Farage says he would offer Diego Garcia to Trump to secure silence on Falklands, drawing cross-party criticism

Nigel Farage said on a US podcast that, if he were prime minister, he would offer the Chagos Islands’ Diego Garcia military base to Donald Trump in return for the US president stopping public commentary about the Falkland Islands.

Farage framed the exchange as a trade — “Diego Garcia, in perpetuity, the most strategic American military base in the world,” he said on the Benny Show podcast, and asked Trump to “please stop talking about the Falkland Islands,” according to published extracts. Coverage of those remarks sparked a public dispute in London between Farage and government ministers.

Kemi Badenoch criticised Farage’s comments, calling the proposal humiliating and directly confronting him over the suggestion that Britain could trade or give away the Chagos archipelago.

Reports say Badenoch and other ministers pushed back in public statements, and Foreign Office minister Uma Kumaran told the House of Commons the government would engage with the challenge and would do “whatever it takes” to support islanders, as reported by The Independent.

A White House official, speaking to The Times and cited in multiple British reports, said Farage’s remarks appeared to refer to use of the Diego Garcia base rather than a formal surrender of sovereignty, and that no one in the administration construed his comments as indicating Britain was giving away the islands.

The same White House official told The Times that Diego Garcia is critical to countering threats from China and Iran, a rationale cited to explain Washington’s interest in the base.

MercoPress reported that a 2025 agreement to transfer sovereignty over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius — with a 99-year lease for the base — is on hold, and linked that pause to Donald Trump’s opposition.

That reporting frames the Farage remarks against a background of contested policy decisions about Diego Garcia and the Chagos sovereignty process, though the Independent and the Mirror emphasise the immediate political row triggered by Farage’s podcast comments.

Media coverage differs in emphasis: some outlets highlighted the strategic value of Diego Garcia and a White House view that Farage was speaking about base use rather than sovereignty, while others focused on the domestic political fallout and ministerial denunciations of Farage’s suggested trade.

Headlines in other outlets also recorded the episode as Farage saying he would offer the Chagos base to Trump to secure his silence on the Falklands, and noted ministers’ condemnations.

The dispute ties into an ongoing, documented policy debate in Britain about the status of the Chagos Islands and the 2025 agreement referenced in reporting, and it has produced concrete parliamentary engagement through the Commons statement by Uma Kumaran.

The coverage to date records claims and reactions: Farage’s own account on the podcast; ministers’ denials or recriminations; and a White House official’s framing that no US official treated Farage’s words as a formal transfer of sovereignty. Each of those claims is reported by named outlets and remains a claim rather than a resolved diplomatic action.