𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Sir Keir Starmer suffered one of his biggest setbacks yet when the United States refused to back his deal to hand sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. He now has extra reason to glare at Dame Priti Patel. The Shadow Foreign Secretary fought behind the scenes in Washington DC to stop the “stupid deal” and prevent the giveaway of British territory.

Back in May last year, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave a full-throttle endorsement of the proposals. Dame Priti was among Conservatives who jetted to the States to convince the Americans the plan to transfer sovereignty to Mauritius but lease back the UK-US Diego Garcia military base was a disaster in the making.

The base is considered vital to countering threats in the Middle East and there are widespread concerns that China will seek to expand its influence in the Indian Ocean. Dame Priti, 54, remains appalled that Labour negotiated the deal, describing it as a “complete and utter outrage”. On Monday the UK Government confirmed the deal was paused indefinitely.

“This shows you how inept, how stupid, how ignorant the Labour Government is, and how out of their depth they are,” she said. “I think the whole thing is just preposterous.”

Dame Priti and fellow opponents of the deal jumped at every opportunity to persuade senators, Congressmen and figures in the White House that the transfer of sovereignty should be derailed. When she visited in February, she says, figures around the administration were “very, very concerned” about what it would mean for the base and “our joint national security”. She insists Labour should not simply put the deal on ice so it can be brought back at a later date.

“The whole thing needs to be scrapped,” she says, pushing Labour to display “some actual courage”.

“Just say [we] got it wrong and no money’s going to go to Mauritius,” she urges.

President Trump’s switch from acceptance of the deal to outright opposition was the game-changing moment.

Members of the administration gave her a clear message: “The President is in charge, he has spoken, his views are very clear, and quite frankly, that’s the end of it.”

She wants the cash saved from the axing of the Chagos handover – which she claims would come to £35billion over the lifetime of the deal, a figure strongly disputed by the Government – to be invested in the UK’s armed forces to “make Britain strong and safe all over again”

“I have seen so many national security threats and challenges to our amazing country,” she says.

The fragility of Britain’s defences have come under the spotlight following the conflict in Iran. She is adamant the Iran crisis must end with the nuclear threat eliminated and the regime’s “proxies” – “Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis” – no longer posing a danger to Britons.

Pressing for determined action to protect British nationals in the region, she says: “This is no hokey-cokey – you can’t have one foot in, one foot out. You know, we have British personnel, we have British nationals in the Middle East region. They are at threat from Iran. We have a duty to protect them.”

Gulf states, she claims, feel “bitterly betrayed and let down” that “Britain wasn’t there at the outset of the Iran conflict, protecting our own bases, protecting the quarter of a million British nationals that live and work out there and travel out there”.

Dame Priti wants Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps proscribed as a terrorist organisation and calls for action to stop “Iranian dirty money” coming into this country.

“We need to protect our country from Iranian operatives operating in the United Kingdom,” she says. “I want to see all of that end.”

She is not afraid to criticise the US president when she believes he has made a mistake – such as when he delivered the threat to Iran that a “whole civilisation” could “die”.

“Those comments are completely detrimental, they’re bellicose and they are unhelpful,” she says. “That’s not something that we would ever support at all.”

However, she remains one of Parliament’s most enthusiastic champions of the “special relationship”.

“Post-Brexit, we have a trading relationship that is first-class, second to none and evolving and developing,” she boasts.

There is nothing synthetic about Dame Priti’s anger towards Labour and the “spineless” prime minister.

“The choices of this Labour government are absolutely idiotic,” she says.

When she knocks on doors in Witham, the Essex constituency she has represented since 2010, voters tell her what they make of the state of UK politics.

“They think this Government’s a joke. And they think this Government is just an insult to Britain’s standing in the world.”

Voters will elect councillors for 136 English local authorities, plus the members of the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, on May 7. Polls suggest this will be a painful moment for the Tories but Dame Priti insists her party is fighting for every vote, “working hard to win back the trust and confidence of the electorate all over again”.

Arguing that “humility goes a long way”, she says the party knows where it “got things wrong”.

She is adamant Britain should drill for oil and gas in the North Sea and secure food supplies in the pursuit of self-sufficiency.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage set a deadline of the May 7 elections for defectors to come across. Was there ever a flicker of temptation for this veteran Brexiteer to follow the likes of Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman and Danny Kruger and join the teal tribe?

“I’m a diehard lifelong Conservative,” she says, laughing at the suggestion.

Dame Priti attacks Reform’s record in councils where it wields power as “absolutely appalling”.

“They’ll promise all sorts of things in that populist party way, and they’re failing to deliver,” she says, not hiding her irritation with Reform’s campaign tactics for one moment.

“They shove out national messages in local election campaigns to mask the fact that they don’t have any agenda locally whatsoever and they are not on the side of local taxpayers.”

She adds: “Reform have to sort themselves out quite frankly. All they do now is have political stunts. They vilify actual MPs and politicians who’ve worked incredibly hard, tried to do the right thing for our country, and they’re just promising people a lot of things that are totally undeliverable.”

She is equally vociferous in her assault on Zack Polanski’s Greens and is dismayed at their support for drugs legalisation. The former Home Secretary claims the Greens would “put our country in jeopardy on so many levels” and “have no credible economic policies whatsoever”.

“I think they’re frightening,” she says.

Dame Priti sees the Labour cabinet as a gang of pro-EU “obsessives” and never forgets that Sir Keir was Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Brexit Secretary. She warns that any attempt to unravel the Brexit settlement as part of the PM’s attempts to reset relations with Brussels would be “totally undemocratic”.

If the UK commits to align with EU regulations this country will once again be a “rule-taker”, she warns, and end up in the “worst of all worlds”.

Are things so bad that Sir Keir could be Labour’s last prime minister?

Dame Priti does not miss a beat: “We’re going to make it that way.”