Ben Stokes stars with the ball before an excellent batting performance from Ben Duckett and Zak Crawley gives England control of the fourth Test against India, with the home side closing day two on 225-2 at Old Trafford, 133 runs behind India's first innings score of 358.

MATCH REPORT: Stokes and openers put England on top against India

Available to UK users only.

Trump takes time out to open Scottish golf course

3 hours ago Share Save James Cook Scotland editor Share Save

As Donald Trump heads to Scotland, what to expect from his visit

Donald Trump flies into Scotland later to visit two golf resorts which he owns in the country where his mother was born. He will travel to Turnberry in South Ayrshire, a world class venue he bought in 2014, and to Menie in Aberdeenshire to open a new 18-hole course. The White House says Trump will also meet prime minister Sir Keir Starmer to discuss trade while he is in the UK. The trip is exceptional as US presidents rarely promote their personal interests so publicly while in office. It is not the first time that Trump has been accused of conflating his own affairs with the nation's. Even so, with Gaza and Ukraine in flames, the dollar on the slide, and questions mounting about his ties to convicted paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, Trump's decision to focus on golf has raised eyebrows.

Reuters In Las Vegas a decade ago Trump was keen to promote his Scottish golf courses

I witnessed Trump's unconventional attitude first hand, right at the start of his political career, when I met him on the campaign trail in 2015 as the Republicans searched for a candidate who could win back the presidency after Barack Obama's two terms in office. Trump strode off the debate stage in a glitzy Las Vegas hotel and into a room packed with cameras. Jostling for position, I asked the man with the long red tie a couple of questions and, after boasting about his status as frontrunner in the race, he told me he had a message for the UK. This will make news, I thought. Maybe something about immigration, Trump's signature campaign topic? It was not. Instead Trump wanted BBC viewers to know that he had some fine golf courses on Scotland's shores which they should visit. The answer struck me as remarkable for a man aspiring to become the so-called leader of the free world.

Getty Images Donald Trump's mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, grew up on the Isle of Lewis before emigrating to America

Of course Trump does have a genuine link to Scotland. His Gaelic-speaking mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, was born in 1912 on the island of Lewis in Scotland's Outer Hebrides and left during the Great Depression for New York where she married property developer Fred Trump. Their son's return to Scotland for four days this summer comes ahead of an official state visit in September when the president and First Lady Melania Trump will be hosted by King Charles at Windsor Castle in Berkshire. Trump is not scheduled to see the King on this visit but it is not entirely private either, as he will meet Scotland's First Minister John Swinney as well as the prime minister. Business leaders, including Scotch whisky producers, are urging Starmer and Swinney to use their meetings with Trump to lobby for a reduction in US taxes on imports, known as tariffs.

A huge security operation, which has been under way for weeks, has been scaled up in recent days. Giant transport aircraft carrying military hardware, including the president's helicopters, known when he is on board by the call sign Marine One, have been spotted at Aberdeen and Prestwick airports. Roads and lanes in Aberdeenshire and Ayrshire have been secured and closed. Airspace restrictions have been issued. Police reinforcements have been heading north across the England-Scotland border. Visits to Scotland by sitting US presidents are rare. Queen Elizabeth hosted Dwight D Eisenhower at Balmoral in Aberdeenshire in 1957; George W Bush travelled to Gleneagles in Perthshire for a G8 summit in 2005; and Joe Biden attended a climate conference in Glasgow in 2021. The only other serving president to visit this century is Trump himself in 2018 when he was met by protesters including one flying a paraglider low over Turnberry, breaching the air exclusion zone around the resort.

PA Trump's trip to Scotland is not an official state visit

Even by the standards of Donald Trump the years since have been wild. When he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, a mob of Trump supporters responded to their leader's false claims of electoral fraud by mounting a violent assault on the US Capitol. Four years later Trump staged a stunning political comeback and since returning to the White House he has survived at least one assassination attempt while a man has been charged with another. Amid this turmoil, security surrounding Trump is supposedly tighter than ever. The US Secret Service, much criticised for failures which nearly cost the president his life, remains primarily responsible for his safety but concerns have been raised about the impact of his visit on Police Scotland's officers and budget, with one former senior officer estimating the policing cost at more than £5m. Adding to the pressure which the police are under to secure his resorts, large anti-Trump demonstrations are expected to be held in Aberdeen and Edinburgh. Police Scotland insists it has the resources it needs to deal with the visit.

