Trump Cancels London Visit

US President Donald Trump won’t be paying a visit to London to open his country’s billion-dollar embassy, he tweeted on Thursday.

The trip, which would have been Trump’s first to the UK as president, had not been officially announced but was expected next month, CNN reported.

“Reason I canceled my trip to London is that I am not a big fan of the Obama Administration having sold perhaps the best located and finest embassy in London for ‘peanuts,’ only to build a new one in an off location for 1.2 billion dollars. Bad deal. Wanted me to cut ribbon-NO!” the full tweet reads.

The decision to move the embassy from Grosvenor Square to Nine Elms was made in 2008 under George W. Bush, not Obama. It would have been impossible to retrofit the aging concrete building with the security measures needed, officials said at the time.

Former Labour leader Ed Miliband replied to Trump’s tweet shortly after it was posted, challenging the assertion that it was Trump’s dissatisfaction with the deal that had derailed the visit.

“Nope it’s because nobody wanted you to come,” Miliband wrote in a reply to the US leader’s tweet. “And you got the message.”

Echoing that view, London Mayor Sadiq Khan said on Friday that Trump had “got the message” from Londoners after canceling his visit to the city.

“President Trump got the message from the many Londoners who love and admire America and Americans but find his policies and action the polar opposite of our city’s values,” Khan said in a statement released on Twitter.

Khan said Trump’s visit would “without doubt have been met with mass peaceful protests” and that it was a mistake for May to invite him on a state visit.

Large demonstrations are expected to accompany any visit to the British capital by Trump, who is deeply unpopular here. A petition to stop Trump from making an official state visit to Britain garnered over 1.8 million signatures last year, in a backlash over his controversial travel ban.

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