You may have noticed that our prime minister, Keir Starmer, met the president of the United States, Donald Trump, last week. Among other things, the PM handed POTUS an invitation from King Charles for him to enjoy a second state visit to the UK. In his letter, the king remarked that the president might at “some stage be visiting Turnberry and a detour to a relatively near neighbour might not cause you too much inconvenience”. Balmoral was mentioned.
Aside from that and Ukraine, Trump and Starmer also discussed trade. The journalist Mark Austin posted on X: “Sometimes it’s the smaller stuff. I hear on good authority that high on the list of what Donald Trump wants from the UK is for the Open Golf Championship to be staged at his Trump Turnberry course in Scotland.” I bet he does. Well, there or at his other course in Scotland.
He always intended that Trump International in Aberdeen would one day host the Open. The course was opened in 2012, designed by Martin Hawtree, who had previously done work for the Royal & Ancient Golf Club. Early on, Trump invited Peter Dawson, then chief executive of the R&A, for a game there. Trump guided the conversation round to the subject of the Open and when his course might have a chance of getting it. Dawson said something along the lines of “in perhaps 50 years”, which was a sensible way of batting back the question but it wasn’t what Trump wanted to hear. He would have known that Chambers Bay in Washington state was slated to host the US Open in 2015, eight years after it opened. He didn’t want to wait until after he was dead. He would have to find a different plan. So he bought Turnberry.
Turnberry had by that point hosted four Opens: 1977, 1986, 1994 and 2009. Trump had bought a sure thing. But his behaviour at the 2015 Women’s British Open at his Turnberry, when he seemed to seek to make himself the main attraction, had alerted the R&A to potential pitfalls. If Trump had not been its owner then despite some suggested infrastructure issues Turnberry may have been awarded the 2023 Open (which Covid turned into the 2024 Open) since Royal Troon had staged the previous Open in the west of Scotland, in 2016. After the Capitol riots on January 6, 2021, Martin Slumbers, who had succeeded Dawson, said: “Until we’re confident that any coverage at Turnberry would be about golf, about the golf course and about the championship, we will not return any of our championships there.”
The topic of Turnberry came up at the White House last week only in the context of Trump saying he owned it. In the Daily Telegraph on Saturday, the R&A reaffirmed that the Open would not be going there in any case because of poor logistics and the fact at Turnberry they would be unable to generate the money they would want. Surely Trump of all people would understand the profit motive? However, I suspect we may not have heard the last of this. Nor perhaps of Aberdeen. Trump abhors the North Sea wind farms that are very visible from his course there. I’m sure he’d like to see them traded, as in vanished.
You can follow Robert Green on Twitter @robrtgreen and enjoy his other blog f-factors.com as well as his golf archive on robertgreen-golf.com
