Alex Burghart has urged the Prime Minister to “park and forget” his Chagos surrender deal after facing a fresh swipe from US President Donald Trump.
Speaking to GB News, Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party hit out at the “stupid” deal, arguing that Mr Trump “doesn’t want it to be done”.
“Most of them say they have ownership. Somebody has ownership that never showed up before after decades and centuries. I think it’s ridiculous.”
Reacting to the criticism on GB News, Mr Burghart said that he hopes the Government now has an “understanding” that the Chagos deal is “dead”.
He said: “I hope that one of the things that came out of that meeting with President Trump yesterday was a kind of background understanding with the Labour Party that this is dead, and they’re just now trying to save face, or ‘we’ll try and find another way of doing it’.
“No, the President doesn’t want it done, and he doesn’t want it done for a reason. It’s because it’s a stupid idea.”
Alex Burghart has told Andy Burnham to park his ‘ridiculous’ Chagos surrender after meeting with Donald Trump
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GB NEWS / PA
The Tory deputy urged the Prime Minister to “forget” the deal and focus on increasing the UK’s defence spending.
He argued: “This is the moment to just park it and forget about it, and if the Conservatives were in charge right now, that’s what we’ll be doing.
“And if Kemi was Prime Minister right now, we would be ready to spend three per cent of GDP on defence at the end of this parliament, which is what we need given everything that’s happening in Eastern Europe at the moment.”
Mr Burghart accused the Labour Government of “dragging its heels” on defence spending despite running the country amid “the biggest war in Europe since 1945”.
Donald Trump has told Andy Burnham the Chagos Islands deal is ‘terrible’ in the latest withering assessment of the giveaway from the US | REUTERSHe told GB News: “We have a plan to get to 3.5 per cent by the end of the next parliament, but instead, the Labour Party, even though we’ve got the biggest war in Europe since 1945, is dragging its heels to the point they were supposed to tell us how this was going to happen last summer.
“And then now, they now say they’re not going to tell us until next summer. It’s like they don’t read the news. It’s just terrifying.”
Asked how he felt the meeting between Mr Burnham and Mr Trump went overall, Mr Burghart admitted that it “wasn’t a disaster” for the Prime Minister.
He said: “It wasn’t a disaster. It could have been a disaster, but it wasn’t a disaster.
Mr Burghart told GB News that the meeting between Andy Burnham and Donald Trump ‘wasn’t a disaster’
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GB NEWS
“And I say, what I take some hope from is that the President said, we’ve got this terrible Chagos thing going on, and the Prime Minister said he’ll look at it again, and Andy Burnham said yes. So if that came out of it, I’m all in favour of that.”
Asked for his verdict on Andy Burnham’s plans for a new information defence centre, Mr Burghart made clear that he must “see the detail” before “celebrating” the move.
He said: “We’ve really got to see the details on this one don’t we, because we know that there are Russian agents online and Iranian agents online and that they do spread misinformation, that they do basically try and encourage British people to argue with each other, and that’s a real thing.
“But we have to be quite careful before we say, right, the Government is now going to tell us what’s information and misinformation. I want to know that Conservative views are not going to be caught in this dragnet, so let’s see the detail on this before we start celebrating.”
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