The government brushed aside Brexiteer Nigel Farage’s offer to help build diplomatic relations with Donald Trump. Farage is a longstanding ally of the US president-elect and spent election night at his Mar-a-Lago residence.
Despite being a political opponent to Britain’s center-left Labour government as leader of the Reform UK party, Farage has said he would be willing to help build bridges with the US for the UK’s “future survival.”
But that offer was given short shrift by Cabinet Office Minister Pat McFadden Thursday. “I think we’ll have our own relationships,” McFadden told Times Radio. “The good thing about our friendship with the United States is it’s not based on any single individual, it’s much deeper than that.”
He added: “‘Hasn’t he got a job working for the people of Clacton that he was recently elected to a few months ago?” McFadden told ITV, in reference to Farage’s day job as a member of parliament. Labour’s beef with Donald Trump goes way back. Long before taking office, Foreign Secretary David Lammy — Britain’s top diplomat — labeled Trump a “neo-Nazi sympathizing sociopath” and “a racist KKK and Nazi sympathizer.”
Even before taking power in a landslide in July, Labour worked to build bridges with Team Trump. Prime Minister Keir Starmer congratulated Trump Wednesday and said “the U.K.-U.S. special relationship will continue to prosper on both sides of the Atlantic for years to come.”
Farage has previously talked himself up as Britain’s next ambassador in Washington, an offer the UK government is all-but-certain to refuse as it mulls over who will occupy the crucial diplomatic post.
Meanwhile, Farage will on Friday address his party’s first big rally since Donald Trump’s election win as Britain’s emboldened populist right seek to drive momentum and build on links with the US president-elect.
Farage will make the speech in Newport in south Wales after attending a victory party in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, attended by Trump and other figures likely to be prominent in the incoming White House administration.
Trump’s plans to radically slash the US public sector and appoint Elon Musk to “sack vast numbers of people” were a blueprint for what needed to happen in the UK, Farage has said.
But while Reform is the closest British equivalent to the movement behind Trump, his win was also met with elation by the far right.
A video message recorded by Tommy Robinson in anticipation of a Trump win, before his jailing last month on contempt of court charges, was posted on the activist’s X account, in which he said: “I’m in my prison cell doing cartwheels.”
Close associates of Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, are using the social media platform to call on Trump to put pressure on Keir Starmer to release a man they described as a “political prisoner”.
They also tagged X’s owner, Elon Musk, who permitted Robinson to return to the platform and has engaged with him on it.
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