Call for cancelling Trump’s UK visit over Twitter row with May

UK rebukes Trump for retweeting inflammatory anti- Muslim videos

visit to Britain, which has been highly controversial ever since Ms May extended the invitation at her first meeting with him at the White House in January, to be cancelled.

London mayor Sadiq Khan, who has been involved in a series of spats with Mr Trump, said it was “increasingly clear that any official visit at all from President Trump to Britain would not be welcomed”. He said Mr Trump’s actions were “a betrayal of the special relationship between our two countries”.

“The Prime Minister of our country should be using any influence she and her government claim to have with the president and his administration to ask him to delete these tweets and to apologise to the British people.”

Mr Trump drew fierce condemnation at home and abroad for retweeting three incendiary antiMuslim videos posted by Jayda Fransen, deputy head of the British farright group Britain First, who has been convicted of a hate crime.

Ms May said through a spokesman that Mr Trump was “wrong” to promote the “hateful narratives” of the group.

Local government minister Sajid Javid said Mr Trump had “endorsed the views of a vile, hate- filled racist organisation that hates me and people like me. He is wrong and I refuse to let it go and say nothing.”

But the immediate response from the government after Mr Trump’s rebuke appeared muted.

“In the end, our relationship with the United States has a longevity to it that will succeed long after Presidents come and go,” education secretary Justine Greening said.

“This is a President that behaves unlike any other in the nature of the tweets he puts out. I don’t believe that should be able to undermine an overall important relationship with our country,” she said on BBC Radio.

Ann Coulter, a rightwing US commentator who is followed by Mr Trump on Twitter and may have inspired his retweets, defended him in an interview with BBC

radio. “I think he has only given as good as he gets. I think he has been verbally attacked from the mother country for a lot longer than he has been attacking Britain.” Ms Coulter said.

“People retweeting videos are not researching the bios of the people who sent the video,” she said.

Mr Trump’s interventions in British politics have strained the so- called “special relationship”. He has infuriated British authorities with his tweets on terrorism in UK. Before Mr Trump’s latest missive, the White House had scrambled to limit the fallout, saying that even if the anti- Muslim videos were misleading, the President was pointing out a real problem.