Donald Trump has been invited to make a state visit to Britain this year – and he could head to Scotland to stay with the King at Balmoral.
Keir Starmer extended an official invitation from the monarch to the president to come to the UK on his visit to the White House today.
The Prime Minster presented Trump with a letter from the King, as he invited him for an unprecedented second state visit.
As the pair were sat next to each other in the Oval Office, the US President said he would be visiting the UK in the “near future”, adding: ‘It’s a very special place and he’s a special man and the UK is a wonderful country that I know very well, I’m there a lot.’
Trump made several visits in his first term, when Elizabeth II was on the throne.
But this would be his first since Charles became King, and it may provide fireworks given their differing world views.
The monarch is known to be a staunch environmentalist, who used his Christmas speech this year to say that ‘diversity of culture, ethnicity and faith provides strength, not weakness’.
In contrast, Trump has urged oil firms to ‘drill baby, drill’ and dismantled protection for minorities in the US since his return.
The US president has strong links to Scotland. His mother was born on the Isle of Lewis and he owns a golf resort at Turnberry in Ayrshire.
During his first spell in the White House, Mr Trump visited both Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace to meet Queen Elizabeth II.
It means that Balmoral Castle, near to Mr Trump’s golf course in Aberdeenshire, is now being talked about as the venue for another trip to Britain.
Sir Keir told reporters in Glasgow on Sunday: ‘In terms of state visits, that’s a matter for His Majesty the King, but I can guarantee that when I’m over there next week, as President Trump has done in every conversation I’ve had with him, he’ll be talking about Scotland, as he always does.’
Last year a biography of the late monarch said she found Trump ‘very rude’.
The former sovereign is said to have ‘particularly disliked’ the way he looked over her shoulder as if ‘in search of others more interesting’.
She also mused over his relationship with his wife Melania and said she believed they must have ‘some sort of arrangement’.
The astonishing claims were made by Craig Brown in his book, A Voyage Around The Queen, which was serialised in the Daily Mail.