Britain's 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.”
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, UK 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”.
