VP travel pool report #5: Vance on ‘28, free speech, Gaza

Press left Chevening House, and won’t be covering any other events that we know of. So cheerio, tatty bye, etc. from your pooler.

Officials who were present for the meeting include:

UK

Caroline Hurndall, principal private secretary

Jonathan Allen, director general, defense and intelligence

Harriet Thompson, director, Americas & small islands developing states

Benjamin Judah, special adviser

US

Warren Stephens, US ambassador to UK

Jim Durrett, deputy chief of staff to VP

Andrew Loomis, special adviser to the VP for Russia and Europe (notetaker)

Vu Riche, chief of staff to US ambassador

More quotes below, and Otter link is in last pool report.

“In the brief time that we've been here, my kids have fallen asleep on your floor. We've gone fishing in the lake outside. And unfortunately, the one strain on the special relationship is that all of my kids caught a fish, but the Foreign Secretary and I did not.”

On what they would be talking about:

“The situation the Middle East, the situation with Ukraine and Russia. There's a lot of news there, and a lot of things to update each other on. I believe that we're going to talk about our economic partnerships, both in technology, but also the broader shared economic relationship that we're having, we have, and we're so thrilled about that.”

VP said he and Lammy became friends when Lammy was still in the opposition party and Vance had just been elected to Senate.

“We just we care about this relationship, …And there's a lot to do and a lot to work on together. David once said to me, this is probably a couple of years ago, that there's this feeling that the world is in a state of incredible tension. And I certainly felt that a couple of years ago. I think the President of the United States, for the last six, seven months, has done a lot to lower that tension, but there's a lot that the United Kingdom, the United States, can do, I think, to bring greater peace and greater stability to the world.”

On US response to Israel/Gaza:

“We've been in constant negotiations and conversations even the last 24 hours, about how to get more aid into Gaza, about how to solve that humanitarian problem, and also how to get Hamas to a position where they can't continue to threaten the citizens and the civilians of Israel."

More on Gaza and US/UK differences:

“What the President has made very clear is our two goals are very simple right now, vis a vis the situation in Israel and Gaza. Number one, it's we want to make it so that Hamas cannot attack innocent Israeli civilians ever again, and we think that has to come through the eradication of Hamas. Second, the President has been very moved by these terrible images of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. So we want to make sure that we solve that problem. I think all of us can work on how to solve that problem. Obviously, it's not an easy problem to solve, or it would have already been dealt with, but we share, I think, that focus and that goal. We may have some disagreements about how exactly to accomplish that goal, and we'll talk about that today."

On 2028 (he laughed when asked):

“I don't want to talk about lowly things like politics in this grand house. Come on. Look. I think my view on the politics of 2028 is I'm not really focused even on the election in 2026 much less one two years after that. And if we do a good job for the American people, the politics will take care of itself.”

On if he’ll offer Lammy advice on free speech/censorship:

"I also raised concerns about free speech in the United States of America. 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.

"Obviously, I've raised some criticism because concerns about our friends on this side of the Atlantic, but the thing that I'd say to the people of England, or anybody else to David, is many of the things that I worry most about were happening in the United States from 2020 to 2024 I just don't want other countries to follow us down what I think was a very dark path under the Biden administration."

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Natalie Allison

White House Reporter

The Washington Post

@natalie_allison