Concern in Downing Street over Chagos Islands handover deal

Senior Downing Street figures have concerns about the government’s deal to cede sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, Labour sources have told the Guardian.

Ministers are under fire over an agreement to hand control of the islands, including Diego Garcia, which houses a joint US-UK airbase, to Mauritius. Under the terms of the deal, the base would remain under UK control on a 99-year lease.

Keir Starmer told MPs on Wednesday that the deal was essential for the Diego Garcia base to continue operating. “Without legal certainty, the base cannot operate in practical terms as it should,” the prime minister told MPs. “That is bad for our national security and it’s a gift for our adversaries.”

But two senior sources said that some in Downing Street had reservations about the deal, which is costing considerable political capital and risks jeopardising relations with Donald Trump’s administration.

Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, had criticised the agreement before he was appointed and raised it in his first call with David Lammy, the UK foreign secretary, earlier this month.

Jonathan Powell, who negotiated the agreement before being appointed as the UK’s national security adviser, is due to travel to Washington DC to meet his US counterpart, Mike Waltz, this week, amid concerns that Trump’s administration could seek to overturn the deal.

The government has been criticised by opposition MPs. Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, accused ministers of having “botched” the negotiations and questioned why they were making “significant payments to Mauritius upfront at a time when winter fuel payments have been scrapped”.

Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, called the plan an “immoral surrender”, while Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, told MPs that “when the Americans wake up to the fact that this has been done wholly unnecessarily, I wouldn’t be surprised if we find ourselves together with the European Union in their tariff regime”.

The plan is being increasingly criticised inside the Labour party. Bloomberg reported that two cabinet ministers had concerns about the cost of the deal at a time when public spending cuts were being threatened.

One former Labour adviser said the row had the potential to become a totemic issue akin to Gordon Brown selling half the UK’s gold reserves.

Another said the Chagos deal “was a catastrophic error … The best way to solve it now and save face is to pull out and say: ‘We tried to be constructive, tried to support the rules-based order, but Mauritius has been completely unreasonable and now it will never be returned.’”

More than 1,000 people were evicted from the Chagos Islands to make way for the Diego Garcia airbase. Photograph: Fiona Hanson/PA

Britain kept control of the Chagos Islands after Mauritius regained independence in the 1960s, and evicted more than 1,000 people to make way for the Diego Garcia base. Mauritius has maintained the islands are its own, and the international court of justice ruled in an advisory opinion in 2021 that the UK’s administration of the territory was unlawful.

Peter Lamb, the Labour MP for Crawley, West Sussex, which is home to about 4,000 Chagos Islanders, criticised the deal and said it did not guarantee the islanders’ right to return to their homeland. “There is absolutely no guarantee whatsoever that any of the people who were truly harmed by the UK’s actions will in any way benefit from this deal,” he said.

Stephen Doughty, the minister for British overseas territories, said Foreign Office officials were due to meet Chagos Islanders next week.

He told the Commons that the deal ensured the Diego Garcia base could continue to operate, including by guaranteeing the UK’s “unrestricted and sole access to the electromagnetic spectrum” above it. If the UK were to lose this exclusivity as a result of a sovereignty dispute, other countries could access radio waves above the base, Doughty said.

Navin Ramgoolam, the prime minister of Mauritius, triggered a diplomatic spat after telling his MPs on Tuesday that he had rewritten the deal to ensure payments from the UK rose in line with inflation. He said that not doing so would have halved the amount handed to Mauritius.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Starmer’s spokesperson said it was “factually inaccurate” that the payment had doubled and there had been “no change” to the cost of the deal or terms of the lease.

In response, Ramgoolam’s government issued a statement insisting it had never said the cost of the agreement had doubled.