Theresa May 'embarrassed the Queen' by inviting 'racist' Trump to UK, Emily Thornberry claims
3 min read
Theresa May left the Queen in a "humiliating" position by offering Donald Trump a state visit to the UK, Emily Thornberry has claimed.
The shadow foreign secretary called the US president an "asteroid of awfulness" and said she did not want him on British soil.
Elsewhere Jeremy Corbyn tore into Boris Johnson over his "ignorant" suggestion that Labour had damaged the so-called special relationship.
Earlier this week Mr Trump announced he was cancelling a short visit to London to open the new US embassy in Vauxhall.
Although the president claimed it was because the embassy relocation was a "bad deal", several reports suggested he had been offended by remarks directed at him by various British politicians.
Ms Thornberry told the Andrew Marr Show she would rather Mr Trump never visited the UK, saying:
"I don't want him to come to the country, I don't think he should have been given an invitation in the way he was, I think it was wrong for Theresa May to so prematurely give him a state visit. I think that it embarrasses the Queen, I think that it's humiliating for her and I think it's wrong to have brought her into it in this way.
"The visit in February was supposed to be to open the embassy and then the question is, you know, what kind of visit did he think he was going to get ? Did he think he was going to get a visit in a gold coach? Did he think he was going to get all that stuff? Well, Londoners are not terribly impressed with him and neither, frankly, are the British...
"He is an asteroid of awfulness that has fallen on this world. I think that he is a danger, and I think that he is a racist."
CORBYN SLAMS 'IGNORANT' BORIS
Meanwhile Mr Corbyn dismissed Mr Johnson's suggestion that senior Labour politicians had "endangered" Anglo-American relations.
The Foreign Secretary tweeted earlier this week that the Labour leader and Sadiq Khan "seem determined to put this crucial relationship at risk".
Appearing on ITV1's Peston on Sunday, Mr Corbyn responded: "Well, in line with so many other ill-thought out, ignorant, ill-conceived comments by Boris Johnson, that goes in the same shelf."
He also questioned the idea of the so-called 'special relationship' between the two countries.
"No, I think there are many important relationships. The US one is obviously culturally and economically important and significant and important. Also the trading relationships we have around the world with obviously the EU but also with India and China and the rest of the world are very important...
"I'm not sure anyone has succeeded in defining the special relationship. I get asked about the special relationship and I was told once by a former prime minister - I won't name' the person - that if they specified what the special relationship was it wouldn't be a special relationship."
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