Getty Images Trump's last visit as president sparked protests across the country

While polls suggest Trump is deeply unpopular in the UK, he may actually find some sympathy in Aberdeen, a city which he and many others call "the oil capital of Europe". He has stirred the heated debate about the nature and pace of the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, telling BBC News last week that Aberdeen, which has prospered for decades from North Sea drilling, "should get rid of the windmills and bring back the oil." The environmental campaign group Uplift says Trump's claim that the North Sea can still provide the UK with a secure energy supply "runs counter to reality." Trump's pro-oil message echoes the rhetoric of Reform UK, the right-wing party led by Trump fan Nigel Farage which made progress in a recent Scottish by-election and hopes to go one step further by winning seats for the first time in next year's Scottish parliamentary election. The Scottish Parliament, known as Holyrood after its location at the foot of Edinburgh's Royal Mile, runs much of Scotland's domestic affairs, such as health, education and some taxation and benefits, while the UK parliament in London retains control of defence, foreign affairs and wider economic policy.

Getty Images Security and police teams surrounded the perimeter of Turnberry as Donald Trump played golf on his last visit as president in July 2018

Trump's support for the oil industry is well known but his hatred of wind turbines appears to run even deeper. In 2012 he told me that building a wind farm off the coast of his golf course at Menie would be a "terrible error" that would "destroy Scotland." The encounter was a strange experience. At first, Trump's aides told us he was so affronted by the difficult questions he had been asked by Rona Dougall of STV News earlier that morning that he had changed his mind about speaking to the BBC. We waited anyway in the rain, for hours. Eventually the man himself emerged. After some verbal sparring he offered us burgers from a barbecue before backing down and agreeing to be interviewed. Later, asked by a committee of the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh to provide evidence to back up his claim that Scottish tourism would be ruined by wind turbines, Trump famously replied: "I am the evidence." The wind farm was built anyway and is now clearly visible from the course.

Getty Images Donald Trump poses with Scottish pipers during a visit to the construction site of his golf course on the Menie Estate in 2010

Getty Images Trump appeared at the Scottish Parliament in 2012 to complain about wind turbines near his golf course

More traders to challenge rate-rigging convictions

"Following the Supreme Court's landmark decision yesterday to quash the convictions of Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo, all four of our clients now intend to appeal against their convictions," said law firm Hickman & Rose.

All of the traders were convicted of manipulating the interest rates used for loans between banks, know as Libor in the UK, an issue at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis.

Jay Merchant, Jonathan Mathew, Philippe Moryoussef, and Christian Bittar are seeking acquittal following the victory of traders Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo .

Four traders are appealing to have their rate-rigging convictions overturned after the Supreme Court quashed two rate-rigging cases on Wednesday.

"In those circumstances, they don't intend to comment further at this time," the firm added.

The four convictions came after an investigation from the Serious Fraud Office into whether traders had been manipulating Libor for profit.

Libor became the focus of allegations of wrongdoing following the financial crisis in 2008 and has now been discontinued, while its European equivalent Euribor is being reformed.

Because the Supreme Court has now ruled in favour of Mr Hayes and Mr Palombo, the four traders' appeal is likely to be a more straightforward process than for Mr Hayes and Mr Palombo who argued their case for years.

The Serious Fraud Office declined to comment on the appeal from the four traders on Thursday.

However, it said on Wednesday in response to the ruling on Mr Hayes and Mr Palombo's case that it had "considered this judgement and the full circumstances carefully and determined it would not be in the public interest for us to seek a retrial".

The Libor scandal came to light in 2012, when it was discovered that banks were artificially inflating rates to profit from trading and were also lowering them to mask the troubles they faced following the outbreak of the global financial crisis.

However, in 2023, the BBC uncovered evidence of a much larger, state-led "rigging" of interest rates, under pressure from central banks and governments across the world during the financial crisis.

Mr Hayes and Mr Palombo argued they were wrongly prosecuted for what were normal commercial practices in order to appease public anger towards the banks over the financial crisis.