Ex-Foreign Office mandarin Lord McDonald warns Labour ministers towards caving to Mauritius on Chagos Islands as they’re ‘overplaying hand’
Mauritius is ‘overplaying its hand’ with demands for more money to secure the Chagos Islands, a former top mandarin has warned.
Simon McDonald, who was the most senior civil servant at the Foreign Office and head of the Diplomatic Service between 2015 and 2020, urged the UK to stand firm.
Britain agreed to hand over the Chagos Islands archipelago, also known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, to Mauritius in October.
But Mauritius has reportedly asked for £800million a year and ‘billions of pounds in reparations’ as part of the negotiations – described as ‘crazy money’ by a source familiar with the talks.
Lord McDonald told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the Mauritian government is ‘overplaying its hand’.
‘It is not at all unusual for a new government to come in, as a new government has come in in the last two months in Mauritius, and look at what its predecessor has done and think “we could do better”,’ he said.
‘And that was the spirit of the initial exchanges between London and Port Louis, but the new government is not looking to tweak the agreements as far as I can see, but to ask for many multiples more pounds or dollars from the UK.
‘It feels to me that they are overdoing it and they will not succeed.’
Lord Simon McDonald, the former top civil servant at the Foreign Office, urged the UK to stand firm
Diego Garcia, part of the Chagos Islands. Britain agreed to hand over the Chagos Islands archipelago, also known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, to Mauritius in October
Sir Keir Starmer (pictured) has been facing calls to abandon his surrender of the archipelago after Mauritius’ new government rejected a proposed deal and started demanding more money
Lord McDonald urged the UK government to ‘keep negotiating’ and not to accept the demands for extra money.
‘[Mauritian PM Navin] Ramgoolam is new in office but he is not the only new factor on the horizon – the other is President Trump,’ he added.
‘It’s three weeks until the inauguration and if he thinks it is going to get easier when we have a new president in the Oval Office, he doesn’t have long to wait to be disabused.’
Lord McDonald, now a crossbench peer, said the UK would not ‘be pushed as far as Mauritius is trying right now’.
‘If there is no agreement, this will linger maybe for many more years, and if it lingers that means Mauritians will get nothing.’
Under the deal, the UK would give up sovereignty over the islands, including Diego Garcia, which houses a strategically important UK-US military base.
The British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) or Chagos Islands (formerly the Oil Islands) is an overseas territory of the United Kingdom situated in the Indian Ocean, halfway between Africa and Indonesia
Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos archipelago
But it was struck before elections in both Mauritius and the US and senior figures in the incoming Trump administration have voiced doubts about it.
Mr Ramgoolam has said the draft deal ‘would not produce the benefits that the nation could expect’ and that negotiations had restarted.
In a joint statement earlier this month, the UK and Mauritius said they hoped to finalise the deal to hand back the Chagos Islands ‘as quickly as possible’.
