Donald Trump likes to brag about his prowess as a negotiator, but he has nothing on the government of Mauritius, which pulled one of history’s great diplomatic heists yesterday, when it announced that the British government had agreed to give it the Chagos Islands, which have been sovereign British territory without interruption since 1814.

To add insult to injury, not only will Mauritius gain a new colony, but it will collect large rents from the Americans for the military base on Diego Garcia, while the British government will pay hefty financial support to Mauritius (Africa’s third richest country on a per capita basis) for the honour of handing over to Mauritius one of the world’s most strategically valuable territories.

Britain has just announced that it is run by the world’s most gullible ruling class

In other words, not only is Mauritius having its cake and eating it too, it has also extracted from the British taxpayer a new cake, to be savoured while it smugly lectures the world about the importance of decolonisation.

Never mind that Mauritius sold the Chagos Islands to the United Kingdom in 1965 for the-then astronomical sum of £3 million and a valuable British security guarantee. Its prime minister had described the islands as “a portion of our territory of which very few people knew… which is very far from here, and which we had never visited”, so it was no big loss.

In the 1980s, a new government changed its mind and decided to get the islands back. It alleged the British had threatened to withhold independence from Mauritius unless it agreed to sell the territory. The small problem was that every single surviving Mauritian negotiator cheerfully admitted that they didn’t care about the Chagos, whose inhabitants they regarded as half-civilised savages.

And the blackmail thesis suffered from the fact that Britain in the 1960s could not get rid of its remaining colonies fast enough—Mauritius had to wait a few more years for independence because part of its population wanted it to remain a British territory.

Mauritius then decided to wave the bloody shirt of the Chagossians, who had been callously expelled by the British to make way for the air base and dumped on Mauritius. The fact that the Mauritian treated them terribly—so terribly, in fact, that thousands of them left for the UK,  the country which had deported them in the first place—was but a minor detail.

In 2019, Mauritius managed to get the International Court of Justice to say that the islands should be given to Mauritius. The ruling was not even legally binding, but Mauritius was somehow able to convince gullible Whitehall functionaries that Britain had no choice but to give the islands to Mauritius.

But Mauritius’ masterstroke was to corner Liz Truss at the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 2022. The helpless Truss blurted out that she would negotiate the island’s sovereignty with the Mauritians. Decades of British government policy had been trashed in a couple of minutes.

The negotiations took place without the consent or the involvement of the Chagossians, most of whom are resolutely opposed to Mauritius getting the islands. Meanwhile, Mauritius made it a crime, punishable by a decade in prison, for anyone to challenge its claim to the Chagos with the “support” of a foreign government, no matter where they lived in the world. That was enough to terrify many Chagossians into silence.

With terrifying irony, Mauritius had meanwhile leased one of its far-flung islands to India, and began to depopulate it, just as the British had done in the Chagos decades prior. All of this was cheered on by gullible British progressives and expensive British KCs who were happy to repeat Mauritian talking points.

The Chagossians, whose only sin was to inhabit islands which were crucial to the defence of the Western alliance against communism, have been betrayed once again by the British government. Mauritius walks away smelling of roses and a few millions richer in its pocket, as are its lawyers. As for Britain, it has just announced that it is run by the world’s most gullible ruling class.

Yuan Yi Zhu is a Senior Research Fellow at Policy Exchange. His two reports on the Chagos Islands for Policy Exchange can be read here and here.