andy Burnham in person that the current arrangement was a “terrible deal”.
Burnham met Trump on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday. With the British leader seated beside him, Trump said he expected the UK to reconsider the agreement. Burnham nodded and replied “yep”. Speaking to reporters afterwards, Burnham said Britain would “work hard” to resolve the issue and that he was “confident we can find it working with our US partners”.
Streeting told the BBC that Trump’s objections were “not news to us”, but that the president’s latest remarks “provide absolute clarity that his position on this Chagos deal as currently drafted is not changing”. He added: “So we have to do more work with our American allies, with President Trump and his administration, to get the deal to a place where we can support it.”
Payments suspended
Streeting also confirmed that Britain would not, “at this stage”, make the annual payments of at least £120 million (€139 million) it had agreed to pay Mauritius to lease back the military base on Diego Garcia. The suspension is a significant shift from the terms negotiated under Burnham’s predecessor, Keir Starmer.
The deal, struck last year, would return the Indian Ocean archipelago to Mauritius, a former British colony. Britain would then lease the strategically important US-UK base on Diego Garcia for 99 years, with an option to extend. London announced in April that the plans were on hold, but this is the first time the lease payments have been formally paused.
Trump initially backed the pact but later turned against it, calling it “an act of great stupidity”. His administration has opposed the deal for months, and the issue has become a point of friction in transatlantic relations. The president’s latest comments came during his first face-to-face meeting with Burnham, who took office in July.
Starmer had defended the agreement by arguing that international legal rulings cast doubt on Britain’s claim to the islands, and that only a deal with Mauritius could secure continued US and UK use of the base. Britain retained the Chagos Islands when Mauritius became independent in the 1960s, and forcibly removed thousands of islanders, who have since pursued compensation claims in British courts. In 2019, the International Court of Justice concluded that Britain unlawfully separated Chagos from Mauritius when ending colonial rule.
Conservatives call for scrapping
James Cartlidge, defence spokesman for the opposition Conservatives, said the agreement “should be binned entirely”. Streeting rejected that approach, telling Times Radio: “The ostrich strategy of sticking our heads in the sand and hoping it (will) go away ... is not a wise strategy when it concerns one of the most sensitive national security assets we have anywhere in the world.”
Jack Pannell, a senior researcher at the British Foreign Policy Group think-tank, told AFP that Burnham’s focus with Trump would be on “the big international issues”, such as AI regulation, Ukraine and the Middle East. “Success for Burnham means avoiding this issue becoming a millstone around his neck while he pursues his other foreign policy priorities and focuses on his domestic agenda,” Pannell said. “The chances of a breakthrough on this issue are slim, and that may suit the prime minister just fine.”
The Chagos dispute has long been a sensitive topic in British politics, and the new government’s handling of it will be watched closely in Paris, Berlin and other European capitals, where the fate of overseas territories and the rules-based international order are of keen interest. The suspension of payments also raises questions about the financial arrangements that were meant to compensate Mauritius for the continued use of the base.
For now, London appears to be buying time, hoping to craft a version of the deal that Washington can accept without alienating Mauritius or undermining the international legal arguments that prompted the original agreement. Whether that is possible remains unclear, but the pressure from the White House is unlikely to ease anytime soon.
