‘Thick-skinned’ Trump will defy protesters and come to London
The Left is having an attack of the vapours over The Donald’s UK visit — even though they cheered his love-in with Macron. What hypocrites, says ROBERT HARDMAN. With the U.S. booming and North Korea tamed, we should . . .
DONALD Trump will defy warnings of mass protests and insist on coming to London when he makes his first visit to Britain as US President.
Officials in Whitehall had considered staging some or all of the trip on Friday July 13 away from the capital amid fears of violent demonstrations.
But the US ambassador to Britain said yesterday the President would ‘definitely’ not be staying away from London.
Robert ‘Woody’ Johnson told LBC radio that Mr Trump was ‘thick-skinned’ enough to deal with protests and suggested he might be able to win over critics such as London mayor Sadiq Khan.
Protesters vowed a ‘carnival of resistance’ after it was confirmed that Mr Trump would make a working visit to London this summer. Concern over possible demonstrations is thought to have played a part in the cancellation of a trip to open the new US embassy in London earlier this year.
The threat of protests is also believed to be behind the postponement of a state visit last year. The trip – which would involve a stay with the Queen at Buckingham Palace – has been put off indefinitely but Mr Johnson suggested it may take place next year.
The ambassador was unable to confirm who Mr Trump will meet in July, but asked if it could include the Queen, he told LBC’s Nick Ferrari: ‘I think he really wants to meet the Queen. He knows that the valueadded of the Royal Family and what they bring to the table is enormous.’
Asked how concerned the President is about protests, Mr Johnson said: ‘He’s very thick-skinned. He knows what he wants to do and he speaks in a very clear and unusual way from most politicians.’
The ambassador sparked a fresh row after he suggested the President’s combative nature stems from his Scottish roots. Mr Trump, whose mother was born on the Isle of Lewis, made frequent visits to Scotland before becoming President. Mr Johnson said: ‘ The Scots are tough and argumentative. All the things he brings to the table to the American people come from Scotland.’
But Alistair Carmicheal, the Lib Dem MP for Orkney and Shetland, said last night: ‘The idea that Trump is anything like most Scots is nothing short of laughable. Most Scots are open, fun and tolerant, three words you’d never associate with Trump.
‘If he ever came back to Scotland, there would no doubt be thousands of people protesting his hate-filled divisive politics.’
THE Left never did get irony. think of all those millionaire luvvies and comedians mocking the miserly tories while exploiting every tax loophole.
think of all the student unions, proclaiming freedom of speech while banning every incorrect voice.
think of the virulent anti-Semitism of the hard Left.
But yesterday surely took the prize as Britain awoke to two big headlines.
First, the leaders of North and South Korea were finally meeting to pledge an end to the 68-year-old Korean War.
And second, Donald trump was finally making plans for a trip over to Britain in the summer.
the Korean breakthrough is trump’s handiwork. had it not been for his forthright interventions, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un might have been testing another missile yesterday morning instead of swapping jokes with his South Korean opposite number.
And yet, at that very moment, trump-bashers were already calling for massive street demonstrations to send Britain’s most important ally packing when he arrives here on July 13.
One foot-stamping representative of the ‘Stop trump Coalition’ breathlessly reeled off the President’s purported crimes against humanity when she was invited on to Radio 4. Another tribune of the perpetually offended was over on Radio 5 Live pledging a ‘carnival of resistance’ against the democratically-elected leader of the Western world.
For their part, the Lib Dems have pledged to be ‘ front and centre’ of every demonstration.
LONDON’S selfie- obsessed Labour Mayor, Sadiq Khan, has assured the President that ‘we have got a great history in our city of protests’. One of his Labour boroughs has declared itself a ‘trump-free zone’.
if Khan can’t accept the will of the U.S. electorate, how dare he claim to speak for the entire population of a city which thrives on U.S. investment?
they just don’t get it, do they? Or perhaps they do get it, and it is just too awkward to admit.
