The First Minister of the Chagos Islands, Misley Mandarin, has given Donald Trump permission to bomb Iran from Diego Garcia. Well, that’s nice.
The US president must be delighted to have such muscular international support and the ayatollahs will be quaking in their boots.Mr Mandarin is currently camped out with two companions and his dad on Ile de Coin, one of 1,000 islands in the Chagos archipelago,120 miles from the joint US/UK military base.
The British, who own the islands for the time being, are mightily irritated by this and would like to evict them. A judge has ruled we can’t yet, so expect more pronouncements by Mr Mandarin on global controversies.
I must have missed his election to this prestigious post, but apparently, there was some sort of one in December last year. And although Mr Mandarin is a British military veteran, I imagine the quartet would find some difficulty forming a standing army. So his backing for President Trump can only be of the moral support kind.
Nevertheless, he pronounced loftily: “If the US decides that action is needed to defend international order, then as the elected Government of these islands, we give our permission for the use of Diego Garcia in defence of peace.”
Like the rest of us, Mr Mandarin probably has no idea what goes on at Diego Garcia. The base is top secret. What we do know is that it is bristling with B-2 Spirit stealth bombers, B-52 Stratofortresses and F-15 fighters.
It is also one of the few deep-water ports in the Indian Ocean capable of handling big aircraft carriers, warships and submarines and hosts a GPS system monitoring the rest of the world.
In short, it is crucial for Western security, and the one thing the Americans and British are agreed on is that we must not let it fall into Chinese hands.
So much so that it was the Americans who begged the British to come to an agreement with Mauritius over the sovereignty of the islands.
This was because of advisory judgements from the International Court of Justice, the UN General Assembly and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea that we had to give Chagos up.
Negotiations began in 2022 under the Tories and were inherited by Labour. The Americans were worried that binding legal decisions were about to come down the line.
Keir Starmer's Chagos deal is not about decolonisation. This is what's really going on - Nigel Nelson
|Getty Images
This would mean the Chinese could claim we were illegally occupying Mauritian territory, making supplying the base unlawful.
It would give Beijing the legal cover to send in a few fishing boats, followed by a research vessel and a listening post to eavesdrop on Diego Garcia.
The point is this is not some woke issue about decolonisation but one of key national and international security. Had we not been willing to pay off Mauritius, America might have, and we would have lost our foothold on Diego Garcia.
Ben Judah, special adviser to David Lammy when he was Foreign Secretary, remembers bumping into deputy US Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, who said: “The only way the UK can actually hurt the US would be by not doing a deal.”
I commend Ben’s article in the Sunday Times, which explains all the nuances of this. It is not a simple matter of the UK carelessly giving away land she already owns, as Reform and the Tories claim.
Then along came the mercurial and unpredictable Donald Trump, who changes his mind with the wind. As he did the day after the State Department had given the deal official approval.
This is no way to conduct international relations. There is no doubt the British behaved disgracefully in 1965 when we cleared the atolls of their inhabitants – including Mr Mandarin’s father, Marcel. We did so at the urging of the Americans to make way for the base.
Any deal should take into account Chagossian wishes, although that is difficult when they cannot agree between themselves what their wishes are.
But it would be a calamity for Britain’s security to be edged out of Diego Garcia, which is why a deal must be done.
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