We’ve long known that the Chagos deal is a witch’s brew of competing interests, drawing in the Chinese, a coven of Left-wing lawyers and a Mauritian government eyeing up billions of pounds of British taxpayers’ money.
But this week we can add Brussels, and French and Spanish fishing trawlers, to the toxic soup as well as discreet payments to a shadowy firm founded by National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell, the very man steering the Chagos capitulation. So what on earth is going on?
As The Mail on Sunday reported yesterday, Inter Mediate, an international negotiating organisation which uses intelligence networks to run back channels between key players in crises and disputes, has trousered hundreds of thousands of pounds from the Foreign Office over the period Powell was involved in the shameful sell-out of the Chagos Islands.
What these payments were for, we are not told – which goes to the heart of the transparency issue around the whole sorry Chagos saga.
The surrender of the islands’ sovereignty has never been sold to the British public – it certainly didn’t appear in Labour’s 2024 manifesto. It’s been cooked up by a clique of Left-wing human rights lawyers close to Prime Minister Keir Starmer – some of whom have been paid by the Mauritian government for advice.
Their justification for this dire deal is based on a non-binding legal opinion from a dubious international court populated by state appointees from Russia and China, following a non-binding UN vote.
All this to hand the islands to a country that has never owned them. The Chagos archipelago is as far from Mauritius as London is from St Petersburg. So dubious is the territorial claim that at the weekend Mohamed Muizzu, the president of the Maldives, told the BBC that he will not recognise the ‘deeply concerning’ deal – principally because his country, which is far nearer to Chagos, also claims the islands.
Little wonder that US President Donald Trump has called the handover an ‘act of great stupidity’. Many Britons would agree. Why are we spending billions to give away our own territory? The Government has repeatedly tried to hide the true cost, too. No 10 told taxpayers that only £3.4 billion of their money will be handed to the Mauritian government over the 99-year lease of the joint US-UK military base on Diego Garcia.
An organisation founded by Jonathan Powell, the Prime Minister’s national security adviser received £1 million from the taxpayer following his appointment as the Government’s Chagos envoy
Effectively, the marine-rich waters of Chagos will become prey to rapacious French and Spanish trawlers if the deal goes ahead
Yet last August, the Conservative Party obtained figures produced by the Government Actuary’s Department which has the figure closer to £35 billion, after inflation is factored in – a quite astonishing waste of public money when our Navy, Air Force and Army are crying out for proper funding in an increasingly dangerous world.
Should we add Inter Mediate’s pound of flesh to the Chagos ledger? Not according to the Government, which insisted the payments were unrelated to the policy, though they failed to reveal their actual purpose. And good luck asking Jonathan Powell, as the unelected security svengali – who many believe is the real foreign secretary – does not answer questions in the Commons.
When he was appointed as National Security Adviser in December 2024 – having been Britain’s Chagos envoy since that summer – he stepped down from his role as CEO of Inter Mediate.
Leaning on his experience as a pivotal figure in the Good Friday Agreement, he founded the company in 2011 to lend his negotiating expertise to world leaders. And his firm charges top dollar, as taxpayers found out yesterday. On October 20 2025, three days after the Diego Garcia Military Base Bill was passed in the House of Commons, Inter Mediate was awarded a ‘commitment’ for £700,000. This is in addition to the £349,000 paid to it since Powell’s appointment as Chagos envoy.
While there is no suggestion that he personally pocketed these payments, isn’t there a conflict of interest? We have a hugely influential National Security Adviser apparently steering foreign policy into areas from which his former company gains handsomely. It is a justifiable public interest question to ask: does Powell himself gain from these contracts?
If so, how can this continue? The public’s trust in politics is already stretched wafer-thin by the appointment of another old boy of New Labour, Peter Mandelson, as Washington ambassador. In Northern Ireland, Powell’s service to the state was commendable, but his position now is untenable and it is time for him to stand down from Government.
What role China – an ally of Mauritius, which would sorely like to see Britain and America depart the strategically important base of Diego Garcia – has played in the Chagos deal remains to be seen. In July 2025, Powell met with the Chinese foreign minister to discuss the treaty. Last week, the pair met again in China in an encounter cloaked in secrecy – it was not announced by the UK Government but through a Chinese state press release. What extraordinary irony: a Communist one-party state puts out more information about the meetings of our key officials than we do.
But if Beijing stands to benefit from the Chagos surrender, it is now apparent that Brussels does, too.
Details emerged yesterday of a European Commission report stating that the transfer of sovereignty would ‘further increase the relevance’ of the EU’s existing fishing agreement with Mauritius.
Effectively, the marine-rich waters of Chagos will become prey to rapacious French and Spanish trawlers if the deal goes ahead. Since 2010, Britain has enforced a ‘no take zone’ around Chagos, as it is one of the planet’s largest Marine Protected Areas. Yet the silence from environmentalists is deafening.
For Reform leader Nigel Farage, the EU’s plan to plunder these pristine waters is the ‘final straw’ – this weekend he called the Chagos policy ‘a terrible deal in every respect, including marine conservation’. And as the stench from this surrender grows ever more powerful, it is hard to disagree.
- Dr Bob Seely is author of The New Total War.
