Is this the week Starmer’s Chagos deal is scrapped?

Dame Priti Patel is set to fly to Washington DC this week to convince Donald Trump’s administration to kill off Sir Keir Starmer’s beleaguered Chagos Islands deal with Mauritius.

The Tory shadow foreign secretary’s trip comes after the government pulled plans to bring forward a vote in the Lords on Tuesday this week to ratify it in a what has become a crisis for the prime minister.

Sir Keir, who this week faces the prospect of a make-or-break by-election in Gorton and Denton, is facing transatlantic demands to scrap the deal to hand Mauritius sovereignty of the Chagos Islands amid concerns for the crucial Diego Garcia base located there.

The prime minister claims he has “no choice” but to do the deal with Mauritius because of a ruling by the International Court of Justice and the United Nation’s Law of the Sea, but his critics claim he is ignoring UK opt outs on international law.

In fact, a letter to Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle coordinated by former security minister Sir John Hayes looks set to lead to questions over whether ministers misled parliament on this issue further complicating the ratification for the PM.

Now Trump has finally ditched his support via his Truth Social platform, Dame Priti’s trip to Washington and a failed trip by Nigel Farage to the islands shows that political opponents sense the PM can be defeated on the Chagos issue. The race is on to claim credit for his humiliation.

The return last week to the islands by a group of Chagossians was funded by Reform’s biggest donor, the Thailand based crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne but rightwing opponents have been working for some time on the issue.

When the deal was first announced back in 2024 it was the Conservatives, who actually started the talks with Mauritius, who led the charge in parliament to oppose it while Mr Farage tried to lobby Trump to veto it.

What emerged was a team connected to the Great British PAC - a political pressure group set up to bring legal challenges founded by Conservative Post founder Claire Bullivant and chaired by Advance UK leader Ben Habib - to challenge the deal.

They joined up with the exiled Chagossians, led by their first minister in exile Misley Mandarin, to fight for their demand for the islands as a British protectorate.

Leading lawyer James Tumbridge, who had worked extensively for the Tories and Brexit Party, was brought in to judicially review the decision. He also got a judge to agree to an injunction to block UK officials removing the Chagossians from the islands last week,

Ahead of Dame Priti’s visit, trips to DC by former Downing Street advisor Robert Midgely, ex-Home Office spad Christopher Howarth and former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith persuaded the State Department and Department of War that Sir Keir’s legal arguments on Chagos were wrong.

Opponents have also been working with Labour MPs and peers to stop the deal including attempting to get Angela Rayner to come out against it.

Sir Keir has to get the treaty ratified before May or it fails. This is assuming he is not ousted beforehand with eyes very much on the Gorton and Denton by-election on Thursday.

But the treaty is currently expected to come back to the Lords in early March although no date has been officially set. This means the Lib Dems in the Lords are being heavily lobbied to vote with the Tories to kill the treaty off.

The is some small hope for Starmer – a meeting between Lib Dem peer Lord Jeremy Purvis and the Chagossians did not go ahead this week in a sign they may abstain. But even if it is not killed in the Lords it will have to go to the Commons, because of other amendments where Labour MPs are getting restless.

The one thing Sir Keir has been praised for was his international statesmanship. But now the Chagos nightmare suggests even that is unravelling for this ill-fate PM. So while the clock is ticking to May on this treaty, it is in fact also ticking on Sir Keir’s premiership.