The Prime Minister insisted he has "secured" the Diego Garcia military base, which is used by the US to support operations in the Middle East.

Sir Keir Starmer has given up the Chagos Islands, handing the Indian Ocean territory to Mauritius. The islands were British-owned from 1814 but have now been signed away by the Government in a deal that it claimed would safeguard global security by ending a long-running dispute.

The British government has announced it will cede sovereignty over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, in an agreement that ends decades of dispute over Britain’s last African colony while maintaining a key US-British military base in the archipelago.

Mauritius has long argued it was forced to give up the islands in 1965 in return for independence from Britain

The U.K. has agreed to hand sovereignty of the long-contested Chagos Islands, an archipelago of more than 60 islands in the Indian Ocean, to Mauritius, in a deal to secure the future of a strategically important U.