Advertisement

Awkward? Yes. But Trump’s state visit must be called off | Matthew d’Ancona

Awkward? Yes. But Trump’s state visit must be called off | Matthew d’Ancona

Theresa May must cancel President Trump’s state visit to the United Kingdom. Simple as that. Not delay the trip, suspend planning, or otherwise equivocate. In this instance, only an unambiguous withdrawal of the invitation will do.

For as long as I can recall, I have been drawn by what the late Christopher Hitchens called “the gravitational pull of the American planet”. In fair and foul weather, I have defended the “special relationship” as the foundation of Nato and a cornerstone of liberal democracy, and for many other reasons with which you may disagree. I have absolutely no sixth-form yearning for a Love Actually moment in which a British prime minister publicly defies the US president, and then dances around No 10.

A visit by this president would be a sort of Evil Olympics: an infrastructural nightmare reducing the capital to chaos

And yes: I fully appreciate the diplomatic embarrassment that would face the royal visits committee – attended by representatives of No 10, the Cabinet Office, the Department for International Trade, the Foreign Office and the royal household – if Theresa May were to rescind her original recommendation. Still and all, it is the only honourable, patriotic and morally defensible course open to her.

Let us deal with the second-order questions first. May’s authority – presently at rock bottom – would be enhanced radically by such a dramatic intervention. She would be seen in a different light by our 27 soon-to-be-ex EU partners. I am not saying that tearing up the president’s invitation would guarantee Britain a better Brexit. But at least the other negotiators might stop sniggering for a while.

Can you imagine, too, how many thousands of hours of police time would be saved by the cancellation of Trump’s visit? The barriers that would not have to be set up around London and elsewhere? A visit by this president would be a sort of Evil Olympics: an infrastructural nightmare reducing the capital city to chaos and leaving crowds of people angry and miserable.

Yet this is not the heart of the matter. It is true that Trump was offered a state visit with unseemly haste, an honour that had only been accorded to two of his predecessors, well into their presidencies. Desperate for friendship outside the EU and a swift bilateral trade deal, May stretched out her hand to the Donald and offered him all the pageantry, pomp and prestige that British monarchy has to offer. One can imagine the great vulgarian positively salivating at the prospect of the world’s ultimate backstage pass.

When MPs debated the propriety of the invitation in February, responding to a petition signed by more than 1.8 million people, ministers insisted that Britain’s commercial, diplomatic and strategic interests remained paramount. There was little attempt to dispute Trump’s buffoonery, misogyny and casual racism, or to deny that the White House appeared to have been taken over by the world’s first far-right improv group. But such qualms – it was argued – were an insufficient reason to call off a presidential visit.

That was before Charlottesville. If ever there were a time for unequivocal condemnation, unhedged and unqualified, this is it.

As Franklin D Roosevelt remarked, the presidency is “pre-eminently a place of moral leadership”. But Trump’s version of moral leadership was a babbling stream of phoney equivalence, in which he blamed the “alt-left” as much as the white supremacists, insisted that there were “very fine people” alongside the Klansmen, and sought to turn an argument about racism and the legacy of the civil war into an argument about statuary.

Those who say that this is a purely domestic matter, of interest only to Americans, have a slender grasp on history. One of the basic building blocks of the modern liberal order is the shared assumption that nazism was, and remains, the epitome of wickedness, the dark mirror into which we all look and shudder. No ifs, no buts, no small print. It should hardly need to be stated: but apparently, in the Trump era, it does.

Here is the crux of it all: this orthodoxy is supranational. Whatever she believes privately, it is emphatically none of May’s business how Trump organises US healthcare, or reforms tax policy, or staffs the White House. But when the most powerful person in the world fails the most basic test of democratic leadership – “Were the Nazis uniquely bad?” – we are all suddenly involved. Everybody has a stake in how the US president answers that question.

The insult to those who fought in the second world war, and rebuilt the world in its aftermath, is clear enough. But as contemptuous as they were of history, the president’s remarks represent a danger in the here and now. His words have already oxygenated the hateful “identitarianism” that understands society not through the prism of pluralism secured by the rule of law, shared values, and the rights of common citizenship; but as a Darwinian competition between “identity groups”, races and tribes.

Those who chanted “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville have counterparts all over the world, growing in confidence, inspired by the wink from the Trump Tower lobby. Some of them dwell in our midst. Do they really deserve the treat of a state visit from their hero? Do ethnic minority Britons deserve such contempt?

It has been argued that rescinding this president’s invitation would represent double standards. And so indeed it would: the Queen has hosted more than 100 such visits, many of them by deeply unlovely individuals such as Robert Mugabe, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and Nicolae Ceausescu.

But it is precisely because our relationship with America is so close, our histories so entwined, and what Barack Obama called our “partnership of the heart” so important, that different criteria apply in this case. What is the point of being a candid friend if we can never afford to be candid? This should be the position of the authentic Atlanticist.

There is a time for realpolitik and a time for bold and principled action. To cancel Trump’s visit would not be, as some claim, a mere gesture, but a well-merited sanction, perfectly suited to a former reality TV star obsessed with ratings and status. The United Kingdom’s national interest is not best represented by close association with this dreadful president. To borrow the words of the prime minister herself: enough is enough.

• Matthew d’Ancona writes a weekly column for the Guardian. He is a visiting research fellow at Queen Mary University of London, author of books including In It Together: The Inside Story of the Coalition, and chairman of the thinktank Bright Blue