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Trump Is Already a Headache for Tory Leadership Candidates

They’re weeks away from winning the top job, but Trump is already causing issues for the Conservatives vying to succeed May as PM.

Trump Is Already a Headache for Tory Leadership Candidates
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference with Andrzej Duda, Poland’s president, not pictured, in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S. (Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg)

(Bloomberg) -- They’re still weeks away from winning the top job, but U.S. President Donald Trump is already causing problems for the Conservatives vying to succeed Theresa May as prime minister.

The latest headache is how they should respond to Trump’s attack on London’s Muslim mayor over knife crime in the capital.

Trump called London Mayor Sadiq Khan “a disaster” in response to a spate of violence in London in which three men were killed in separate attacks in less than 24 hours. He said the capital needs a new mayor “ASAP” as he retweeted a post by right-wing commentator Katie Hopkins in which she dubbed the capital “Khan’s Londonistan.”

Trump Is Already a Headache for Tory Leadership Candidates

Trump and Khan, the first Muslim mayor of a western capital city, have been engaged in a long-running war of words. Khan authorized protests and the use of a giant inflatable blimp of the president in a diaper when he visited the U.K.

For Conservatives aiming to be prime minister the issue poses several dilemmas: do they side with Khan, who is a member of the opposition Labour Party; defend their country from foreign interference, or agree with Trump, with whom they will need to have a personal relationship once becoming premier?

Different Approaches

At a question and answer session with political reporters in London, the candidates took different approaches.

“President Trump has his own style,” Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said. “I wouldn’t use those words myself -- but the sentiment is enormous disappointment that we have a mayor of London who has completely failed to tackle knife crime, and spent more time on politics than the actual business of making London safer -- and in that I 150% agree with the president.”

By contrast Home Secretary Sajid Javid, also of Muslim heritage, said the president should “stick to domestic politics,” adding: “He should be concerned about the serious violence in his own country, which is more than 10 times higher than it is in the U.K."

Not Savory

Former Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab said the tweet was neither “helpful, savory or constructive,” while Environment Secretary Michael Gove, asked the same question, merely replied: “I think it always a mistake to retweet anything that Katie Hopkins tweets.”

Rory Stewart, the international development secretary and another leadership hopeful, also declined to criticize Trump, saying such actions should take place in private. “You should be firm, you should talk about your national interests, you should talk about it politely, you should talk about it very clearly and you should do it privately,” Stewart said.

The Tory front-runner Boris Johnson declined to appear at the media session in Parliament Monday, the day after he refused to appear on a televised debate.

In 2015 Trump praised Hopkins, who has courted controversy by fat-shaming and comparing migrants to cockroaches, as a “respected columnist.” In 2016 her then employer, the Daily Mail newspaper, settled a libel case with a Muslim family after Hopkins claimed they had connections to terrorist group Al Qaeda.

To contact the reporter on this story: Kitty Donaldson in London at kdonaldson1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Tim Ross at tross54@bloomberg.net, Thomas Penny, Emma Ross-Thomas

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