Send Trump to Scotland

Aye.. because he’ll get a warm welcome here

DONALD Trump could be taken to the Western Isles during any state visit to the UK to keep him clear of protests.

Senior Government figures are discussing a plan to send the US president to his mother’s old home on the Isle of Lewis.

The Government fear it would be impossible for a Trump state visit to go ahead unless he can be isolated from thousands of activists who have pledged to disrupt the event.

Though no date has been set, planners have been considering how best to avoid mass protests since Prime Minister Theresa May issued the invite earlier this year.

A Whitehall insider said: “Outside Windsor or Buckingham Palace, the plan was to get him somewhere where as few people as possible could get behind the fence.”

One idea circulated at ministerial level was to involve the president in marking the centenary of the sinking of the HMY Iolaire, a Royal Navy troop ship that hit rocks and sank near Stornoway with the loss of 201 lives on Hogmanay 1918.

The deaths of so many servicemen as they returned home from war still has huge significance on Lewis, where Trump’s mother Mary MacLeod was born six years before the disaster.

British officials have considered using Trump’s family ties to Lewis as cover to get him as far away as possible from protesters who would hound his every move.

The runway at Stornoway airport can take Nato bombers, making it long enough to accommodate Air Force One, the president’s plane.

Gleneagles Hotel, the venue for the G8 conference in 2005, was ruled out as a possible destination because it could conflict with Trump’s business interests in his golf courses in Aberdeenshire and Ayrshire.

The state visit would be in addition to a low-key visit Trump hopes to make next year to officially open the new US embassy in London, which is nearing completion.

More than 100 Labour MPs yesterday put their names to a letter written by Alex Sobel to demand that May cancel any trip here by Trump.