A pachyderm squats in the corner regarding Keir Starmer’s ever-more-expensive quest to surrender the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.

All on the Right – and an increasing number on the Left, up to and including his Cabinet – agree that the Prime Minister’s putative deal is rotten. All power to Yuan Yi Zhu for popularising the historical and legal weakness of the Mauritian claims. Starmer forfeiting British territory to make his legal chums feel warm inside would be ludicrous enough, Yankee base or no Yankee base.

But a hated Prime Minister spaffing the pocket money that his Chancellor confiscated from the nation’s grannies to double the GDP of a Chinese puppet state is so baroque that it’s hard to believe we aren’t living a Telegraph leader writer’s fever dream. Jonathan Powell must have kompromat on Starmer of which Guido could only dream. Only four and a half years to go now, babe. 

The focus is now on Washington, as Powell desperately lobbies Team Trump not to hurt the feelings of Phillipe Sands KC. But this lays bare where the power lies. As ever, Christopher Montgomery has already put far better than I could. Nothing “quite says sovereignty like not being able to surrender when and what you want”. The Chagos Islands are “BTINO: British territory in name only”.

In instinctive agreement with his Attorney General regarding the evils of British imperialism, the Prime Minister must take pride in one-upping Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, and Tony Blair in finally completing Britain’s flight from the Eastern Hemisphere. But with his fealty to international law, Starmer frames this capitulation as Britain’s best route to preserving the American base.

We will not give up the islands if Trump say we can’t. The Chagossians now all live in Crawley because we expelled them fifty years ago to make room for a bombing facility, nicknamed the “Footprint of Freedom” by the US Navy. We hold on to Diego Garcia et al so that our Atlantic cousins can use it to have their apocalyptic crack at the Chinese at some point in the next decade.

In short, we have these islands not because we want them – they are not the Falklands or Gibraltar, don’t be silly – but because it makes the lives of the State and Defence departments easier if they are de jure under British sovereignty and de facto American. Why don’t we end this fiction? We know the new President foresees an America stretching to Greenland and the Gaza Riviera.

So why don’t we gift him the Chagos Islands? When Starmer goes over to visit the White House, he can take a scale model, wrapped with a big red, white, and blue bow. The Panamanians are obstreperous. The Canadians don’t want to be the 51^st state. The Danes are threatening a NATO civil war. But Britain? Trump doesn’t even have to ask, and we oblige.

Doing so would produce quite a domestic reaction. Alistair Campbell would accuse a Labour Prime Minister of being the poodle of a Republican President, as the Left denounced Starmer for abandoning the noble cause of decolonisation for appeasing Evil Orange Man. The Right would be torn between patriotic laments for the loss of British pebbles and their deep ardour for the Donald.

But giving away the islands to the Americans makes sense. Starmer seems to have impressed the President with his obsequiousness, raising the hope that our stuttering economy will escape his capriciousness. Providing Trump with an Indian Ocean outpost would be an even more obvious act of fealty. Dealing with Mauritian lawfare would become Marco Rubio’s problem.

The islands go to the country that really wants them. We no longer would have to pretend to get hot and bothered about them. Apologies to Yi Zhu, but as soon as the islands were no longer useful for raising eyebrows at James Cleverly, I lost all interest. I have no patriotic feelings for a small archipelago housing someone else’s military base. They don’t even have any penguins!

Such a bracing triumph for realism has no hope of succeeding under a government with as few brain cells to rub together as this. But even airing that suggestion feels like a triumph. I agree with the Mauritians: Britain possessing islands in the Indian Ocean, in the year of our Lord 2025, is an absurdity, a hangover of a worldview that we should have abandoned long ago. I have.

I once believed in ‘Global Britain’. I thought, in my childish naivete, that there was something called the liberal international order, and that we had the will and means to champion it. I became a great admirer of the United States and read my Rudyard Kipling. Brexit was a chance for Britain to get out and into the world, preferably to colonise it. That’s what I took from Paul Collier.

A decade and a half after Afghanistan and Iraq, teenage William Atkinson went around calling himself a neoconservative. I was a Whig, not a Tory, shackled for electoral purposes to a Conservative Party that fitfully showed an interest in my agenda of strident interventionism abroad, complete free trade, and a bracingly Victorian approach to the welfare state. I loved Standpoint.

