Major Luton airport expansion to go ahead despite environment concerns

London’s fourth-largest airport, Luton, has been given permission to expand its annual passenger numbers from under 17 million to 32 million by 2040, despite environmental objections.

The decision by the transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, overrules concerns about additional carbon emissions, noise and traffic. The Planning Inspectorate had recommended that she should turn it down on environmental grounds.

The expansion represents a rise of 90 per cent compared with last year’s passenger throughput – without building a new runway. The increase will be met with expanded terminal space, improved taxiways, and infrastructure improvements.

Take-offs and landings on Luton’s single runway could increase by 77,000 annually – an average of 211 extra movements per day.

Ms Alexander’s approval aligns with previous ministerial support for expansion at Heathrow and Gatwick airports, with an additional runway at each. They are respectively the first and second airports serving London, with Stansted in third place.

The Green MP for Brighton Pavilion, Sian Berry, said: “This is the third disastrous decision on airports the government has delivered in as many months, proving once again that Labour has stopped caring about our climate commitments.

“Nearly doubling Luton’s passenger capacity will cause active economic harm to coastal communities like Brighton, who have seen holiday spending fall by almost a third since 2022.

“The government needs to break free from the influence of wealthy airport bosses, and start delivering on changes that people actually want to see. It makes far more economic sense to impose a frequent flyer levy and invest the money raised in our brilliant tourism sector, rather than building new terminals and runways to help fly more money out of the UK.”

Luton airport’s chief executive, Alberto Martin, told The Independent: “The plans are very ambitious to increase capacity, but I think they are very strong plans at the same time. We are talking about £2.4bn investment. And now that we support directly more than 28,000 jobs in the region, this could mean a significant benefit for the community as well.

“We want to continue serving the markets that we serve but also to also open up opportunities to reach out to destinations that we do not serve today. There are plenty of opportunities out there where we could further serve the European destinations that we do serve, but also expand those opportunities to all the regions like the Middle East.”

This week Jet2 launched flights from Luton airport for the first time – putting it in competition with existing players easyJet, Ryanair and Wizz Air.

“The big four with us now means a lot for us in terms of reassuring us that we are doing things the right way,” Mr Martin said.

The local campaign group, Ladacan, said it “actively opposes the plan for massive further expansion of Luton airport”.

The campaigners say: “Local people want to sleep at night; enjoy their gardens or parks; breathe fresh air; see blue sky; drive on the roads not sit in traffic jams; get on the trains; breathe clean air.”

On Monday, easyJet opened a new base at Southend airport, which is the sixth serving London – with London City in fifth place.

Listen to Simon Calder’s interview with Steve Heapy, CEO of Jet2, on launching flights from Luton

The Waterboys on Dennis Hopper: ‘At crucial moments, he’s always there’

Over four decades ago, when Mike Scott started The Waterboys, the very first song they released saluted the art of somebody else. “A Girl Named Johnny”, issued in 1983, swooned over the androgynous daring of Patti Smith. In the years since, Scott has written entranced odes to an entire constellation of maverick stars, including Hank Williams (“Has Anyone Here Seen Hank?”), Elvis Presley (“I Can See Elvis”), Hendrix (“The Return of Jimi Hendrix”) and Van Morrison (“The Soul Singer”).

“It’s just a quirk in my personality,” says Scott, 66, of his favoured motif as he sits in his home studio in Dublin for a video interview. “I like writing songs about people. And these just happen to be very interesting people.”

None of them interests him more, it seems, than Dennis Hopper, the first star to inspire from Scott a wall-to-wall album tribute. Titled Life, Death and Dennis Hopper, Scott’s latest album with The Waterboys features 25 tracks that bore into every aspect of Hopper’s work, influence, and meaning. That’s no small feat considering the subject’s impact in a wealth of disciplines, including acting (in pivotal films like Rebel Without a Cause and Blue Velvet), directing (Easy Rider, which introduced a whole new level of realism to Hollywood), photography (evidenced by scores of vaunted exhibitions of his work), and art collecting (he was one of the first to recognise the subversive vision of Andy Warhol).

