The passage of Sir Keir Starmer’s Chagos Islands deal through parliament has been “paused”, after Donald Trump urged the prime minister to scrap it.
Foreign Office Minister Hamish Falconer told MPs on Wednesday that while the US had initially expressed its support for the deal, the US president’s intervention earlier this month was “very significant.”
He told MPs: “We have a process going through parliament in relation to the treaty.
“We will bring that back to parliament at the appropriate time. We are pausing for discussions with our American counterparts.”
Earlier this month, Mr Trump hit at at Starmer in his second U-turn on support for the deal to hand over UK sovereignty of the archipelago to Mauritius.
In a post on Truth Social, the US president branded the move a “big mistake” because of concerns over the joint UK-US military base on the island of Diego Garcia.
More follows on this breaking news story…