Admitting that now feels a tad embarrassing. I still wish I could find my copy of Neoconservatism: Why we need it for Douglas Murray to sign. But just as my Ronald Reagan posters came down as soon as I had a girl to bring home, so too has my view on Britain’s role shifted when confronted with realities. The unipolar moment is over; history has come roaring back.

A world order of free trade and benign American hegemony is dead. Even before Covid, Ukraine, or Trump 2.0, Chinese and Russian revanchism showed the folly of my Occidental triumphalism. I no longer look at the Middle East’s smouldering ruins and argue real neoimperialism hasn’t been tried. Unlike Lord Hermer, I could see my worldview was a smug and hollow fantasy.

Even more important than the darkening international vista for killing my Whiggery was my rude awakening to our domestic inadequacies. Coming of age in the shadow of repeated once-in-a-century elite failures – the financial crisis, stagnation, Brexit, Covid, the Boriswave, Don’t Scare the Hare, and so on – cured me of my delusions as to how viable unchaining Britannia was.

Credit is due to Jack Lopresti. His generation of the Right came of age in the shadow of the Falklands War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Gulf War One. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they can’t shake their faith in either Western righteousness or Britain’s global importance. Claims of punching about our weight still makes them misty-eyed, rather than reach for the bucket.

Their enthusiasm for Ukraine manifested that confidence – a chance to stand up to the Russkies history had denied them. In going to fight, Lopresti has taken his commitment to a logical conclusion that Boris Johnson has never managed. But as that war draws towards an end that it wasn’t hard to foresee, we see the cost of shouting loudly, carrying a small stick, and giving half to Kyiv.

Just as the Brave New Right embraces a weltgeist those approaching late middle age might consider cask strength, so too can we embrace a realism about Britain’s diminished international position that would leave the armchair generals spluttering. Rather than navel gaze about 2.5 per cent, why don’t we trim our aims to military, geographic, and economic realities? It’s easy if you try. 

The Ministry of Defence is structurally bankrupt, wildly overstretched, and institutionally chaotic. It has been asked to prepare for a war over Taiwan with a navy half laid up with a lack of crew. Our nuclear deterrent is a costly exercise in willy-waving that by existing on Washington’s sufferance and continually misfiring is far too on the nose as a metaphor for our diminished position.

Gifting the Chagos Islands to Washington can be considered a goodbye present – the flowers handed to an ex as you finally make the difficult choice to leave. Seven decades as the Scrappy Doo to their Scooby has brought us far less than we might have hoped for and encouraged us to play a larger international role than our economy or political class are willing to sustain.

This could be the beginning of a questioning of all our pre-existing assumptions. What is the point of NATO in the 21^st century? Can we live with Russian control of the cabbage patches of the Donbas? Why should a single British life be lost fighting over faraway semiconductors of which we know nothing? Why should we pretend, want, or need to be a global power?

Time for the Guilty Men of the Foreign Office to be retired. The coming generation want little but peace, security, and bread. Shutter our consulates, bring our troops home, and let the Ferrero Rocher melt. Yesterday’s pomp is one with Nineveh and Tyre, and we should be glad. We had our time in the sun. Now to batten the hatches against the coming storm.

All those looking for jobs after the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence are emptied can go and be employed in a push for national self-sufficiency. Our armed forces will be reduced to serving core national interests: defending our islands, protecting our Atlantic seaways, staffing royal pageants, and so on. Pace Elon Musk, new departments will be built to manage them.

A fantasy? Of course. But a self-interested one. As disillusioned with politics as three years covering the death spasms of the Conservative Party has made me, I remain sufficiently patriotic that if a future government sees fit to send me to be sunk for King and Country at the bottom of the Malacca Strait, I would oblige. But I wouldn’t be happy about it.

So consider this an entreaty: a plea that Britain becomes far more realistic about our obligations, inadequacies, and vassalage to Washington before it is too late. We should hand over the Chagos Islands, and quit the stage. Trump’s return should wake Starmer up to the need to retreat from the American Empire before the world order it was said to enforce is buried for good.

Our isolation will be splendid.

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This article (Starmer should gift the Chagos Islands to Trump, and end our grand delusion of ‘Global Britain’) was created and published by Conservative Home and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author William Atkinson