During our interview, Scott reflects Hopper’s character in his very look. Sporting serious glasses and a cowboy hat, he strikes the perfect middle between intellectual and outlaw.

On the album, Scott doesn’t skimp on singing about the seedier side of Hopper’s life which, during some prolonged periods in the Seventies and Eighties, was his only side, marked by drug binges extreme enough to shock a young Keith Richards and sexcapades that would make Led Zeppelin look like eunuchs. “He was reckless and did things that make you think, ‘Why the hell did he do that?’” Scott says now. “But he also had the magic touch to create things nobody could have foreseen.”

A surprising number of those things moved the culture as a whole. Scott calls Rebel Without a Cause “the big bang of youth culture”, while David Lynch’s surrealist drama Blue Velvet represented the high-water mark for art films in the Eighties. “I was very impressed by his presence at so many hinge moments in history,” Scott says. “At crucial moments, he’s always there.”

To express the breadth of Hopper’s influence took more time than usual. Scott first wrote about Hopper half a decade ago in a song named after the star, released on The Waterboys’ 2020 album Good Luck Seeker. “That was just a good fun song where every line rhymed with Hopper,” Scott says. “I thought that was that.”

He should have known better given his interest in Hopper dates back to when he was a teenager in the late Seventies. Scott’s first encounter with Hopper came from the underground comic series The Furry Freak Brothers. “In one of the books the three brothers visit a beatnik character named Groover McTuber who tells them, ‘I’m going to watch five Dennis Hopper movies tonight,’” Scott says. “That was when I realised that this Hopper bloke wasn’t just an actor. He stood for the whole counterculture.”

Scott’s interest ballooned after attending an exhibit of Hopper’s photos at London’s Royal Academy of Art a decade ago. “I was entranced by his eye,” Scott says. “The combination of how he captured the vanished world of the Sixties with his choices about when to click the shutter and how to frame the events was poignant. When his camera is pointed at his subjects, something of their soul comes out.”

The seeds of the new album began after Waterboys’ keyboardist “Brother” Paul Brown created a remix of Scott’s song “Dennis Hopper” several years ago. Shortly afterwards, the other band members approached Scott to say they’d written a series of instrumental pieces on their own. Because the frontman already had Hopper on his mind, he decided to pen like-themed words for every one of the instrumentals, expanding their work with music of his own. The songs he wrote for the album are wildly diverse, shifting quickly between movie score instrumentals, rock epics, funk tracks and spoken word pieces.

Yet, when it came time to record the songs, Scott decided he didn’t want his voice on all of them. As a Scotsman, he felt only an American singer could capture a key part of his subject’s character. “A friend once said, ‘Hopper led one of the great American lives’,” Scott says. “That shows in his sense of exploration and adventure, which led to great success and hubris before it all came crashing down. But he still managed to come back, reconfiguring himself as a sparkly-eyed elder. It’s a true hero’s journey.”

The singers Scott enlisted couldn’t be starrier, including Bruce Springsteen, who offers a dusty reading of Scott’s ode to Hopper’s self-obliteration, “Ten Years Gone,” and Fiona Apple, who sings “Letter From an Unknown Girlfriend”, a track that chronicles several horrifying incidents in his life in which he physically abused women. Daringly, the first voice we hear on the album isn’t Scott’s but that of Steve Earle, marked by his hard Americana twang. “I needed someone with an authentic plains and prairie sound,” Scott says.

The song Earle appears on, and which he helped write, is “Kansas”, named after Hopper’s birthplace. “Where a person comes from can simultaneously be who they are and everything they don’t want to be,” Earle says in a separate video interview. “You can’t do what Dennis Hopper did in Kansas. You have to go away. After he left, he became the kind of person who was mythic to everybody around me.”