Because having demonised trump as the fifth horseman of the apocalypse when he was elected nearly 18 months ago, things have actually turned out really rather well.
the Koreas are talking and, finally, a U. S. president is actually prepared to enforce ex-president Barack Obama’s red lines on chemical weapons in Syria (instead of merely talking about it).
Employment is up, and the U.S. economy, despite the odd wobble, is booming — which means ours is, too.
And regardless of the relentless and corrosive barrage of rudeness directed at him by our political classes, Mr trump still seems genuinely fond of the UK, and keen to sort out a post-Brexit trade deal. his predecessor, Mr Obama, we should recall, told us that we would be at the ‘back of the queue’ when it came to all that.
Yet still the Left — from centre-ground hand-wringers all the way out to the crazies on the neo-Marxist horizon — are already heaping abuse on the man ahead of his visit.
Whatever your grievance, folks, they’ll claim it’s trump’s fault.
Above all, it’s the hypocrisy that stinks. For you will have noticed a certain narrative being pumped out by Labour MPs and arch-Remainers all this week as France’s President, Emmanuel Macron, enjoyed his state visit to Washington.
We heard it on BBC1’ s Question time on thursday night, notably from the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas.
Oh, look at the marvellous Macron, the argument goes. hasn’t he wooed trump brilliantly while that fool theresa May has got it so wrong. Our Prime Minister promised trump a state visit more than a year ago, and is now reduced to offering a downgraded ‘official’ visit. Pathetic Britain! Where’s your special relationship now, eh?
take a look at the facts behind the Macron-trump bromance. Macron’s trip to the U.S. followed trump’s visit to Paris last summer — with dinner up the Eiffel tower plus guest-of-honour status at the July 14 Bastille Day parade.
And why did that pass off so smoothly? it’s because
France can still be a quasi-police state when it wants to, and has no qualms about suppressing embarrassing protests.
I was in Paris throughout that visit. I was struck not only by the way in which the authorities declared that all anti-Trump protests should only take place at the eastern end of the city (miles away from the U.S. President) but also by the craven way in which the demonstrators obeyed.
All those fearless ‘activists’ simply did as they were told and trotted off to the Place de la Republique to preach to each other. As a result, Mr Trump never saw a single hostile banner (if one appeared, it was immediately confiscated) and never heard a barbed remark.
Picture the howls of high-minded outrage if the Metropolitan Police did the same in London come July. Just imagine if Mrs May announced that all London protests would be restricted to Islington and Tower Hamlets.
Would Mr Khan, the Lib Dems, the ‘ Stop Trump Coalition’, the Momentum bovver boys and all the rest meekly slope off to demonstrate elsewhere? Of course not.
It is precisely because Mrs May is
more of a bleeding heart liberal than nice, shiny Monsieur Macron that all these furious people will be able to hold their ‘ carnival of resistance’ in the first place.
Not that I imagine Mr Trump will set foot in London anyway. He is coming on a Friday. The Queen will be at Windsor and the Prime Minister will be at Chequers. Both places have excellent helicopter landing facilities.
But I have one question for the shouty, two-faced Left.
Where were you last week, when London welcomed the members of the Commonwealth to Britain? Of its 53 member states, 37 are notably less liberal than the U. S. because they criminalise homosexuality. And yet there was barely a squeak of protest.
I was at the Commonwealth summit from beginning to end. Not one banner.
Yesterday, Corbynista Guardian writer Owen Jones was busy calling for a ‘carnival against hatred’ in advance of the Trump visit.
Yet during the Commonwealth People’s Forum last week, I saw Jones was not merely attending the conference. He was chairing it. At least Jones was one of the tiny handful who turned up to protest the last time the King of Saudi Arabia paid a state visit to the UK. But where was the rest of morally- upstanding Britain? Nowhere to be seen.
Human rights groups routinely point out that critics of the Saudi government are executed or jailed without a proper trial, while women are second-class citizens who face systemic discrimination.
