This Will Save Our Nation Billions Which Labour Had Wanted To Cast Away Into The Wind!

 Jake Wallis Simons.

Wes Streeting has confirmed Labour’s Chagos humiliation.

Even the Prime Minister must realise that this rotten deal is dead in the water

Jake Wallis SimonsShow biography

Published 23 September 2026 11:47am BST

The Defence Secretary has done Britain a favour Credit: Thomas Krych / Story Picture Agency

It is with great regret that I must inform you of the coming death of the Great Chagos Island Giveaway Wheeze, one of the most treacherous policies pursued by the British government in recent times (made all the more annoying by their appetite for it).

Or rather, it’s not me who is bearing this news. It is the Defence Secretary, Wes Streeting. “Objectively, in the absence of support from the Americans, is this deal good enough?” he said today, before answering himself. “No.”

Oh dear. Has anybody checked on David Lammy? Addressing Parliament in 2024, the then-foreign secretary made American approval central to his case for betrayal, which involved handing over the strategically valuable Chagos Islands to Mauritius and paying them for the privilege.

The White House, State Department and Pentagon all backed it, Lammy crowed. This saw him through for a while: when the treaty was signed in May 2025, the Government again emphasised that it enjoyed “strong support from the US”.

Ben Judah, then Lammy’s special adviser at the foreign office, who worked on the deal – if we can call unnecessary surrender a “deal” – expended much energy in defending it. According to him, an American official confided: “The only way the United Kingdom can actually hurt the United States would be by not doing the deal.”

Really? Oops. Somebody had better check on Judah, too. On Tuesday, Donald Trump dramatically poured cold water on the act of national self-harm, for which Labour has been gagging for years, branding it “ridiculous”, leaving Andy Burnham sitting helplessly beside him like a gazumped estate agent.

That’s the problem with building foreign policy around a dependency on the United States. You leave yourself high and dry when the White House changes positions. DT