Scott found another regionally specific voice in Taylor Goldsmith, frontman for the band Dawes and perhaps the most Hollywood and LA-centric songwriter since Jackson Browne. To Goldsmith, Hopper pulled off a unique feat in his Hollywood roles. “Rather than him getting lost in a role, the role got lost in him,” he said in a separate phone interview.

The song featuring Goldsmith, titled “I Can’t Believe I Made It”, concentrates on a single line – “It’s as if I made a deal with an angel” – repeated frequently enough to become a mantra. “The song lets you live with the line much longer than you would if it were just a short refrain at the end of a wordy verse,” he said. “I thought that was daring.”

As the album progresses, Scott includes a song for each of Hopper’s five wives, all of whom are still alive, including Brooke Haywood, the daughter of Hollywood royalty. It was Haywood who gave him the Nikon camera that helped turn him into a photographer. One song is devoted to Daria Halprin, who starred in the 1970 Antonioni film Zabriskie Point, and another to Mamas and Papas singer Michelle Phillips, to whom Hopper was married for an infamously fast and awful eight days. Poignantly, Scott named that track “Michelle (Always Stay)”. Phillips later described their marriage to the press as “excruciating”, but Hopper told author Peter Biskind that “seven of those days were pretty good. The eighth day was the bad one”.

According to Biskind’s reporting in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (How the Sex and Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll Generation Saved Hollywood), Hopper shot off guns in the house, which terrified Phillips, whom he handcuffed at one point and insisted that she was a witch. The doomed couple originally met on the set of the 1971 Hopper-directed film The Last Movie, a financial and critical mega-bomb that the director himself later described as “one long sex and drugs orgy”.

The new album, like most Waterboys works, features a distinct configuration of players. Over their four-decade career, the band have seen a rush-hour turnstile’s cast of revolving players. Some observers have estimated that up to 50 musicians have cycled in and out of the band over their 16-album catalogue, putting them in the running for the group with the most members ever. “That was always the plan,” Scott says. “When I started the band, I had the record deal. I was like a solo artist, but I didn’t want to work under my own name.”

Likewise, he wanted the band’s music to keep changing. Their earliest albums were enriched by the varied contributions of Karl Wallinger, who went on to form the brilliant group World Party. Wallinger, who died one year ago from a stroke at 66, never got on well with Scott and the two didn’t hang out much after he left the band. Ironically, Wallinger’s World Party became an even bigger draw than The Waterboys in the world beyond the UK and Europe, a circumstance Scott puts down to his band’s lack of touring in key places like the States.

The problem, he says, was insufficient record company support during the opportune time of their classic 1985 breakthrough song “The Whole of the Moon”. That single, an instant classic later covered by scores of artists including Fiona Apple, showcased Scott’s flair for saluting visionaries with a broader viewpoint than his own. Earle says he shares Scott’s love for honouring other artists in his work. “We learn a lot about ourselves by looking into the people that came before us,” he says.

Scott’s paeans to influential artists have sometimes turned sly. In his hosannah to Elvis, he gave the King of Rock’n’Roll his revenge by imagining him slitting the throat of his villainous manager Colonel Tom Parker. “I painted him as this kind of intellectual, countercultural Elvis,” Scott says, with a laugh. “It’s the Elvis I would like to see.”

His ode to Van Morrison, meanwhile, titled “The Soul Singer,” is snarkier, capturing the Irish artist’s reputation as a rude curmudgeon who has “spent the better part of three decades brooding”. Scott says he has never heard from Morrison on the song, though, he added, “I’d be surprised if he didn’t hear it.”

Like Morrison, Scott has more than a touch of the poet in him. As always, the lyrics on his new album are quicksilver things, alight with tight alliterations and fleet verse. While his latest lyrics uphold his poetic elan, in order to properly represent Hopper they also had to embrace some crude outbursts, including a track in which he inhabits the star’s blitzed-out character from Blue Velvet by using the f-word no fewer than 29 times in a row. If such hyperboles are key to understanding Hopper, Scott also wants listeners to know that he “wasn’t just a guy who took a lot of drugs and did a lot of weird and reckless things. He was also a guy with a huge perspective and a big soul”.

