As UK diplomats picked over the rubble of the special relationship caused by Donald Trump’s twitter attack on both Theresa May and the UK’s multicultural society, seasoned foreign policy hands pointed out that there have been serious high level breakdowns in Anglo-US relations in the past, but it is rare for a disagreement to be so public or for a US president to be so insulting to a prime minister or the UK’s sense of its own identity.

The row – at one level banal – may also inject an urgency into a growing debate about UK’s foreign policy alliances in the wake of Brexit, diplomats said.



The UK’s strategic ties with the US are too important to be abandoned, but the relationship is going to be deprived of any warmth and passion so long as Trump remains president, according to Lord Ricketts, the former national security adviser.

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) .@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!

On the immediate issue of the proposed state visit, Ricketts, who has long held the view the invitation was foolishly premature, said: “It had now become an embarrassment, and the can will have to be kicked further down the road into the very long grass.”

For others, such as the former ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer, it is best to got the visit over with. “To cancel the visit would give wide offence beyond Trump’s core support. We have too many interests – economic, defence, intelligence – invested in the relationship to risk that, especially at a time when our relations with Europe hang in the balance.”

One option is to hold a low-key visit at the government-owned estate at Chevening, away from any crowds at Buckingham Palace. But the image of an American president being smuggled in and out of the country by his hosts is said not to attract Trump, and prompted him previously to tell May he did not want to come if the protests were going to overshadow everything.

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Either way, the difficulty now is that the imminence of the visit, or otherwise, is going to be a constant awkward barometer of the state of Downing Street/White House relations. The speed and aplomb with which Emmanuel Macron, no admirer of Trump, managed to pull off Trump’s swift Bastille Day visit to Paris stands as a stark rebuke to the UK’s relative flat-footedness.

Ricketts accused Trump of incredibly bad judgment, and added he did not think the president was going to change.

Nor does it mean the British were wrong to get close to the Trump team. The foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, has made every effort to develop friendships with figures such as Jared Kushner, the president’s son in law. In efforts to ingratiate himself Johnson even implausibly described Trump as essentially a liberal New Yorker. But even he has retreated from role as spokesman for the administration in the Commons.

The retweeting of the far right lies about the UK appears to have crossed a line that even protocol-conscious ministers in the Foreign Office could not tolerate. In tweets both the Middle East minister, Alistair Burt, and the Foreign Office minister Lord Ahmad did not just confine themselves to a defence of Muslims in the UK, but instead personally criticised Trump.

Alistair Burt (@AlistairBurtUK) As Minister for the Middle East, proud of our relationships with the Islamic world and those within it, the White House tweets are both alarming and despairing tonight. This is so not where the world needs to go.

LordAhmadofWimbledon (@tariqahmadbt) @realDonaldTrump to show support for vile&racist outfits is wrong, insulting to Britain & fuels extremism- the gr8 diversity of Britain is our strength. The way we are defeating terror is through unity not division

The hope inside the Foreign Office is that Trump will delete the tweets and apologise, but it is not something any minister has yet dared demand in public, partly because Trump is unlikely to alienate his political base by doing so. There is also an overriding need to keep an open door to the grown-ups in the rest of the Trump administration. Many Republicans are appalled by Trump’s behaviour, with one accusing him of single-handedly wrecking the special relationship.

Ricketts argued on Sky News that it was best to take the long view. “The crucial thing is the strategic relationship we have with the US – the defence and intelligence relationship – they are much longer lasting and much bigger than one round of tweets.” In the immediate term the UK may increasingly work around Trump on key issues such as the Iran nuclear deal, climate change, counter-terrorism or trade relations, including the tariffs imposed on Bombardier.

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Many diplomats, and not just in the UK, said the critical task would be to build relations with other branches of the Trump administration.

Ricketts concluded by saying the episode threw up a wider challenge: “I would like to see a serious debate going on about how we are going to perform as an independent country after 40 years of always thinking how do we influence the EU, and how do we work within the EU and alongside the US.

“Honestly, it needs a foreign secretary who is out there with authority, who commands respect and who is doing a serious representation of Britain as a post-Brexit country. I do not see that at the moment.”

To that extent, the row with Trump, ironically a great supporter of Brexit, has just increased the angst that “Global Britain” may turn into “Irrelevant Britain”.