And yet it’s Donald Trump who is pilloried as the enemy of womankind.
True, he was recorded making deeply sexist remarks in private 13 years ago. But he doesn’t ban women from wearing jeans and voting in general elections. Would you rather be a woman in Saudi Arabia or in Trump’s U.S?
The fact is that it was a Labour government which invited the most deplorable visitor ever to spend a night beneath the roof of Buckingham Palace.
Jim Callaghan was prime minister when the brutal Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, came to London to be feted by the British establishment.
The Queen found him so disagreeable that she even hid behind a bush in the Palace garden to avoid speaking to him while walking the Corgis.
But the Communist despot and Callaghan got along just fine. Britain signed a lucrative aviation deal as a result ( it fell apart afterwards, of course, when Romania failed to pay the bill).
The Queen will have no problem at all welcoming Mr Trump. Indeed, they have much in common. Both had Scottish mothers and both own large chunks of Scotland.
Mr Trump will certainly be more respectful than one of his Democrat predecessors. On his first visit to Britain in 1977, president Jimmy Carter was invited to a reception at Buckingham Palace where he decided to kiss the Queen Mother on the lips.
‘I took a sharp step backwards — not far enough!’ she later recalled, adding that no one had done that to her since the death of her husband, King George VI.
Mr Trump will be on his best behaviour.
Anti-Trumpers also like to sneer that he will be deeply offended not to receive a carriage procession through the streets of London.
That is utter nonsense and always has been.
No U.S. president since Woodrow Wilson in 1918 has had a royal carriage procession for the simple reason that the security heavies will not allow any president to be ferried through foreign streets in a horse-drawn wooden box.
Even Barack Obama — for whom there were no protests during his 2011 state visit — did not enjoy the Royal Mews experience.
Mr Trump’s visit will almost certainly be a replica of the historic 1982 visit of Ronald Reagan. That was not a state visit but an ‘official’ visit. He did not meet the Queen at Buckingham Palace but at Windsor Castle.
Back then, the two heads of state went riding. That is unlikely to happen on this occasion as Mr Trump is not much of a horseman, but Windsor will provide an even more spectacular setting than Buckingham Palace.
It is also a fortress. The protesters can make all the noise they like on the outskirts of town but they will find that they are drowned out by the Heathrow flightpath.
As Prince Philip has pointed out, the noise at Windsor is now so bad that if the Queen records a Christmas broadcast there, she has to do it in ‘little 30-second slots’ between aircraft movements.
WERE I organising President Trump’s visit, I would bring him in to Britain via a U.S. Air Force base such as RAF Lakenheath, a reminder of America’s central role in the defence of this country.
First stop might be a trip to the immaculate and eternally moving American cemetery at Madingley outside Cambridge, final resting place of nearly 4,000 U. S. servicemen who died on British soil during World War II.
It would be a swift helicopter ride from there to Windsor and lunch with the Queen, and an even swifter one to Chequers for tea and talks with the Prime Minister. From there, Mr Trump could fly to his Ayrshire golf course, Trump Turnberry, for the evening.
He was last there on the morning after Britain voted to leave the EU. I well remember the surreal sight as we watched his helicopter coming in to land on the manicured lawn at the very moment David Cameron was resigning in London. Rather than take issue with Mr Trump, the locals regard him as the saviour of a once- dilapidated golfing treasure.
It is absolutely right that Britain gives its most important ally an effusive and heartfelt welcome. It is, of course, also everyone’s right to protest. But the selfappointed forces of righteousness occupying the moral high ground must explain why they reserve such splenetic bile for an Anglophile whose help we badly need at a pivotal economic and political moment — while happily turning a blind eye to so much injustice everywhere else.
But then, this is not really a ‘carnival of resistance’ at all. It is a hypocritical adolescent tantrum which threatens Britain’s best interests and insults the millions of Americans who put Mr Trump in the White House. They voted for him, not us.
So let’s roll out the red carpet — and grow up.