Nigel Farage despises Davos. So what on earth is he doing there?

Having long derided it as a jaunt for ‘globalists’, the Reform leader has relented and joined the world leaders’ gathering in Switzerland – because it will be easier to help the US president twist the knife in Keir Starmer, says John Rentoul

When Donald Trump gave the go-ahead for Keir Starmer’s agreement to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius last year, it was a bruising setback for Nigel Farage. The Reform leader had been telling journalists – speaking as a “senior Reform source” – that there was no way his friend in the White House would agree to such a terrible deal.

But, just as when Farage told journalists that Trump would veto Peter Mandelson’s appointment as British ambassador to Washington, he turned out to be wrong. Except that in both cases, Farage is trying to have the last laugh.

He is in Davos, hoping for a “greet and grip” with the president, while Starmer has decided to skip the world leaders’ gathering in Switzerland. The prime minister seems to have judged that a meeting with Trump is unlikely, and that if it were to happen, the risk of an imperial chastisement would be too high.

That means, however, that Starmer has left the field open to the person he regards as Labour’s real rival – who is crowing that he has inflicted a humiliating reverse on Starmer’s foreign policy.

I doubt that Farage had much influence on Trump’s U-turn on Chagos. The US president may have been looking for an excuse to lash out against Starmer for joining the European hue and cry against his plan to acquire Greenland.

In particular, Trump may have been irritated – if he noticed it at all – by one answer that the prime minister gave at his emergency news conference on Monday. Asked if he thought that Trump was “genuinely” considering military action in Greenland, Starmer made the mistake of saying what he really thought: “I don’t, actually.” One thing Trump doesn’t like is people suggesting that he doesn’t mean what he says.

The US support for the Chagos deal was in the first place a triumph of the pragmatists of the US foreign policy establishment over Trump’s instincts, which would have been to oppose giving away territory with a US base on it.

Trump knows so little about the detail that he seemed unaware, when asked on Tuesday by Harry Cole of the British Sun newspaper, that Starmer actually intends to pay Mauritius for the burdensome task of taking the islands off our hands. Farage is right about one thing, which is that it is a terrible deal – and that Starmer has been bamboozled by his excessive respect for international law.

But did Farage persuade Trump to scupper the treaty? I don’t think so. Farage failed to persuade him in the first place, last year – and if Farage had that kind of influence, Trump would not be threatening to impose punitive tariffs on Britain.

In a way, though, that doesn’t matter. Chagos is a setback for Starmer that Farage is determined to exploit – even overcoming his distaste for the globalists of the World Economic Forum, which many of his very online followers think is a conspiracy to destroy nation states.

Assuming that Trump doesn’t U-turn again, the Chagos deal is dead, which I think is a good thing – but there is no denying that it is an embarrassment for Starmer, and that Farage can present it as his victory. Kemi Badenoch has been just as resolutely opposed to the deal, even though much of it was negotiated by the government of which she was a member. But she cannot claim to be friends with the president who killed it.

In the end, Chagos is small beer (despite the absurdly innumerate figures bandied about for its 100-year cost), and Farage is more likely to find his association with Trump to be a vote-loser. The British public didn’t like Trump before, and his wild aggression towards Greenland, backed up by tariffs levied on countries whose leaders dare to disagree with him, is making them like him less.

Not only that, but Trump’s latest antics are likely to push the British people further into the arms of the EU – which is not what Farage wants at all.