“And his work is still out there,” Scott says. “It’s still there to be appreciated.”

‘Life, Death and Dennis Hopper’ will be released on 4 April, while a reissued version of the soundtrack to Hopper’s 1971 film ‘The Last Movie’ arrives on 18 April

Wicked: For Good debuts ‘dazzling’ and ‘intriguing’ first trailer

The trailer forWicked: For Good was screened exclusively at CinemaCon yesterday, and early reactions are calling it “dazzling” and “intriguing.”

The film is the much-anticipated sequel to last year’s blockbuster musical Wicked and is set to arrive in theaters on November 21 this year.

The first footage from the film was presented at the annual conference for theater owners and distributors in Las Vegas, presented by director Jon M Chu, producer Marc Platt, and stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande.

According to multiple reports, the clip shown exclusively to the in-house audience introduced classic Wizard of Oz characters Dorothy, the Tin Man, Cowardly Lion and Scarecrow to the story.

The trailer also included Erivo and Grande singing popular Wicked second-act songs “For Good” and “No Good Deed” but did not preview the two new songs reportedly written for the sequel by original Wicked composer Stephen Schwartz.

Variety described the first glimpses of the new film as “dazzling,” while The Hollywood Reporter wrote: “To say the Wicked footage bewitched the packed house is an understatement and received a rousing response.”

Gizmodo added that “it was a trailer filled with lots of very cool and intriguing moments.”

Deadline noted that while there were “no musical performances a la Erivo and Grande’s at the Oscars” during the presentation, “the trailer shown to theater owners inside the room was epic enough. And they went nuts for it.”

No release date has yet been announced for the trailer.

The first Wicked film, which was based on the first act of the hit Broadway musical, was a box office success but divided critics.

In a three-star review for The Independent, Clarisse Loughrey wrote: “Wicked looks like every other film now. That’s its problem. It may be the screen adaptation of the stage musical – itself based on a 1995 novel – but, within moments, it also tethers itself directly to the classic 1939 musical The Wizard of Oz.

“And while that film’s Emerald City and Land of Oz have been cemented in the public imagination as brilliant-hued dream worlds, and the most famous demonstration of the Technicolor process, Wicked is shot and lit like we’re being sold an Airbnb in Mykonos.”

Chu has previously said that the second part of the film is “eight times more relevant” because of where we are “in society right now.”

Asked last November how the filmmakers intended to keep the film’s momentum going during the year-long gap between installments, Chu replueed: “I don’t know, but ‘Part Two,’ I will say because I’ve cut ‘Part Two’ together, is a doozy.”

Asteroid that was headed towards with Earth is huge, Nasa finds

The asteroid that caused panic about potentially colliding with Earth is the size of a building, Nasa has found.

The Webb Space Telescope has captured more information and detailed pictures of asteroid 2024 YR4, which briefly appeared to be potentially smashing into Earth in 2032.

The asteroid caused global worry when it was found late last year, and initial observations showed that it could have a 3 per cent chance of hitting Earth.

Additional observations prompted scientists to reduce the threat to virtually zero, where it remains.

But there is a slight chance it could hit the Moon then.

The asteroid swings our way every four years.

Nasa and the European Space Agency released the photos – showing the asteroid as a fuzzy dot – on Wednesday.

Webb confirmed the asteroid is nearly 200ft (60 metres) across, or about the height of a 15-storey building, according to the two space agencies.

It is the smallest object ever observed by the observatory, the biggest and most powerful ever sent into space.

Johns Hopkins University astronomer Andrew Rivkin said the observations by Webb served as “invaluable” practice for other asteroids that may threaten us down the road.

Ground telescopes have also tracked this particular space rock over the past few months.

