US Vice President JD Vance has held official talks and gone fishing with UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy at a stately home south of London.
Global economics, Israel’s war in Gaza and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine were on the agenda for their discussions.
Taking questions from reporters before their talks, Vance addressed the UK decision to recognise a Palestinian state in September unless Israel agrees to a ceasefire in Gaza.
He said he wasn’t sure what such recognition would even mean, “given the lack of a functional government there”.
Asked whether Trump had been given a heads-up on Israel’s announced intent to occupy Gaza City, Vance said he wouldn’t go into such conversations.
“If it (were) easy to bring peace to that region of the world, it would have been done already,” he said.
The meeting comes as the United Kingdom tries to come to favourable terms for steel and aluminium exports to the US and the two sides work out details of a broader trade deal announced at the end of June.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that he hoped to meet with US President Donald Trump next week, comments that came a day before Trump’s deadline for Moscow to show progress in ending the nearly 3.5-year war in Ukraine.
While Trump has focused on bilateral talks with Putin, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other European leaders have stressed that Ukraine must be part of any negotiations on ending the war.
The meeting took place at Chevening, an almost 400-year-old mansion surrounded by 3000 acres of gardens that serves as the foreign secretary’s official country residence.
About two dozen protesters were spotted on the road before the turn-off to the stately home.
Vance and Lammy, come from opposite ends of the political spectrum but have made a personal connection through their hardscrabble childhoods and Christian faith.
While Lammy is a member of the left-leaning Labour Party and Vance is a conservative Republican who supports Trump’s America First agenda, the two men have bonded in recent months.
Lammy told the Guardian newspaper that the two men can relate over their “dysfunctional” working-class childhoods and that he considers Vance a “friend”.
After spending a few days at Chevening, Vance and his family will head to the Cotswolds, an area that has become popular with wealthy American tourists because of its quaint villages, stone cottages and rural countryside that hark back to old England.
The Vance family’s trip will include official engagements, fundraising, visits to cultural sites and museums and meeting with US troops, according to a person familiar with Vance’s trip who wasn’t authorised to speak publicly.
Vance and his family have reportedly rented a house in the village of Charlbury, 19 kilometres west of Oxford, according to British media outlets.
“That area is very fashionable,” Plum Sykes, a socialite, told The Times.
“If you wanted to be in the super-hot, super-social Cotswolds, that’s where you’d go…There’s been this mass exodus from America to the Cotswolds. Americans just cannot get over the charm. Then power and money attract power and money.”
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