We don’t know what the end of the Chagos affair will be, but it is rapidly spinning into farce. The latest brickbat is an immensely awkward judgment delivered today by Justice Lewis KC, Chief Justice of the British Indian Ocean Territory (as well as the Falklands and the British Antarctic Territory).

The judgment finds that a 2004 administrative order passed by the Blair government to take away the native Chagossians’ right of abode could not do that. It also found that the government’s consistent practice since then of simply denying the Chagossians’ right to land on their own homeland is illegal. Coming after an earlier judgment six weeks ago in which he blocked the summary turfing-out by Royal Marines of four Chagossians who had landed on outlying islands to set up house and constituted no threat whatever to the Diego Garcia base, this dumps a large and very unwelcome file on Keir Starmer’s desk.

This dumps a large and very unwelcome file on Keir Starmer’s desk

This dumps a large and very unwelcome file on Keir Starmer’s desk

On one side is the deal cobbled together in 2025 to hand over the Chagos archipelago to Mauritius. It is a project that depends on avoiding awkward opposition and........

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