Nothing quite says sovereignty like not even being able to surrender when and what you want. There was no case for the UK giving up Chagos Arch. The work Yuan Yi Zhu has done for us makes that abundantly clear. There was no pretend-legal case; there was no case in terms of alliance diplomacy; there wasn’t even a case in terms of squalid domestic Mauritian politics. In other words, it was just yet another Jonathan Powellesque balls-up. And unwanted confirmation that, by some distance, his cohort were the weakest entrants to the Office in the twentieth century. Garbage people producing garage results and smug with it. Yet the thing is, our government wanted to give the BIOT away and couldn’t even do that. 

Let us not engage in any pretence here: “Camp Thunder Cove” is an American military and diplomatic asset which we have no control over. This is BTINO: British territory in name only. That we have not managed, albeit as a legal fiction, to give the place away is humiliation beyond even Michael Gove’s EU border inside the UK. That, at least, was the product of real external pressure, and actual domestic political imperatives, desires and ambitions. Here there was none of that.

There was neither domestic constituency for militantly maintaining the fiction that we own (let alone run) Chagos Arch. Nor was there any camp, outside the clique of legal perverts who make up Keir Starmer’s five known friends, who wanted us to de jure give away the place we already very obviously don’t control. Yet that’s what our sovereign, lawful, actual government decided to do and has proven unable to accomplish.

There’s a strong chance that the new government in Mauritius is not content with making Jonathan Powell seem a bigger fool than normal, and that this latest development is simply rational rent seeking on their part. They’ve seen that London is literally willing to pay to be done with the fiction of British sovereignty. So the only question for them is how much will this cost us, and that some version of the original deal will therefore ultimately happen. But we should reflect on just how empty this thing we supposedly have is.

If the BIOT is British, it’s ours to dispose of as we see fit

The constituency in Trumpworld who want to stop this deal is strong, motivated and, by their lights, right. Many of their British friends are gleeful at the prospect of the embarrassment it will cause Starmer and Lammy. Almost all of these people are rock-ribbed British patriots, and a fair few of them are lunatic would-be Chinese cold warriors. What is the result of their patriotism, and what is the means by which it is to be accomplished? That a foreign government — in this instance, the incoming Trump administration — will tell us what we may or may not do with what is supposedly sacred British territory. Stow that — stow that very hard indeed.

If the BIOT is British, it’s ours to dispose of as we see fit. We could kick the Americans out, for example (showing that the UK had sovereign power on a par with, say, the Philippines turfing the US out of Subic Bay in 1992). Try not to laugh, but that would be actual sovereignty. However, we’re (palpably and painfully) in truth about as sovereign over Chagos Arch as the Cubans are over Guantánamo Bay. 

Then there’s the why. Why should we want to have a notional claim to strategic territory which doesn’t serve our strategy? And this disservice can’t be stressed enough. We have no control over what happens on Chagos Arch. We aren’t told what the Americans do with “our” rocks; we don’t know what they do; and if we did, we wouldn’t be able to stop them from doing what they want, but which we might not. These are, in absolute fact, American rocks: so much that so that we cannot even give away the pretence of them being ours without their permission. There are post-Soviet Russian client states which aren’t this servile and abject in the face of their master. 

What good does our pretending to own Chagos Arch do us (in the absence of kicking the Americans out)? Nothing. It doesn’t add to the high level relationship with the US. And not just because that relationship is merely how high we jump — and whether they even bother to ask us to pathetically do so before we arthritically spring into the air to voluntarily slobber all over them in return for bupkis.

Whatever supposed good, for us, is adduced by British supporters of diplomatic servitude to the US would happen regardless of whether we pretend to own Chagos Arch or not. Name the treat we’d lose if we stopped pretending to own the BIOT? Assuredly Washington is more than capable of declining to pay heed to any pretence by wherever the capital of Mauritius is that they might exercise a suzerainty over Diego Garcia which London cannot. 

“China!” then becomes the blether. Something something China. And no doubt China. No doubt Diego Garcia will be as great gamefully useful for the Americans versus China as it was to us versus Japan, all the while denying it to India too. But that’s their confrontation with China. Which they’re going to have with China whether they want to or not. Which they’re going to wage whether we want them to or not. And which will happen with us, our imaginary Australian nuclear boats notwithstanding, being incapable of playing any significant role in it. 

That British irrelevance is a happy state we should delight in, as America’s hegemonic fight with China is something we’re well off out of. Think Iraq, or Afghanistan, for ruinously stupid act of needless self-harm we could have opted out of, but then make it a thousand, millions times worse. There are deep waters round Chagos Arch: we don’t control them and we shouldn’t pretend to. Let those who want to fight over them, and can, do so: it’s their fight, not ours.