The US and UK have “disagreements” on Gaza including over whether to recognise a Palestinian state, JD Vance has suggested as he arrived in England for his summer holiday.
The US vice-president was speaking before a bilateral meeting with David Lammy, the UK foreign secretary, at his 17th-century grace-and-favour country house, Chevening.
His remarks on Gaza marked a note of discord in what otherwise appeared to be a convivial meeting between the two politicians, who have struck up an unlikely friendship. The pair have bonded over their Christian faith and difficult childhoods.
Before speaking to reporters on Friday afternoon, Lammy and Vance were filmed fishing for carp together in a pond near Chevening House. Expressing his love for the UK and describing Lammy as a “good friend” and “gracious host”, Vance joked that their varying degrees of success in the carp pond was the “one strain on the special relationship”.
“All of my kids caught fish, but the foreign secretary did not,” he said.
Vance is staying at Chevening with his wife and family and will spend the weekend there with Lammy and his family before going on holiday to the Cotswolds. The vice-president said the people who had built Chevening and sustained it “really love the human spirit”, and heaped praise on the UK, saying it had a “lot in common” with the US and that the two countries should work together to “bring greater peace” to the world.
While it has been billed as a private visit, Vance and Lammy held a formal bilateral on Friday afternoon where they discussed the continuing crisis in Gaza, including the Israeli security cabinet’s decision to take over Gaza City, as well as the war in Ukraine and US-UK trade and technology policy. A government source described the meeting as “constructive”.
Before the meeting Vance noted Gaza as one area where there “may be disagreements” between the White House and Downing Street despite their shared goal to end the war.
Asked by reporters for his thoughts on the UK’s plans to recognise Palestine, Vance said: “Obviously, the United Kingdom is going to make its decision. We have no plans to recognise the Palestinian state. I don’t know what it would mean to really recognise a Palestinian state given the lack of functional government there.”
He said that while both governments wanted to resolve the crisis in Gaza, they “may have some disagreements about how exactly to accomplish that goal, and we’ll talk about that today”.
In the recent past Vance has criticised the UK over what he saw as infringements to freedom of speech. In February, he claimed a “backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons” under threat and he attacked the use of laws to enforce buffer zones around abortion clinics.
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Asked about his past remarks, the vice-president claimed on Friday that his concerns related more widely to “the entire collective west” as well as the US. “I think the entire collective west, the transatlantic relationship, our Nato allies, certainly the United States under the Biden administration, got a little too comfortable with censoring rather than engaging with a diverse array of opinions,” he told reporters.
Lammy said “commonalities and differences” in political debate were part of the “joy of living in a democracy like ours”.
The meeting took place hours after Keir Starmer urged the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to reconsider his plans to take over Gaza City, warning the move would only bring more bloodshed.
Starmer said Israel’s decision to escalate the conflict was wrong and would do nothing to secure the release of Israeli hostages. “Every day the humanitarian crisis in Gaza worsens and hostages taken by Hamas are being held in appalling and inhuman conditions. What we need is a ceasefire, a surge in humanitarian aid, the release of all hostages by Hamas and a negotiated solution,” he said.