Fact check: No UK prime minister has attended a US presidential inauguration
Donald Trump has broken with a long tradition of foreign leaders not attending the presidential swearing-in ceremony.
Claims have circulated on social media that attach significance to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer not being invited to Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration ceremony in Washington DC next week.
“Not inviting Keir Starmer to Trump’s inauguration should make everyone sit up and listen. This is not a reflection on the UK, it’s a reflection of the direction the UK is headed under Keir Starmer. Make no mistake, it’s another political disaster,” one user wrote.
Another said: “Nigel Farage has been invited to Donald Trump’s inauguration. Keir Starmer hasn’t. This is big.”
Evaluation
No UK prime minister, or any other world leader, appears to have visited the United States at the time of any presidential inauguration going back to when records of visits began in 1874.
This year, in a break with tradition, Donald Trump has invited several world leaders to join him on his inauguration day. Sir Keir Starmer does not appear to be one of the invitees.
The facts
The US State Department maintains a list of every visit by a UK leader to the country, starting with prime minister Ramsay MacDonald in 1929.
There were no official visits by a UK leader to the US in 2021, the year of Joe Biden’s inauguration. Then-prime minister Theresa May visited on January 27 2017, seven days after Donald Trump’s first inauguration.
Barack Obama’s first inauguration was on January 20 2009, but it was not until early March that year that prime minister Gordon Brown visited the country. Tony Blair visited the US around a month after George Bush’s first inauguration and John Major visited Bill Clinton around a month after his first term began.
The earliest visit by a UK leader following a US president’s inauguration in the last century appears to be that of Alec Douglas-Home two days after Lyndon Johnson was sworn in to office in 1963. Mr Douglas-Home’s was in the US to attend the funeral of Mr Johnson’s assassinated predecessor, John F Kennedy.
The PA news agency examined the State Department’s visiting log for each of the presidential inauguration years since records began in 1874 and found that not a single foreign leader was listed as visiting the United States of America at the time of the swearing-in ceremony. That is despite hundreds of visits by foreign leaders throughout the period. There were 31 different inauguration years when other foreign leaders also visited.
However this year it has been reported that, in a break with tradition, Mr Trump has invited several world leaders to join him on January 20 when he is sworn in as president for the second time. So far there has been no confirmation that Sir Keir Starmer is among those invited.
