The UK will pay ‘tens of millions’ of pounds a year to lease a crucial military base on the Chagos Islands on behalf of the US, it was claimed last night.
Senior sources told the Mail that the bill for Diego Garcia, which has been a military base for UK and US forces since the 1970s, could even run into the low hundreds of millions.
The Government said it has secured a 99-year lease for Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Indian Ocean archipelago, as part of the deal with Mauritius.
But the Government has refused to explain how much it will cost.
A spokesman for the charity Friends of the British Overseas Territories said: ‘We will be paying millions, if not billions, to lease back our own island for 99 years.
‘[The Government] should reconsider the deal urgently and make clear that there will be no further negotiation on the Chagos Islands, or any other UK Overseas Territory.’
Ex-Tory Armed Forces minister Mark Francois said: ‘As this mad decision was not announced in Parliament, we don’t know the “rent” we will have to pay for what was our own base, nor which government department will have to pay for it.’ Tory peer Lord Kempsell repeatedly raised the issue of the Chagos Islands in Parliament because he said he was ‘suspicious Labour would cede sovereignty’.
Just nine days before the deal was announced, he was told by Labour peer Baroness Chapman of Darlington that it was ‘too early to speculate’.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy will be expected to make a statement on the deal to the Commons on Monday and could face an Urgent Question if not.
The Foreign Office said full details of the arrangement would be set out at a later date.