Why did it take so long to shelve the rotten Chagos giveaway?

In October 2024, UK prime minister Keir Starmer agreed to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius – including the largest island, Diego Garcia, which hosts a joint US-UK military base. Eighteen months and a lot of criticism later, Starmer’s Chagos deal has finally been shelved.

While officials said the agreement had not been entirely abandoned, the government admitted on Monday that ‘the position of the United States president appears to have changed and this means in practical terms it has become impossible to agree [a deal]’.

It has looked for months as if the deal may be in the deep freeze. In January, President Trump branded it an ‘act of total weakness’. The following month, he urged Starmer not to ’give away Diego Garcia’. Giving away Diego Garcia, however, seems to have been something Starmer – together with his attorney general, Lord Hermer – had been extremely keen to do.

What I have called our ‘craven surrender’ over Chagos was for me the final straw that led to my resignation after 11 years as a British diplomat. The issue was the clearest indication of a pattern I saw repeatedly during my time in the Foreign Office, and which has become more pronounced under the Starmer administration: an unshakeable subservience to the most rigid interpretations of international law, and its elevation over a clear-sighted view of our national interest.

Chagos has become totemic because it illustrates the guiding principle of international law that energises our PM. The tenacity with which Starmer has pursued the giveaway of British territory, and the amount of political capital he has been willing to expend on the cause in the face of all criticism, has left many genuinely perplexed.

This is not, after all, a prime minister unaccustomed to u-turning. Yet on Chagos, it seemed as if nothing would stop him. Not the cost of leasing Diego Garcia back from Mauritius, estimated at anywhere between £10 billion and £50 billion. Not finding himself on the wrong side of the self-determination rights of the Chagossians. Not the fact that the one man he desperately needs to keep on side – Trump – came out against the deal. Not even the powerful environmental concerns around the possible destruction of a precious marine reserve should the deal enable Mauritius to commence commercial fishing. Despite everything, and through it all, Starmer tried to plough on.

As any student of international relations knows, international law is an amorphous thing. It’s less law as we understand it in the domestic sense, and more an evolving framework. A guidebook for responsible state action, if you will, rather than a hard-and-fast instruction booklet. But what is responsible about giving up sovereign territory to an ally of China, against the wishes of the historically displaced population and in a manner that would weaken the West’s precarious military defences at a time of rising geopolitical tensions?

The problem goes deeper than Starmer. The Foreign Office has, for many years, taken to heart American political scientist Joseph Nye’s observation that nations who disregard international law risk a ‘hypocritical’ foreign policy that diminishes their soft power. It is that maxim that explains our foreign-policy establishment’s decision to treat the 2019 International Court of Justice (ICJ) judgement as the beginning of the end of British sovereignty over Chagos, despite the ruling being only advisory, rather than binding.

As former head of the Foreign Office, Lord McDonald, said a few days ago, ‘There was a long discussion about whether we should play along [with the ICJ judgement]… in the end we decided to engage… Once you have decided to engage in a legal process, you can’t then walk away from it when you don’t like the result.’ While McDonald acknowledges that the judgement could theoretically have been ignored, it seems the Foreign Office decided that would have deviated too far from its modus operandi. ‘Everything that has happened now and also under the Conservative government as well as the Labour government is a consequence of that ICJ judgement’, said McDonald.

But why, unlike almost every serious thinker about geopolitics today, have Starmer, Hermer and the Foreign Office leadership not woken up to the fact that the ‘rules-based international order’ has ceased to exist, if indeed it ever did so? John Bew, the foreign-policy brain of the past four prime ministers, gets it. Writing recently, he pointed out that ‘the idea of a rules-based order is treated as an almost theological abstraction, as a God-given gift from which dissent cannot be contemplated’. To make ‘fidelity to international law the organising goal of our foreign policy and the premise of every decision we take’, he argues, means we risk being left as the only one with our pants down.

Rather than getting serious about investing in our military capabilities and holding on to prized assets like Diego Garcia, which will help us to navigate the dangerous world we face, Starmer has prioritised setting an empty moral example. It is less the ethical foreign policy expounded by Robin Cook nearly three decades ago, and more an exercise in virtue-signalling on the world stage. As Bew warns, the danger is that Britain ends up curating ‘an old system’ rather than becoming an active participant ‘in a new world in which power is being more nakedly asserted’.

Even Canadian PM Mark Carney, speaking at Davos in January, spoke of the end of this rules-based order. The former central banker invoked Václav Havel’s Soviet-era greengrocer who put up a ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ sign in his shop window not because he believed in it, but to signal compliance, and because everyone else does the same. To do so is to be ‘living within a lie’, Carney said. It is time, he declared, ‘for companies and countries to take their signs down’.

The irony of all this is that Britain’s wholesale abandonment of hard power has, in fact, undermined our soft power and the moral force of our example on the world stage. Diplomats from other nations’ foreign ministries I am in touch with are astonished and aghast at how weak and frankly naive UK foreign policy has become. At a time when we should be investing in warships and fortifying our bases, we’re invested in anti-colonialism dialogues and giving our bases away.

Even Joseph Nye himself, speaking at Chatham House back in 2011, acknowledged realism could not be wished away: ‘It would be nice to imagine a world in which it [international law] was applied equally and in all states. I don’t expect to see that world any time soon.’ And even Nye – who coined the term ‘soft power’ – was more clear-sighted than our prime minister about the limits to the role it could play in a nation’s overall foreign policy: ‘I’d hate to see Britain lose its capacity for hard power. You really need both, and the combination is what I call smart power.’

The Chagos surrender is thankfully dead, at least for now. But what the attempted giveaway reveals about Starmerism shows it’s anything but smart.

Ameer Kotecha is a former diplomat and now the CEO of the Centre for Government Reform.