Methodist peer launches fierce attack on Trump over criticism of prime minister

A senior Methodist and member of the House of Lords has launched a stinging attack on President Donald Trump over his comments regarding Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit strategy.

Trump, on an official visit to the UK, gave an interview to The Sun newspaper in which he said he had 'told Mrs May how to do it, but she didn't listen to me'. He said the Brexit paper controversially agreed at Chequers would probably 'kill' any chance of a trade deal with the US and praised May's rival Boris Johnson, who he said would 'make a great prime minister'.

In a Facebook post entitled 'The straw that breaks the camel's back', Methodist minister Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, a former president of the Methodist Conference, expressed his outrage at Trump's comments.

'So who is this tyrant, this gas-filled, empty-headed foreigner who has so callously treated our prime minister with his public, on-the-record outbursts?' he said. 'He's already done the same for Justin Trudeau and Angela Merkel. Now he's addressed his sociopathic inadequacies towards the leader of our government. Our British government. And on a visit to Britain, the guest of the very person he's denigrating. How dare he?'

He continued: 'Alongside these gratuitous insults, of course, we've seen him in a loving clutch with the dictator of North Korea and we know that he's soon going to be cosying up to the authoritarian leader of Russia. It's as if he considers them to be his kind of people. And perhaps they are. He certainly seems at home in that kind of company.'

He concluded: 'This man is a danger to us all. I don't care how many American readers of these lines write in with their dismissive or angry rejoinders. Their president is a disgrace to his office and to his people. It's time the people of America woke up. Their president, far from making their country great again, is making it the laughing stock of the world.'

In a previous post Lord Griffiths criticised Trump's policies in Venezuela and in Haiti, where he served as a missionary, saying they had led to widespread poverty.