WHEN Sir Keir Starmer concluded the Chagos deal I thought we had seen the worst agreement ever signed by a British Prime Minister. Britain had given away a key strategic asset to a nation with no historical claim on it.
The Chagos Archipelago includes the US-UK base of Diego Garcia, a vital deep-water port, and two 12,000ft runways that can support long-range bombers. It has refuelling capability for flights across a vast range of strategically important locations, and has previously been of use in missions in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East. Centrally located in the Indian Ocean, it is equidistant between Africa and South-East Asia, allowing for the rapid deployment of air and naval forces across the Indo-Pacific, Middle East and East Africa. It’s been described as a ‘linchpin’ in US and UK defence.
Along with these military and defence implications, the UK ownership of the Chagos Islands included its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). This covers 200 nautical miles surrounding the Archipelago in all directions, a total area of 247,000 square miles, making it one of the largest marine protected areas in the world. Within that territory, Britain had exclusive right to all the minerals, fishing, oil or any other natural resources discovered there and had sole control of their detection, extraction and sale. All of this was handed to Mauritius by the deal Starmer signed on May 22, 2025.
The full lunacy of the deal is understandable when we see that the British government acknowledge the strategic importance of the asset they gave away. Since the US wishes to retain the Diego Garcia base, the UK then had to agree to lease back that land it was, in the same deal, giving away. This led to the utterly ludicrous position of the UK paying Mauritius for the return of Mauritius taking something we owned. That payment is for a 99-year lease on the land containing the military base, and is eye-wateringly disadvantageous to the UK and the UK taxpayer. The government claims it will be a limited payment of around £101million per annum, but has actually agreed that these payments are linked to inflation and that they extend for an indefinite period. The total end cost could easily top £30billion.
The thing is, that deal was completely unnecessary. There was no real pressure on Britain from anyone else to give all this to Mauritius, which is some 1,300 miles away from Chagos. The only claim Mauritius has ironically refers back to the French colonial era when the French treated both as the same territory, a position the UK clarified in 1965 three years before Mauritius gained independence. Mauritius is hardly a nation capable of posing any serious threat to ownership, and had been pursuing a case through international courts that was completely meaningless. It’s true that in 2019 the International Court of Justice (ICJ) gave an advisory ruling supporting Mauritius but that has NO legal force and no mechanism of enforcement. It was an advisory opinion of a powerless body.
The remaining Chagossians themselves prefer British authority to becoming Mauritian, and are seeking legal avenues to challenge the deal. So there was no argument to name in terms of Britain’s rule being unjust or colonialist. A single ruling by a toothless court prompted Starmer’s Chagos fiasco.
Partly it can be ascribed to Starmer’s own background and ideology. Starmer is a leftist lawyer who is obsessed, fanatical even, regarding the priority of international law over national law and national self-interest. He is always keen to show his fetish for international law and signal that his primary loyalty is to foreign and internationalist and transnational courts. But the Chagos deal was also strongly influenced by other Labour figures of a similar background and mindset.
The key legal figures behind the deal include Lord Hermer, the UK’s Attorney General, and Philippe Sands, a prominent international lawyer who led the Mauritian negotiating team. Both are close associates of Starmer, having worked together as barristers and shared a long-standing professional relationship.
In other words, the UK’s clear strategic, financial, defence and military interests were set aside by the decision of three very left-wing lawyers who had worked together for years. The people supposedly protecting British interests were friends of the man challenging British interests and demanding, on behalf of his client, huge payments from Britain.
All this would qualify as one of the greatest scandals in UK history if the British media cared any more about UK interests than the Labour government does. But it’s not even the full extent of the folly and corruption involved regarding Chagos. That comes if you address the geopolitical situation as well. When you look at that, the wider context of the deal, it moves from the territory of folly to the territory of treason.
Let us be very clear on this.
Mauritius is the hub of China’s extension of influence and power in Africa. China is its largest trading partner, and has funded major infrastructure projects. It is practically a Chinese asset.
Those who concluded this deal would have had security briefs and intelligence reports telling them far more regarding the links between China and Mauritius than I have access to. They would have known both what a bad deal this is for the UK, and what a good deal it is for China and China’s other allies who are antagonistic towards the UK.
The day after Britain signed the Chagos deal, Mauritius signed a deal on ‘marine development and research’ with Russia, potentially opening all the maritime resources we gave away to Russian and Chinese development, or equally facilitating Russian and Chinese spying on Diego Garcia. Not only have we sacrificed potentially significant profits, but also the 99-year lease we are paying for becomes useless if the area is clogged with Russian and Chinese shipping and Russian and Chinese spying facilities conducting ‘marine research’.
Now we come to the second great betrayal of the UK to Chinese interests. That is the announcement that the UK government has agreed to a Chinese ‘super embassy’ in London. Again, this comes against both security advice and local disagreement. Its location is adjacent to cables supplying City of London financial instititions and key UK government buildings. It’s perfectly positioned to allow the Chinese to hack into critical UK infrastructure.
So the Chinese are being offered the chance to disrupt our financial communications, London’s most important and profitable industry, on top of the close proximity they would have to other data stores, communications networks and the infrastructure underpinning those (which is even worse a scenario than simply remote hacking into computers systems).
We know that the intelligence services advised against agreeing to the embassy. China has applied pressure, and the government has responded by doing what China wants. First the government barred the intelligence services from offering further advice on the issue, and then ignored the advice it had already received.
China has not even attempted to disguise its malign intentions. The building plans include 208 secret rooms and an additional hidden chamber. It is literally the case that the Chinese have indicated that they want facilities where they could hold people, perhaps torture them, perhaps murder, perhaps store weapons, drugs, bombs – ‘But don’t worry, we won’t do that.’
It’s worth quoting Priti Patel on this, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, because I think she has actually expressed it well:
‘Keir Starmer has sold off our national security to the Chinese Communist Party with his shameful Super Embassy Surrender. Throughout his dismal premiership to date, the PM has kowtowed to Beijing at every opportunity, including over Chagos. And now, once again, he is giving Xi Jinping what he wants – a colossal spy hub in the heart of our capital.’
So perhaps in both cases we need to move from the assumption of incompetence to the assumption of intent. Is it humanly possible to be THIS stupid, and selectively so with regard to threats from China? Or is Starmer actually some kind of Chinese asset?
Even for those of us who detest the man it seems an extreme accusation. Until we ask ourselves, on Chagos and on the Super Embassy, what would a Chinese asset do? The answer to that seems, at least to me, to be exactly what Keir Starmer is doing.
A longer version of this article appeared on Jupplandia on January 20, 2026, and is republished by kind permission.
