As Sir Keir Starmer – armed with a commitment to increase the UK’s defence spending – travels to Washington today for his first face-to-face meeting with Donald Trump, a question on a particular detail of that policy remains unanswered.

Will the promised boost in defence spending include any future payments to Mauritius as part of the Labour government’s proposed Chagos Islands deal, given that intelligence and security service spending will now be included in the defence budget?

At Prime Minister’s Questions this afternoon, Sir Keir Starmer was asked three times by Opposition leader Kemi Badenoch and Conservative backbencher Dr Kieran Mullan to provide clarity on the Chagos deal and how it would be paid for. The Prime Minister refused to provide a clear answer or rule out that it would be paid for by the announced increase in the defence budget, only promising that “when the deal is complete I will put it before the House with the costings”.

A Downing Street spokesperson later confirmed that the details of the Chagos deal will only be revealed “when it’s finalised”, apparently confirming the Opposition’s fear that the deal will likely be presented to Parliament as a fait accompli.

When Waste Watch last explored the reported cost of the deal to British taxpayers in December, it was expected to be somewhere around £2 billion, which is a good few millions short of the £1.7 billion the Education Secretary is hoping to raise from imposing VAT on private schools.

Just two short months later, there is reason to suspect that the amount being discussed now as payment for the archipelago has more than quadrupled, with senior politicians in Mauritius discussing £9 billion to be a “fair” price as “reparations” (which is the exact word openly used by UN experts in press releases as well as the human rights lobby), with experts warning that the eventual sum paid over 99-years could be over £50 billion pounds given that the proposed deal is linked to inflation.

Foreign Office not only refuses to reveal the figure it is proposing to hand over to Mauritius along with the Chagos Islands, it continues to block all attempts to reveal the cost of the talks, such as staffing, legal counsel, travel and accommodation, claiming it would “exceed reasonable costs” to calculate “an aggregation of those costs”.

It has become an all too familiar feature of the British state that the only occasion when it feels any responsibility towards taxpayers’ money appears to be when it is spent in the pursuit of transparency and accountability.

If there were ever any doubt that this proposed surrender of the British Indian Ocean Territory is driven by anything but a quasi-religious zeal of the Foreign Office and the Labour administration to “decolonise” at the risk of bankrupting the nation, a report published by Policy Exchange last week puts it to rest.

Authored by experts in international law and national security, the report finds that not one of the series of rationales set out by the Government for the proposed surrender of our territory “stand up to scrutiny”.

The outlandish claim, for example, “that the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a UN agency, could decide that Mauritius is sovereign over the Chagos Islands and then proceed to deprive the UK and the US of the use of the radio spectrum associated with the islands” is baseless.

“The ITU has no power to stop anyone from transmitting anything”, Yuan Yi Zhu, a senior fellow at Policy Exchange and a principal author of the report tells me.

But the following excerpt, which I feel is worth including in full, illustrates the most worrying finding of the report. It diagnoses a culture of activism at the heart of our most senior institutions which are entrusted with the defence of our national interest and security.

“The Government’s apparent fear of a binding judgment is indicative of its deeply troubling approach toward assessing legal risk in an international law context. Under guidelines proclaimed by the Attorney General, Lord Hermer KC, government lawyers are directed to give advice on the assumption that there is an international court capable of issuing a binding ruling even when no such court exists. There are strong reasons to think that this misconceived approach forms the basis on which the Government decided to agree to the deal to cede the Islands to Mauritius.”

In other words, the only interest this deal would serve is that of those who wish to establish the political supremacy of international law over Westminster and would achieve this, de facto, by voluntarily accepting this advisory opinion and setting a precedent.

Finally, another claim put forward by the Government in support of its deal was that it enjoyed the support of the US. With Donald Trump now back in the White House, this is emphatically no longer the case, with Marco Rubio, the new Secretary of State, challenging David Lammy over the deal during their first phone call.

Experts at Washington believe there is every chance that Donald Trump will view the deal as a threat to the long-term security of our joint military base, Diego Garcia, in the Chagos Islands. The deal may also be considered a strategic win for China with which Mauritius has developed strong bilateral relations. Lastly, the talk of reparations could raise a red flag for Washington with the proposed handover seeming like a “woke win” very much in line with the values of the Biden-Harris administration.

Nile Gardiner, a transatlantic policy expert with intimate knowledge of the Trump administration, tells me “if President Trump weighs in, it’s game over for Labour’s deal.”

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