Well, we all know there's one thing Donald Trump can't stand, and that's being lied to.
Back in February of last year, when Trump had been in office for only a month, he and the Prime Minister of England, Sir Keir Starmer, met in person for the first time at the White House. The Chagos Island transfer, which also includes the island hosting our Indian Ocean 'unsinkable aircraft carrier', Diego Garcia, was broached by a reporter during the question-and-answer period. Trump gave what for him was a tentative approval to the outline of the handover scheme at the time.
Trump on the Chagos Islands deal February 2025:
— Haggis_UK 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 (@Haggis_UK) January 20, 2026
"I have a feeling it's going to work out very well... I think we'll be inclined to go along with your country.." pic.twitter.com/D53j3pkNGM
Trump says the two of them are going to 'have some discussions about that deal,' which sounds like 'it's going to be very long-term.' He was very pleasant and accommodating.
Anyone who has listened to Trump long enough knows why the rest of this statement, though it sounds like an endorsement, should be recognized as a qualified one. The second the president says 'I THINK and follows up with a 'inclined to go along,' whoever the petitioner is should be aware they have been put on notice to be on their best behavior, or that okay will be yanked so fast their heads will spin.
By May, the shock to the British people of both the Chagos betrayal and Trump's win had begun to wear off, and the serious work of digging into the nuts and bolts of what Starmer was selling had begun. What they were starting to find was not at all what Starmer had portrayed it as when he announced the agreement with the Mauritians.
For one thing, there was an exorbitant payment scheme in the signed agreement that no one had been aware of...
...Not only has Starmer absolutely incensed security hawks who are crazy with rage at the stupidity of the move in such a dangerous part of the world, he has people blowing gaskets over the terms of the agreements once they came to light.
They are not at all what Starmer had explained back in October when he first broached the subject to a nation already on its knees financially.
Besides an upfront payout, Starmer is giving Mauritius £101m a year to lease back Diego Garcia for ninety-nine years.
...which handed over vast quantities of scarce British cash in addition to the island chain that no one could prove the Mauritians had any legal claim to other than a non-binding international court opinion.
In 2019, the International Court of Justice issued a non-binding ruling that called on the U.K. to give up control of the Chagos Islands, saying it had wrongfully forced out the people living on Diego Garcia to make way for the military base.
Not only were the numbers Starmer reported outrageous in themselves, but when folks who do such things for a living double-checked his figures, they came up with numbers vastly exceeding the government's official ones. The difference was so appalling that Starmer was reported to the British statistics watchdog for lying to the public about the true cost of the handover.
All the while, everyone waited to hear something from the United States on the situation, but not a word came.
As I told you in August, Starmer had another fatal mathematical 'oops' involving decimal points - it was actually going to cost ten times what the Prime Minister had claimed - and, as of the beginning of the New Year, the House of Lords saw fit to slam the brakes on the whole Chagos sellout.
It was too expensive, Labour had lied about Chagossian ties to the islands, the deal was nothing like Starmer had originally sold it as, and Diego Garcia was far too important in a rapidly changing world to hand over to the truly questionable, authoritarian-leaning bunch of Chinese sympathizers governing in Mauritius.
Major international developments are emerging after Labour’s Chagos defeat:
— Robert Midgley (@RobertMidgley07) January 6, 2026
• Mauritius has been implicated in illicit financial dealings linked to Venezuela's Maduro
• Whistleblower documents indicate China’s strategic interest beyond the 99-year lease period
• The Chagos… pic.twitter.com/YGNEtzK3dP
• The Chagos Treaty undermines the Pelindaba Treaty, making AUKUS operations at Diego Garcia unlawful
The US must urgently reassess this avoidable strategic failure
Someone must have been reassessing something because it appears the United States no longer has the inclination to 'go along with the deal,' and Trump blasted the crap out of the feckless Labour government, letting them know. 
I can only assume that Starmer's toadies were feeding Marco's boys at State the same BS pablum he thought he'd successfully fed the British public until it all blew up on him.
...The incendiary comments reversed the Trump administration’s previous policy over the Chagos Islands, a remote archipelago that Britain held since the colonial era and that houses a strategically important U.S.-British military base on Diego Garcia, the largest island in the chain.
In 2024, Mr. Starmer’s government agreed to relinquish control of the islands to Mauritius after years of negotiations, following a ruling by the United Nations’ highest court that found Britain had acted unlawfully by detaching the archipelago from Mauritius in 1965.
Under the terms of the deal, the United States and Britain could continue to operate the military base on Diego Garcia for an initial period of 99 years. At the time Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised the deal and said that Mr. Trump had “expressed his support for this monumental achievement,” which “reflects the enduring strength of the US-UK relationship.”
That had been the terms of the deal. I'm assuming that Trump has altered it in such fiery fashion due to circumstances he and Marco have uncovered that we may never be privy to.
But which, obviously, have made him immensely... unhappy.
