Deputy prime minister stands in for Keir Starmer as he travels back from G20 summit, facing shadow Cabinet Office minister

With Keir Starmer still on his way back from the G20 summit in Brazil (they were on the ground refuelling at Cape Verde about two hours ago), Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, is standing in for him. Kemi Badenoch does not have a deputy, but today she has asked Alex Burghart, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, to lead for the opposition.

Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.

Lammy argued that Trump would not accept a deal over Ukraine that would look like a victory for Putin. Asked about Trump’s stance on Ukraine, Lammy said:

I’ve been a politician for 25 years and I understand the different philosophies at play. There’s a deep philosophical underpinning to friends in the Republican party that I’ve known for many years, thinking back to people like [former US secretary of state] Condoleezza Rice. Donald Trump has some continuity with this position, which is ‘peace through strength’.

What I do know about Donald Trump is that he doesn’t like losers and he doesn’t want to lose; he wants to get the right deal for the American people. And he knows that the right deal for the American people is peace in Europe and that means a sustainable peace – not Russia achieving its aims and coming back for more in the years ahead.

Lammy said he found Trump “very funny, very engaging and very charismatic” when he and Starmer met Trump for dinner at his home in New York. He also said Trump was “a consummate politician” and very interested in learning how Labour won the election in the UK.

Lammy said he was confident that the Trump administration would back the UK deal giving Mauritius sovereignty over the Chagos Islands. Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has claimed Trump’s team are strongly opposed to the deal. But Lammy said:

The most important thing about that deal was securing the [US-UK] naval base and securing that naval base well beyond any of our lifetimes [99 years]. That secures global security in many, many ways and it certainly keeps that important part of the Indian Ocean out of play for the Chinese.

I’m very confident that when the new administration looks at the detail of this deal that they will stand behind it because Donald Trump knows what a good deal looks like [a reference to his 1987 book The Art of the Deal] – and this is a good deal.

Lammy said the Democrats should have focused more on the economy in their presidential campaign.

When I spoke to friends in the Democratic Party, and I raised this privately, I just felt that they hadn’t centred the economy in the way that we [Labour] had done just coming into our own election cycle.

It felt that the campaign was very focused on 6 January [the pro-Trump riot at the Capitol building in 2021], very focused on Donald Trump personally, very focused on abortion rights. But my view is that you don’t get permission to talk about those things unless you have satisfied the bread and butter – the economy and issues of immigration.