I admit I am prejudiced. I tend to assume that politicians are trying to do the right thing. If only because being seen to do the right thing is usually the best way to advance their career. So when a politician is attacked for making what seems to be the wrong decision, I try to understand the trade-offs that led them to conclude that it was the least bad option.
Even if I don’t agree with their decision in the end, I think it is better to understand why they made it, rather than simply denouncing them as malign or stupid.
That said, the decision to pay Mauritius to take over the Chagos Islands has me stumped. There must be good reasons for doing this deal, but nobody has been able to explain what they are.
The Conservative government started the negotiations with Mauritius. James Cleverly, as foreign secretary, suspended talks, possibly because he couldn’t see the prospect of a deal that he could sell to the British people, but David Cameron, his successor, started them again.
When Keir Starmer became prime minister, he appointed Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff and an experienced international deal-maker, to negotiate. Powell concluded a deal and was later appointed the government’s national security adviser.
Cleverly, Cameron and Powell are no fools, and yet the deal they have ended up with looks foolish.
Starmer cannot explain it. His speech on Thursday said that a ruling by the International Court of Justice that the islands belong to Mauritius would “undermine the operation” of the US military base on Diego Garcia, which is important for British national security.
The ICJ has already issued an advisory opinion to that effect, and Starmer said that there was no “realistic prospect” of blocking a definitive ruling. Mauritius’s claim is weak – the Chagos islands have never been part of its territory – but the politics of UN bodies such as the ICJ is strong.
As the ICJ has no powers of enforcement, however, Britain could ignore the judgment. But Starmer said: “If we do not agree this deal, the legal situation would mean that we would not be able to prevent China or any other nation setting up their own bases on the outer islands.”
That sounds like the sort of far-fetched scenario dreamt up to try to justify a decision already taken on other grounds.
Then there is the cost. In other circumstances, ceding the islands and leasing back the military base might be a sensible deal. If the islands had been seized from an indigenous people, and those people were now an independent nation and wanted it back, for example.
But they weren’t. They were uninhabited when the Europeans arrived. The 1,000 Chagossians, workers imported mostly from Africa and India who were displaced in the 1960s and 1970s to make way for the base, have been badly treated. This deal includes a £40m fund for them, but the main beneficiary is the government of Mauritius, which has no claim to Chagos except that the two island groups were administered together by the British.
Mauritius’s leaders portray themselves as righteous against a former “colonial” power – yet their only claim to Chagos is that it was administered by the same colonial power.
Starmer was reduced to arithmetical gibberish when questioned about the cost of the deal. He said the “average” is £101m a year, but that the total over the 99-year lease was £3.4bn. He described this as a “net cost”, which is not right: it is a fancy formula for assessing long-term projects because people value nearer-term spending more than spending after they are dead.
The common-sense valuation in today’s money is £10bn, and we should ignore the Tory figure of £30bn, the total cash figure, which is even less numerically literate than the prime minister’s.
But it doesn’t matter. The annual amount would be modest in the context of the national finances if it were justified. But it is not, so any amount is outrageous.
This is a deal that will weigh Starmer down for the rest of his time in politics. It is like Gordon Brown “selling the gold”. Actually, it is worse, because selling the gold was a sensible decision: the government should not be speculating in precious metals on behalf of citizens – it was simply bad luck that the price went up afterwards.
The Chagos deal, though, looks like a bad deal, and nothing Starmer can say can persuade people otherwise.
This month, the prime minister has secured four international deals. The trade deals with India, the US and the EU were triumphs in the national interest that will make us better off; but they will be overshadowed by an indefensible deal with Mauritius.
