President Trump’s “hands-off” visit confounded his British critics just ahead of this week’s general election, according to populist Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage.
Trump spent three days in London and Watford for a NATO meeting last week as socialist campaigners took to the streets and tried to bait him into wading into the election, which will be held Thursday.
Farage, 55, said Trump played it perfectly by slapping down unfounded reports that he wanted to buy parts of the National Health Service but otherwise keeping out of British politics.
“There is an argument that foreign leaders should not be seen to interfere in general elections; I get that,” Farage told the Washington Examiner.
“But it was right that Trump made his comments on the National Health Service,” he said. “If the central pillar of the Labour Party is that Donald Trump wants to buy the NHS, he has the absolute right to answer that. Beyond that, it was a very hands-off … much to the surprise of many, including the journalistic pack who didn’t think he was capable of that.”
The visit, barely a week before Britons go to the polls in an election that pits Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party against hardline socialist Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, unnerved many in the British government.
Trump’s freewheeling approach to journalists’ questions meant that senior ministers privately said they would not be able to relax until he left the country.
In the event, he stuck closely to questions of defense and foreign policy, departing only to say Johnson was a “capable” leader, but that he could work with anybody.
The biggest moment of controversy came when several world leaders were caught on camera at a Buckingham Palace reception, apparently ridiculing Trump. Farage said he was shocked by the footage.
“I do think that what happened at the NATO summit where Boris Johnson is there in a little gossipy group with Justin Trudeau and they are effectively mocking the president — I thought that was pretty insulting,” he said.
Farage’s Brexit Party is contesting a general election for the first time. He is hoping to woo northern Labour supporters who voted for Brexit but who now blame a London elite for failing to deliver on the 2016 referendum result.
