Theresa May’s lost opportunity

Donald Trump’s cancellation of his much-anticipated first visit to Britain reflects poorly on the government of Prime Minister Theresa May, casting a shadow over the vital transatlantic alliance. Officially, the President has pulled out because of his distaste for the relocation of the US embassy in London — a “bad deal” he blames on Barack Obama. Mr Trump was to have opened the new embassy. But Britain’s Sunday Times has reported the real reason he cancelled is “he had not been shown enough love by the British government ... he started to believe that the British (Conservative) government thought the same way about him as (London Mayor) Sadiq Khan and (Opposition Leader) Jeremy Corbyn”. Both led the agitation against the leader of a nation with which Britain has long enjoyed the closest possible “special relationship”.

Mrs May should have ensured the campaign did not succeed. New White House incumbents invariably visit London soon after taking office, in keeping with the overwhelming importance of the alliance. Mr Obama visited within weeks of his January 2009 inauguration, as did George W. Bush in 2001. A year after his inauguration, Mr Trump is still waiting, despite receiving red-carpet treatment in Paris, Berlin, Beijing and Tokyo.

Mrs May was the first foreign leader to visit Mr Trump in Washington. But taking up her invitation to him for a reciprocal visit has proved impossible because of the lunar left and a petition signed by two million Britons. For a country whose post-Brexit prospects are heavily dependent on securing a US trade deal and ensuring a continuation of the powerful NATO defence arrangement led by the US, it would be hard to imagine anything as foolish as spurning the leader of its closest ally.

Mr Trump’s Twitter outbursts do not help. But that hardly makes him another Robert Mugabe or Nicolae Ceausescu, both of whom visited Britain without outcries. British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has rightly labelled Mr Khan a “puffed-up pompous popinjay”. Mr Khan and Mr Corbyn have harmed a relationship at the heart of the Western alliance.