CHAGOS: AN APPEAL TO LABOUR There is, as I keep pointing out, no enthusiasm for the Diego Garcia surrender on the Labour benches. Its only supporters are Keir Starmer, Richard Hermer, Philippe Sands, Peter Mandelson and Jonathan Powell. Even a month ago, Labour cannot have imagined quite how awful the politics would become. They are handing away a pristine marine conservation zone, betraying a dispossessed black population and paying billions of pounds more to Mauritius than it would cost to resettle the outer atolls with Chagossians. Now they are ordering the eviction of those Chagossians who have returned home to stake their claim. Think about that. We won’t stop small boats in the Channel, but we lose no time in ordering the removal of British subjects from British territory. We are slow and reluctant when it comes to deporting illegal immigrants, but we snap into action to evict British Overseas Citizens from a British Overseas Territory. Labour friends, this is not why you went into politics. You can see as clearly as the rest of us how shameful all this is. You know that, under any other Labour leader, the whole project would have been dropped long ago. Well, here is your last chance. Donald Trump has given you a final off-ramp. For the love of justice and decency, take it. If that means replacing Starmer with someone more sensible, so be it.

We are ordering the removal of British subjects from British territory so that we can hand that territory to a state that has never owned it. Even if we set aside, for a moment, the ancestral claims of the Chagossians to their own archipelago, this is despicable behaviour.