All this “gives us a window to understand what other objects the size of 2024 YR4 are like, including the next one that might be heading our way”, Mr Rivkin, who helped with the observations, said in a statement.

Additional reporting by agencies

How to cut your council tax with little-known trick helping thousands

As council tax bills rise for almost everyone across the UK, new figures show that many households could be unnecessarily overpaying on the monthly cost.

Thousands of people were able to challenge the government on their property’s council tax band last year, resulting in a lower council tax bill. Of the 43,820 people that asked for a revaluation last year, nearly 1,000 were able to lower their band by two places or more, official figures from the Valuation Office Agency (VOA) show.

Since 2019, some 5,591 people have managed to get the council tax band of their property lowered. In 329 of these cases, this was even by four bands or more.

Recent analysis by money expert Martin Lewis has predicted that around 400,000 households are in the wrong band – and so paying too much in council tax – and should consider making a challenge. If successful, the household will not only be due a lower bill going forward, but possibly even a massive backdated payout for all the time they were paying the wrong level of tax.

The banding system is often criticised for being outdated, as the value of properties remains based on an assessment carried out in 1991. These values have changed dramatically in recent years, with some areas seeing massive spikes in property value, and others seeing drops.

For instance, households in Greater London are now paying £444 less on average than those in the North East, despite the region having much higher average sale prices and household incomes. From this month, the average council tax bill is the lowest in the country at £1,981, while those in the North East are seeing £2,425, analysis by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) has found.

However, revaluations are not based on today’s prices, but still based on 1991 market rates. This means that the VOA will take the physical characteristics of a property into account, rather than today’s value. Because of this, the agency can actually place the property into a higher tax band if it believes the value has become higher since it was last checked.

In very unlucky cases, a revaluation could also result in neighbouring properties being placed into a higher band. This is why Mr Lewis recommends households make a few easy checks before pressing ahead with their request.

The first step is to compare the band that you’re in with nearby homes with similar characteristics (size, number of bedrooms, garden area and so on). If many of these properties are in a lower band than you, it could be worth making a claim.

But this should not be done before the second step, which is to estimate your home’s value at the time it was assessed to ensure you haven’t got it wrong. This can be done by taking the price that you bought it for and using a free online calculator to see what it would have been worth in 1991. These are offered by Nationwide through its house price index and also by Mr Lewis’s Money Saving Expert service.

Mapping this value against council tax bands to property values in 1991 will give you the clearest indication of whether you have a claim. If your band appears much higher than the value you have landed on, it could be time for a check.

“My big warning: only do this if you pass both checks,” Mr Lewis told viewers of his ITV show last year. “The fact that you’re in a higher band than your neighbours may be because they are all in too low a band.”

There are two ways to challenge the band. The first is to make a formal request to the VOA, but generally, occupants must have lived within the property for six months or less to do this.

The other way is to request an ‘informal review’ from the VOA. However, the agency does not have an obligation to carry this out, so you must provide strong evidence to them that your property is in the wrong band.

A VOA spokesperson said: “There are a number of reasons why a property’s council tax band may change.

“This includes if a property has changed, for example, it is split to form more than one property or multiple properties are merged into one, part of a property is now used for business purposes, or the local area has significantly changed.

“A property’s band may also change when it is sold if it has been improved or extended.”

Celebration destination: Enjoy life’s biggest moments in the Caribbean

With its turquoise-coloured waters, reliably blue skies, and unparalleled natural beauty, the Caribbean is one of the most desirable destinations for a special getaway. From Antigua to Saint Vincent, St Lucia and Barbados, each island offers something a little different – whether you’re looking for a romantic honeymoon retreat, the perfect place to celebrate a milestone birthday, or a fun spot to enjoy a week (or two) of active pursuits with family and friends.

Sandals’ all-inclusive, adult-only resorts are the perfect way to enjoy the islands in luxurious surroundings. Dotted across the Caribbean, each resort has its own unique identity while staying true to the five-star Sandals ethos. But which one do you choose for your own personal celebration?

