The Deputy Prime Minister has hit back after Donald Trump’s candidate for US vice president described the UK under Labour as the first “truly Islamist” country with a nuclear weapon.
Ohio senator JD Vance, who was chosen as Mr Trump’s running mate on Monday night, made the comments in an address to the National Conservatism conference in Washington DC last week.
Saying he had to “beat up on the UK”, he told the conference he had been discussing with a friend which would be “the first truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon”.
He said: “We were like maybe it’s Iran, maybe Pakistan kind of counts, and then we sort of decided maybe it’s actually the UK since Labour just took over.
“But to my Tory friends, I have to say, you guys have got to get a handle on this.”
Figures from both the Labour Party and the Conservatives hit back at Mr Vance’s comments on Tuesday morning.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner told ITV that Mr Vance had said “quite a lot of fruity things in the past” and she “looked forward” to meeting him and Mr Trump if they won the US election in November.
She added: “I don’t recognise that characterisation. I’m very proud of the election success that Labour had recently.
“We won votes across all different communities, across the whole of the country, and we’re interested in governing on behalf of Britain and also working with our international allies.”
Defence Secretary John Healey told Sky News: “Politics is controversial. You know, (former) president Trump is controversial. It should be no surprise he’s picked somebody who’s also controversial as a running mate.
“But, in the end, who the American people elect to be their president and vice president is for them. We, Britain, as we’ve always done in this very close alliance between the UK and the US, we will work with whoever the American people elect as their leaders.”
Asked whether he agreed with the senator on Ukraine, after Mr Vance backed attempts by the US Republican Party to end support for the country in its war against Russia, he said: “No, look, we put together this Nato summit last week in Washington for the first time, 32 nations together, bigger, stronger, more unified with Ukraine involved all standing together and stepping up support for Ukraine.”
Andrew Bowie, the shadow veterans minister, said he “absolutely” disagreed with the claim that Labour was creating an “Islamist country”.
He told Times Radio: “I disagree with the Labour Party fundamentally on many issues, but I do not agree with that view, quite frankly. I think it’s actually quite offensive, frankly, to my colleagues in the Labour Party.”
Despite Mr Vance’s comments about Labour, Foreign Secretary David Lammy is reported to have good relations with the senator, has met him multiple times and praised his memoir, Hillybilly Elegy, saying it “reduced me to tears”.
In an address to the Hudson Institute in Washington in May, Mr Lammy described Mr Vance as his “friend”, saying he was “right to say we in Europe have a problem that we need to fix with higher defence expenditure”.
But the selection of Mr Vance, a former US marine who previously opposed Mr Trump, could still pose a challenge for the new Labour Government if Mr Trump returns to the White House.
As well as his comments about the UK and Labour, Mr Vance has backed attempts by the US Republican Party to end support for Ukraine in its war against Russia.
In the same speech at the National Conservatism conference, he criticised the decision to send Ukraine “hundreds of billions of dollars of weaponry with no obvious end in sight and no obvious conclusion or even objective that we are close to getting accomplished”.
Conservative MP Alicia Kearns, former chairwoman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, said Mr Vance’s selection “only cements the need” for the Government to set out a firm timetable for spending 2.5% of GDP on defence, rising to 3%.
She said: “Old certainties can no longer be taken for granted and firm action is needed to ensure our own, and European, security.”
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri, director of the US and Americas programme at Chatham House, told the PA news agency that Mr Vance has “loose lips” but said it is important to remember that a lot of his comments are intended for a domestic audience.
Mr Vance went from being an “anti-Trumper” to forging a “tight bond” with the former president, she said.
The fact that Mr Lammy and Mr Vance apparently like each other will make it “easier to get through some of the rhetoric” to potentially work together, she said.
She called Ms Rayner’s response “quite apt”.
“I think that that sort of British pragmatism will get the leadership through, because it’s really the only way to deal with the things that Donald Trump and his circles too often say,” Dr Vinjamuri said.
When it comes to his comments about the UK being an “Islamist country”, Dr Vinjamuri said: “My main takeaway on this is we now have yet another person on the ticket who will say really bombastic, very divisive things, who isn’t going to rein in his rhetoric.
“And that’s going to be very, very difficult for Europeans in general, and for the UK in particular because … the US and the UK need to be aligned, have been aligned on the big geopolitical and geoeconomic issues.
“And so it’s going to be back to the future, with not only Trump, but also now JD Vance saying these things that are going to rip across Britain’s domestic fabric and create a challenge for Keir Starmer, for David Lammy, who are going to have to manage this, because they’ve got to work with them if they’re elected.”
