Theresa May’s hopes of rebooting Britain’s special relationship with the US has suffered a slight glitch after the White House misspelled her name multiple times in the schedule for her meeting with Donald Trump on Friday.

Staff in the new administration missed the “h” out of the prime minister’s name when they laid out the running order for her meeting with the new president in Washington.

A copy of the schedule for Theresa May’s White House visit shows the misspelling of her name. It appeared three times in total before being corrected. Photograph: White House

It was misspelled first in the introduction to the daily guidance and press schedule and then twice more when giving details of when she will meet Trump for talks and a “working luncheon”.

The spelling mistake was later corrected but the staff might have been influenced by the fame of the prime minister’s near namesake, Saint Teresa of Calcutta, better known as Mother Teresa. Theresa is seen by some as a northern European variant of Teresa.

Nor would the staff have been helped by the declining popularity of the name in the US. Theresa did not rank in the 1,000 most popular female first names in the US, according to a list compiled in 2011.



The prime minister will become the first foreign leader to visit Trump at the White House in a meeting she hopes will help renew ties between Britain and America.



The two leaders will spend about an hour in face-to-face talks on Friday in the Oval Office, where Trump has restored a bust of Winston Churchill removed by predecessor Barack Obama.