Here we look at a range of celebrations worthy of an unforgettable holiday and the perfect Sandals resorts to enjoy them in.

If you like your holidays to be as adventurous as they are relaxing, you’re sure to love the many activities offered at Sandals Grande Antigua and Sandals Saint Vincent. Explore the ocean bed with Sandals’s very own comprehensive PADI® Certified scuba diving programmes, and see beautiful reefs and shipwrecks up close alongside the professional supervision of PADI® certified staff and Newton dive boats. There’s also a wealth of water sports available including kayaking and paddleboarding or, if dry land is more your thing, why not spend your days playing beach volleyball, croquet, and tennis? All activities are included at either resort making your trip hassle free and flexible.

If you’re looking for somewhere to make a real occasion of a celebration or simply hide away on a romantic getaway, the Royal Barbados resort is one of Sandals’s most elegant options. The resort offers an extra level of extravagance that makes every day an unforgettable experience – from swim-up suites, Rolls Royce transfers from the airport when you stay in select suites, to a rooftop pool and restaurant, and catamaran cruises. There’s even a bowling alley if you fancy some good old-fashioned fun, or an alternative option for a date night.

On the beautiful island of Curaçao, lies the Sandals Royal Curaçao resort nestled within the heart of Leeward Antilles. The resort has plenty of opportunity for more intimate stays in its seaside butler bungalows complete with private pools and soaking tubs, while private cabanas and local tours leave you plenty of options for making an anniversary or birthday feel extra special. The parties around the pool or on the beach also make this a fun destination for celebrating a loved one.

Jamaica plays host to a number of Sandals resorts that make the perfect destination for honeymoons and group trips alike. The Sandals Royal Caribbean, for instance, offers over-the-water private villas complete with glass floors, hammocks and butler service, on the resort’s own private island. Ocean-view and swim-up rooms also offer a first-class experience for groups and friends spending time together. Alternatively, it’s hard to imagine a more romantic stay than at Sandals South Coast, where you can stay in spectacular, luxurious overwater villas arranged in the shape of a heart, offering an unmatched connection to the turquoise waters of the Caribbean Sea and rich marine life below.

Meanwhile, the Sandals Ochi resort in Jamaica offers the best of both worlds for honeymooners and party goers (or those wanting to enjoy both) with private butler villas, white sand beach, and 11 unique bars. Its vibrant atmosphere is ideal for those wanting to relax and party during their stay.

While every Sandals resort offers a luxurious experience, if you’re really looking to splurge and treat yourself, the re-imagined Sandals Royal Bahamian should be on your wishlist. Located in Nassau in the Bahamas, it has everything you could dream of from a holiday destination. Swim-up suites with butler service will help you leave the stresses and strains of everyday life behind, while pristine-white beaches, an award-winning Red Lane spa and 10 specialty restaurants will make your stay as enjoyable as it is relaxing. A short trip by boat will also take you to the Sandals private island with its own bar, restaurant and pool. Luxury adventure tours around the island will also make exploring the rest of the island easy and convenient.

St Lucia is one of the most beautiful and picturesque islands of the Caribbean, and our top destination for visiting with parents. Resorts such as the Grande St Lucian sit on their own peninsula with 360 degrees of volcanic mountains and crystal-clear ocean views to enjoy. As such, it’s the perfect place for making mum or dad feel truly appreciated. In addition to five grande pools, there’s also a Cap Estate Golf & Country Club for serious parental bonding time, not to mention a range of outdoor activities including reading road trips where guests meet children from the island, Catamaran sunset cruises, and carnival experiences.

Discover Sandals’s full range of Caribbean resorts here

What is the Chagos Islands deal with the UK that Trump has approved?

According to No 10, Donald Trump has “signed off” on the highly controversial Chagos Islands deal, drawing to a close the tortuous process of securing the future of the UK-US military base that has been operating on Diego Garcia since 1965.

