British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said on Tuesday he saw no reason to cancel Donald Trump’s state visit to Britain after the U.S. president criticised Mayor Sadiq Khan’s response to the London Bridge killings.
Trump lambasted Khan on Twitter, accusing him of making a “pathetic excuse”, for saying that Londoners should not be alarmed by the sight of additional police on the streets of the capital following the attack that killed seven people.
“He (Khan) is entirely right to say what he said to reassure the people of his city about the presence of armed officers on the streets,” Johnson said in a BBC radio interview in response to a question on whether Trump’s state visit should be canceled.
“The invitation has been issued and accepted and I see no reason to change that. As far as what Sadiq Khan has said about the reassurances he’s offered the people of London, I think he was entirely right to speak in the way he did.”
“I don’t wish to enter into a row between those two individuals who are I think are probably perfectly able to stick up for themselves,” he said of Trump and Khan.
During Prime Minister Theresa May’s meeting with Trump in Washington on Jan. 30, in the first visit by a foreign leader, the U.S. president accepted an invitation conveyed from the queen for a state visit to Britain later this year.