Mauritius is getting the Chagos Islands – and a lot of Tories ain’t happy. Tom Tugendhat calls it a ‘shameful retreat’; Robert Jenrick bemoans the ‘dangerous capitulation.’ The Telegraph calls it a ‘national scandal’ while the Mail splash screams it is ‘Starmer’s surrender.’ So with the Tory tribes raising a hue and cry, who better to articulate patriotic harrumphing than Boris Johnson? As part of his book tour, the former premier was grilled last night by Camilla Tominey on GB News. Asked for his reaction to the decision, Johnson called it:
Crazy. I mean do, I urge viewers of GB News to get out your maps, get out your atlases, check out the Chagos Islands and see where Mauritius is. It’s a long way away. What is this claim? It’s nonsense. It’s total nonsense. Why are we doing this? It’s sheer political correctness. A desire to look like the good guys. A desire to look as though we are unbundling the last relics of our empire. It’s nonsense. It’s a bad idea in hard geopolitical terms because the base in Diego Garcia, as I’m sure you’ll know, as all our viewers know, is of huge strategic importance for the US, for the West and it’s a key component of the Anglo-American alliance. It’s one of the things we bring to the table. It has been for decades, that base. Why are we trading away our sovereignty over it? Completely the wrong thing to do.
Good strong stuff. So then, who is to blame for starting these talks, which formally began in November 2022? Step forward, er, Boris Johnson, according to the woman who replaced him. Shortly before the excerpt of Johnson’s interview aired, a spokesman for Liz Truss told Mr S that:
It was Boris Johnson who asked Liz to talk to Prime Minister Jugnauth about this at COP26, which she did. But she was absolutely clear that we would and should never cede the territory.
Who could have foreseen that talks would actually lead to something eh? There’s that famous Tory foresight once again…
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