It means formal sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) will be ceded to Mauritius, and comes as something of a shock to opponents who fully expected Mr Trump to reject the change. The long saga may be coming to a close…

Some of the basics are still unknown, especially as regards money, but the position will be that the BIOT – comprising the Chagos Islands and the military base – will be transferred to Mauritian sovereignty. In return, the UK has been promised a 99-year lease on the islands, with military use by the US part of the deal, in return for an annual fee. The fee has not yet been disclosed, but is thought to be some £90m per annum, inflation-linked.

The small matter of international law. Successive appeals by Mauritius to the UN and the International Court of Justice have left the status of the BIOT in doubt, generally favouring the Mauritian position.

The islands are plainly a colonial possession, acquired from France in 1814 after the Napoleonic Wars. As such they are subject to UN resolutions and decolonisation. The islands were carved out of what was then the crown colony of Mauritius as part of its 1968 granting of independence, but such coercion also violated international law. The UK could carry on ignoring the situation, but this would leave the legal status of the joint base in doubt and thus at risk. In a worst-case scenario, Mauritius could transfer sovereignty of “their” islands to, say, China or India. Generally, civilised nations are expected to abide by international law.

They’ve been shabbily treated for decades, having been forcibly evicted to make way for the base in the 1960s. The diaspora principally lives in Mauritius, the Seychelles and near Gatwick Airport, and have had no vote on the deal. Foreign secretary David Lammy insists they have been consulted throughout.

Not quite. Trump has approved it but the formality of Mauritius and the UK signing the agreement has yet to take place, after which the treaty will need to be approved by parliament and all the costs and clauses will be made public. Given the government’s majority and the backing of the White House, the deal is bound to be ratified.

The Conservatives and Reform UK describe it as such, and object to public money needed for vital services being transferred to Mauritius – but that seems to be the price for settling this long-running dispute. What financial contribution, if any, the US will make is not known. In the current wider context of defence and economic tensions between the UK and the US, the Chagos leasing costs might be considered a useful sweetener in the national interest.

No. Those few empire loyalists who feel passionately about the issue are a minority and would never vote Labour anyway, some because they haven’t forgiven Clement Attlee for giving up India. The often exaggerated cost of the lease (adding inflation over a century to invent a bogus cost in today’s money) is no more than a right-wing debating point. The Conservatives are compromised on this argument because they were in talks to “surrender” the BIOT for years, and no one thinks the deal can be reversed unless the Americans demand it.

It doesn’t feel like it, and the government says not. Nonetheless, there are parallels in their disputed colonial status. Before the 1982 Falklands War, a transfer and leaseback arrangement was freely raised by Britain as a way of ending the arguments in the South Atlantic.

The big shift in both these cases has been Brexit, with one EU member, Spain, having a vital interest in steering EU diplomacy towards regaining Gibraltar and a friendlier stance towards the Argentinian claim on the Falklands. The UK can no longer rely on the EU to back it up at the UN and elsewhere; indeed, the Brexit treaty gives Spain a special role with regard to Gibraltar, and the territory’s land and air border arrangements still haven’t been finally sorted out.

Like it or not, the sun has not fully set on the British empire.

Starmer is right to maintain dignity – and avoid upsetting Trump

The prime minister’s insistence that, in framing the UK’s response to the Trump tariffs, “We will always act in the national interest” was wise and reassuring. The mood at the moment is to “keep calm and carry on negotiating”, and if there is to be a response, it needs to be weighed, and to represent a fully informed choice. Hence the meeting of business leaders convened in Downing Street in the immediate aftermath of the US president’s announcements.

In the coming days, the full scale and nature of international retaliation will become clearer; so too will Donald Trump’s thinking. From his rambling presentation of the new tariff schedules in the White House Rose Garden, it is not obvious whether these punitive import taxes are designed to kickstart a more benign process involving a global relaxation of trade restrictions, or if they are part of a permanent policy shift aimed at restoring American manufacturing and providing trillions of dollars for the US Treasury. There is, in other words, no need for a rush to action.

