About the UK's Chagos deal
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Starmer, asked whether he trusted Trump to honour the commitment he gave in backing the deal last year, told reporters: “I’ve obviously discussed Chagos with Donald Trump a number of times. It has been raised with the White House at the tail end of last week, over the weekend and into the early part of this week.
“The position, as you know, is that when the Trump administration came in, we paused for three months to give them time to consider the Chagos deal, which they did at agency level.
“Once they’d done that, they were very clear in the pronouncements about the fact that they supported the deal – and they were announcements made by the defence secretary, from memory, Marco Rubio as well, and by president Trump himself.”
Pressed on whether he believed Trump fully understood the deal – after he appeared to get the details wrong – Starmer added: “There was a three-month pause whilst his administration looked in detail at an agency level, because obviously this is about security and intelligence.
“So it was an agency review that was conducted in the US before they then concluded that it was a deal they wanted to support, did support and did so in very clear terms.”
