Trump to meet the Queen
July visit will include talks with Sovereign and PM, but president may avoid London
PRESIDENT Donald Trump will meet the Queen and go to Chequers when he visits Britain in July but will largely avoid London amid fears of mass protests.
The US leader’s long-delayed trip will take place on July 13 but last just 24 hours, and will include talks with Theresa May and an overnight stay, the White House announced last night.
Boris Johnson said the news was “fantastic” but senior Labour figures warned that critics would not hold their tongues during the trip.
Mr Trump is understood to have approved the visit after weeks of negotiations between his staff, No10 and the UK embassy in Washington.
Confirmation of the visit has prompted renewed fears of protests – one of the reasons Mr Trump has delayed coming to Britain for so long. Activists on Facebook immediately appealed for co-ordinated demonstrations to coincide with the trip.
It offers a chance for Mrs May to improve her relationship with Mr Trump, which figures close to both leaders acknowledge is not especially warm.
Emmanuel Macron’s three-day state visit to America this week, where the French and US leaders heralded a new “special relationship”, has cast the Maytrump relationship in a harsh light.
Friday July 13 was chosen as the date because Mr Trump, who does not enjoy long-distance travel, is in Brussels for a Nato meeting on July 11 and 12. It will not be the full state visit offered to Mr Trump days after his inauguration, for which a date has yet to be set.
While the exact details of the trip remain under discussion, Mr Trump could theoretically visit the Queen at Windsor Castle, and never see London at all. He is expected to hold talks with Mrs May at Chequers but largely avoid the capital to minimise his exposure to the expected protests.
Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, said yesterday: “If he comes to London, President Trump will experience an open and diverse city that has always chosen unity over division and hope over fear. He will also, no doubt, see that Londoners hold their liberal values of freedom of speech very dear.”
It is also thought that Mr Trump could attend a rally outside London to raise money for the Armed Forces.
Mr Trump will not address both Houses of Parliament – an honour that has been accorded to previous US presidents – because of opposition from John Bercow, the Commons speaker. Last November Mr Bercow said addressing the Commons was “an earned honour and in my view he [Trump] has not earned that honour”. A spokesman for the Speaker’s Office said: “Mr Speaker’s views ... are a matter of public record. In any case, no request has been received.”
Mr Johnson tweeted: “FANTASTIC news that President Donald Trump will at last come to Britain on 13 July. Looking forward to seeing our closest ally and friend on the GREATEST visit ever.”
JAPAN and China fear being frozen out of historic talks with North Korea as the US and Seoul take the lead in pushing for denuclearisation of the rogue regime.
The North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, is due to set foot in South Korea for the first time today for talks with Moon Jae-in, the South’s president, a prelude to a proposed summit with Donald Trump in June. The North’s powerful neighbours have been increasingly voicing fears of being left out as the future security of the peninsula is decided.
China is pushing for a “collective body” to negotiate with Kim, or fourparty talks which would potentially exclude Japan. “Whether it is four or six, the number is not key as long as China is involved,” Zhao Tong, a nuclear analyst at the Carnegie-tsinghua Centre for Global Policy, said.
Meanwhile, Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, is pushing for his own meeting with Kim amid fears Japanese interests could be ignored. Tokyo is reportedly concerned that the US will only require the destruction of North Korea’s intercontinental ballistic missiles, leaving Japanese interests still exposed to medium range missiles.
Mr Abe also wants the return of Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea, and an end to the regime’s chemical and biological weapons stockpiles.
Sheila Smith, a Japan expert in Washington, said the Japanese “understand that when Kim is talking about denuclearisation he doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing that we mean”.
She told The New York Times: “I think it may be that the Abe cabinet is still a little nervous that Trump is still going to say, ‘See, I did it’, claim a win and walk away.” Meanwhile, Mr Trump revealed that a recent meeting in Pyongyang between Mike Pompeo, who was confirmed as US secretary of state yesterday, and Kim lasted over an hour.
Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, later tweeted a picture of the meeting.
The US president said he was considering three or four dates, and five locations, for his summit with Kim.
He told Fox News: “This is a much more dangerous ball game now, but I will tell you it’s going very well. The nuclear war would have happened if you had weak people.” Mr Trump added: “I’m saying to myself, ‘Wait a minute, all of these things he [Kim] has given up, and we haven’t even really that much asked them.’ I never gave up anything.”
Jim Mattis, the US defence secretary, struck a more cautionary tone “in light of Kim’s family, and himself, breaking every international treaty, every agreement, they’ve ever made”.
He played down concerns that a potential US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal would undermine attempts to strike an agreement with North Korea. “I’m less concerned with that ripple effect right now,” he said.
Kim is due to be the first North Korean leader in the South since the Korean War armistice in 1953.
Mr Moon is expected to greet him personally at the military demarcation line that runs through the demilitarised borderzone (DMZ). The pair will be escorted by South Korean honour guards to a welcoming ceremony before beginning official dialogue at Peace House, a South Korean building inside the border truce village of Panmunjom. In a grand meeting room on the second floor of Peace House, the two leaders will sit on chairs etched with carvings of their shared peninsula, across a table designed to look like two bridges merging into one.
Expectations are low that any substantive policy decisions will emerge from the summit, but it is nevertheless being seen as an important first step after
the testing of intercontinental ballistic missiles and a hydrogen bomb brought the peninsula close to military conflict.
♦ Iran says that a British-iranian academic arrested by the Revolutionary Guard in Tehran is a “member of a British spy network”. Abbas Edalat, a professor at Imperial College London, was detained on April 15 and is believed to be in custody. The Iranian authorities acknowledged for the first time yesterday that they were holding him.