Donald Trump will not visit Britain until 2018, White House confirms

Donald Trump will not visit Britain until next year, the White House confirmed on Friday.

The US president was invited to Britain a week after his inauguration, when Theresa May became the first foreign leader to visit at the White House. Trump has since travelled to France and Germany.

On Friday, the White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, conceded it has still not been determined whether Trump would make a “state visit” or a “working visit” to Britain. The latter would be without royal pageantry or a stopover with the Queen.

“We’re still going back and forth with our allies there and once we have those travel details outlined and determined we’ll certainly let you know,” Sanders said. “But they’ve made the invitation for the president to come. We’ve accepted and we’re working out the logistics.

“We anticipate that it will be some time next year but at this point there’s no other details beyond that.”

In June it emerged that Trump told May he did not want to go ahead with a state visit until the British public supported him coming.

In July the Guardian reported that the UK government had conceded that the visit would not take place until 2018, amid claims that Trump had been “scared off” by the threat of protests.

The Stop Trump Coalition and other campaigns have vowed a massive show of force on the streets. Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, called for the visit to be cancelled after Trump criticised his response to the London Bridge terrorist attack.

The president provoked a further backlash on Friday when he tweeted: “Just out report: ‘United Kingdom crime rises 13% annually amid spread of Radical Islamic terror.’ Not good, we must keep America safe!”

British police recorded 5.2m offences in the last year, only a fraction of which were associated with terrorism. Former Labour leader Ed Miliband called Trump “a moron” while Conservative backbencher Nicholas Soames described him as a “daft twerp” who needed to “fix gun control”.

Trump did attend the G20 summit in Germany and joined celebrations for Bastille Day in Paris on 14 July, a coup of sorts for President Emmanuel Macron – although the visit was far from universally praised in France.