Cancelled: US diplomats have quietly shelved plans for a 'working visit' by Donald Trump to Britain in the new year - AP

US diplomats have dropped plans for Donald Trump to conduct a visit to Britain in January amid a war of words between the two countries’ leaders.

Mr Trump, the US president, had been penciled in for a ‘working visit’ in the first month of 2018 to formally open America’s new London embassy.

The trip, a scaled down version of a state visit with no meeting with the Queen, was intended to allow Mr Trump to come to the UK while avoiding the mass protests a full state visit would likely trigger.

However, The Telegraph can reveal that the trip has been pushed into the long grass, with no new date in the diary picked.

A senior US diplomat said: "The idea of a visit has obviously been floated, but not December and not January. I would not expect a Trump visit in January."

It comes with relations between Theresa May and Mr Trump deteriorating in a public spat over the US president’s tweeting of videos posted by Britain First, a far-Right group.

Mrs May used her first public comments on the matter to rebuke Mr Trump, saying he was “wrong” to share the videos and insisting her cabinet ministers would never do the same.

Doing nothing to disguise her frustration, Mrs May denounced Britain First as a "hateful organisation" that "seeks to spread mistrust and division within our communities".

She also appeared to question America’s record of keeping the far-Right in check and poked fun at Mr Trump’s love of Twitter by saying she rarely looked at the social media platform.

Sir Kim Darroch, the British ambassador in Washington, has formally complained to the White House about Mr Trump’s behavior.

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The row is the most serious breakdown in trust between Mrs May and Mr Trump since he took office earlier this year and throws into question her decision to get close to the US president.

It began when Mr Trump shared three anti-Muslim videos posted by Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of Britain First, with his 43 million followers on Twitter.

They purported to show a “Muslim migrant” attacking a Dutch boy, a Muslim destroying a Virgin Mary statue and an “Islamist mob” pushing a teenager off a roof.

Some of the information in the messages proved incorrect and the tweets drew condemnation from Cabinet ministers and Mrs May’s own spokesman.

However, Mr Trump hit back late on Wednesday night, tweeting:

.@Theresa_May, don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 30, 2017

The comment escalated calls for Mrs May to rescind the offer of a formal state visit to Mr Trump, which was made in January but is yet to take place.

The Telegraph has learned that the briefer initial visit which had been penciled in for January 2018 has now also been delayed.

A well-placed source confirmed that a January visit would not be happening but said the decision was not linked to this week’s Twitter row.

Mrs May doubled down on her Government’s criticism of Mr Trump during a visit to Jordan on Thursday, saying: “I am very clear that retweeting from Britain First was the wrong thing to do.”

Asked about the group and whether Mr Trump was legitimising them, Mrs May said: "I think that we must all take seriously the threat that far-Right groups pose, both in terms of the terrorist threat that is posed by those groups and the necessity of dealing with extremist material which is far-Right as well.

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