Sir Keir Starmer is right to try to maintain the dignity of the nation, as well as to avoid upsetting the combustible Mr Trump, by limiting himself to vague remarks about having “levers at his disposal”. Businesses are being consulted on possible retaliatory actions, but that is all – at least for the time being.

However, with the US economy approximately seven times as large as that of the UK – and Britain still heavily reliant on America for its defence – those levers are not especially powerful ones. Unlike, say, China (in concert with Japan and South Korea), the European Union, Mexico or Canada, the UK lacks the necessary heft to inflict much material damage on American producers and exporters. Any effort to join in with an international assault on Mr Trump’s policy would risk attracting the imposition of even higher tariffs on UK exports, with the corresponding harm to British jobs and economic growth – and to European security and the Ukraine peace talks.

Far better, then, for the British government to keep a “cool head”, as Sir Keir suggests: not only does it suit the prime minister’s general demeanour, but it will help to preserve his unusually warm relationship with a man almost precisely his ideological opposite. Britain is set to watch how things develop, and will continue to engage with American officials on trade, investment, and wider economic relations. If an old and valued friend unexpectedly decides to have a spat, the most rational response is not to hit them back and escalate an argument into a violent rift.

Fanciful as it may seem, this crisis can be turned into an opportunity. As the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, told the Commons, a trade deal of some sort could be mutually beneficial, even if that isn’t immediately apparent to President Trump, who is more “zero sum” in his approach to life (as might be expected from his time in real estate).

Sir Keir says that talks are continuing. He should be encouraged by the fact that the UK is to be subjected only to the lower “baseline” tariff of 10 per cent, albeit with the higher charges on cars, steel and aluminium bringing the trade-weighted average up to 13 per cent. When the two leaders met in the White House, Mr Trump expressed the hope that a deal could be done. Despite intense activity, such an agreement couldn’t be reached in time to avoid the new tariffs, but the process – which has been in train since Theresa May launched post-Brexit talks with the US – has begun.

The outlines of such a deal can already be discerned. Negotiables could include a radical cut in the tariffs on US goods, such as cars and agricultural produce, and easier access for qualified, skilled workers through mutual recognition. The UK might have to compromise on its high standards of animal welfare, hygiene, and environmental protection, but that is a tough choice that could be made, in the expectation that consumers would exercise their right to choose.

More difficult, if not impossible, would be meeting the usual demands for improved – inflated – prices to be paid by the NHS to the US pharmaceutical giants. The American negotiators would also have to be properly briefed on the reality of free speech in the UK, which is protected as a human right by law, save for incitement to hatred against specified vulnerable groups.

The real question is whether the achievement of some sort of economic agreement with America – an outcome that would certainly yield benefits – is worth the sacrifices and concessions that are likely to be demanded by Mr Trump. That includes the effect that any such pact would have on our relationship with the EU, in light of the “reset” promised by Labour at the general election.

Even the possibility of such an agreement with the United States is being touted as a “Brexit bonus”, as is the “favourable” 10 per cent tariff. Needless to say, this is highly debatable. Were it still part of the EU, the UK would probably have been treated more harshly, but it would have had the full weight of the largest single market in the world behind it, along with better access to the EU markets that it has lost since Brexit.

As a member state, the UK would also have been able, ironically, to control its own laws on free speech, as well as to protect the NHS and farmers. In other words, a trade deal with America would have to be radically better than currently envisaged in order to make Brexit remotely worthwhile, even in purely financial terms.

And there remains the terrible truth that the US has downgraded its commitment to Nato, and “switched sides” to align with Russia on the matters of Ukraine and European security.

On balance, Sir Keir can best serve the British national interest by pursuing closer relations with Europe, while declining to enact futile retaliatory measures against America and salvaging as much as possible of the US-UK special relationship. The hope is that the Trump era might ultimately pass more smoothly. In any case, balancing and nurturing Britain’s most crucial relationships won’t be easy.