...Mr. Trump’s comments are an embarrassment for Mr. Starmer, who has courted the president assiduously, and the comments were immediately seized on by the prime minister’s domestic political adversaries. Nigel Farage, a longtime ally of Mr. Trump and the leader of the right wing populist Reform U.K. party, wrote on social media, “Thank goodness Trump has vetoed the surrender of the Chagos islands.”
Speaking in Parliament on Tuesday, Stephen Doughty, a minister in Britain’s foreign office, said the government would “never compromise on our national security.” He added: “The agreement we have struck is vital for protecting our national security and that of our allies in guaranteeing the long term future of a base that is crucially important for the U.K. and the United States.”
In all honesty, though, everyone except the Labour government has been waiting all year for this moment, wondering when the United States would erupt over what was so obviously a massive strategic blunder.
Now? It's a feeding frenzy exploding on Starmer and Co.'s miserable mewling carbon sacks.
Trump calling this deal an "act of great stupidity" is hard to argue with. The UK had a rock-solid legal position and a vital strategic asset on Diego Garcia, yet Labour chose to hand over sovereignty and then pay billions to lease back what we already controlled. It reeks of… pic.twitter.com/iTMDuZwt0z
— Hephzibah Behulah (@HephzibaBehulah) January 20, 2026
...It reeks of weakness, especially when the US had previously backed the idea but now sees it as a security risk that hands China and Russia an easy propaganda win. Starmer's team keep claiming there was no choice, but the facts show otherwise. This wasn't diplomacy; it was a needless capitulation that has damaged our standing with our closest ally. Well done Trump for calling it out.
All this dumped back in the PM's lap just as the controversial Chinese 'mega-embassy' is about to receive UK approval, too. And, yes - it has myriad security issues, including cables that the Brits lied to the US about, but they're going to go ahead and bless it.
Why shouldn't Trump trust anything Starmer says?
Tomorrow the 🇨🇳 mega embassy is going to be approved. We expect the decision to come as a Written Statement from Steve Reed MP. Weirdly, there's also a Home Office parliamentary statement planned, which will probably be about how we have cleared the embassy from a security point… pic.twitter.com/pLQxKKHuiA
— Luke de Pulford (@lukedepulford) January 19, 2026
...I know for a fact that senior US figures were told that cables "didn't exist" right up until November 2025 when the UK was forced to provide a technical briefing on exposure (which says, you've guessed it: we can deal with the risk, don't worry). Echoes of Huawei.
Here's all you need to know: Barclays Global HQ, Blackrock, Deloitte and others were in the building before it was sold to the Chinese. As reported by the BBC and others, they were using high-capacity cabling. China has a bunch of confirmed infrastructure hacks in the past 18 months in the UK and US. If this *really* doesn't pose a risk, why not be more transparent about it to our allies, and why not set out a mitigation plan?...
Oh, let me count the ways.
If you have some time to spare, this seems like a spy thriller; there are so many dirty deeds done dirt cheap involved. But it's the story of how the Chagos Islands deal, such as it is, has come to pass, going back to Tony Blair's first dabblings.
In this episode of The Winston Marshall Show, I sit down with Robert Midgley, journalist and spokesperson for the Friends of British Overseas Territories, to expose what could be Keir Starmer’s greatest political scandal yet — the quiet handover of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.
We unpack how this shocking deal — costing British taxpayers up to £47 billion — effectively gives away sovereign UK territory in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Robert reveals how the Labour government, under pressure from international legal activists like Philippe Sands, has undermined British sovereignty and endangered one of America’s most strategic military bases, Diego Garcia.
From allegations of corruption and hacked negotiations in Mauritius to the Chinese Communist Party’s interest in the region, we examine how Britain’s political and legal elite have allowed foreign powers to dictate national policy under the banner of “decolonisation.” We also explore the untold story of the Chagossian people — forcibly removed by the British government in the 1960s, yet still overwhelmingly pro-British today, despite decades of betrayal.
All this — the Chagos scandal, the billions in taxpayer money, China’s growing influence, and how Starmer’s Labour is sleepwalking Britain into surrendering its sovereignty.
Starmer's spokesman was sputtering defensively, insisting the Chagos sellout is 'robust' in its protections for Diego Garcia.
..."This deal secures the operations of the joint U.S.-U.K. base on Diego Garcia for generations, with robust provisions for keeping its unique capabilities intact and our adversaries out," the British government said, noting that it had previously been "publicly welcomed by the U.S., Australia and all other Five Eyes allies, as well as key international partners including India, Japan and South Korea."
The Five Eyes refers to the close defense and intelligence partnership between the U.S., Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
But this was the broadside the world's been waiting for to try to stop the deal, and they finally got it.
It does need to die.
If you were Russia, China or Iran (or indeed India or Japan) and you saw the British/Americans in the space of 5 years give up both Bagram and now BIOT/Diego Garcia, it would be to you a simply unfathomable capitulation of vital strategic ground. pic.twitter.com/p0AcBH1AZA
— Gray Connolly (@GrayConnolly) January 20, 2026
And Trump's the guy to do it.
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