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While I agree that the Chagos deal is terrible for the UK, I don't think it is Starmer's folly, and I don't think it is worth trying to psychoanalyse Starmer to understand why it happened. The decision to do the deal stems from the British Deep State. The opening of negotiations was formally announced to Parliament by Tory foreign secretary James Cleverly in November 2022. If you read these columns on conservativehome.com where Deep Stater David Snoxell defends the likely deal to grassroots conservatives (again, while the Conservatives were still in office) you will get the gist. The change of government in the UK does not appear to have affected the progress of negotiations at all.
Tory caterwauling about the deal in opposition is entirely dishonest and opportunistic (I know, politicians. I don't even want to blame them) given that they could have blocked it when in government and didn't. But I think the reason why they didn't is that they didn't care and were letting the Deep State make decisions. So the first interesting question is "why did the British Deep State do such a terrible deal?" And the most obvious answer is that the Americans asked them to. (The British Deep State set a lot of store in maintaining the so-called Special Relationship with the US Deep State).
This David Allen Green post is the best summary of the argument. One piece of evidence he misses out is that Snoxell repeatedly cites to remarks by Blinken praising progress in the negotiations. DAG's key arguments are
The deal failed because the incoming Mauritian government realised that the British (and the lame duck Biden administration) were desperate to seal the deal before Trump came in, thought this gave them leverage to ask for more money, asked for too much, didn't get it, and ran out of time. The deal is now presumably dead unless the US Deep State manages to roll the Trump administration - certainly the Mauritian government says that they are not willing to do a deal that the US don't sign off on.
The second interesting question is "Why does the US Deep State support the deal?" Lawcellism is part of the answer, but the US is not a particularly lawcelled country, and nobody in a position of power is willing in the US is willing to let international law interfere with a vital interest like retaining Diego Garcia. But (unless the US is secretly paying for the lease) the deal isn't that terrible for the US. There are some obvious pragmatic reasons why the US might prefer a Guantanamo Bay-style arrangement where Diego Garcia is nominally Mauritian sovereign territory but US-controlled under a long lease to sharing the island with an ally:
And of course the third question, which is the one which is culture-war salient, is "Why is Starmer still noisily supporting the deal?" The anti-Starmer case has been made ably below. The pro-Starmer answer is that the deal is dead, Starmer knows this, but he wants (mostly for the benefit of elite opinion in relevant neutral countries who pretend to take international court rulings seriously, especially India) to ensure Trump gets the blame. So he is continuing to noisily support the dead deal until Trump unambiguously kills it.
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