The Trump administration charged Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch with circulating inaccurate reports about remarks by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage on American use of a military facility in the Chagos Islands.

Farage told a US podcast host last month that he would lock in ongoing US access to the Diego Garcia base if Washington recognized British control of the Falklands and stopped treating the issue as leverage. Badenoch told a newspaper that the idea amounted to surrendering British land merely to buy silence, which she described as humiliating and careless talk from someone seeking national security responsibility.

A US official said Washington never interpreted Farage as proposing a transfer of the islands and regarded that reading as harmful to the transatlantic relationship. Officials also expressed confusion over whether Badenoch implied a future Conservative government might withhold base access, noting that the United States has long enjoyed such use and that the only recent disruption came from Labour efforts to transfer the territory to Mauritius.