Strange days for Keir Starmer. The prime minister was braced for a brutal mauling from opposition parties, the media and many of his own MPs in the wake of the Gorton and Denton by-election humiliation that saw Labour relegated to third place behind the Greens and Reform in one of its heartland seats.
With the result too late for Friday’s print editions, it was Saturday when headlines like The Times front page, ‘Starmer on ropes after by-election humiliation’ hit the newsstands. Even left-leaning titles featured similar themes, with turbocharged speculation on whether the final nail had been hammered into the PM’s leadership coffin and whether the government would have to lurch left to counter Zack Polanski’s Greens rather than right to continue concentrating on Nigel Farage’s Reform.
But Saturday’s titles were reduced to fish and chip paper at warp speed by the Trump / Netanyahu aerial blitzing of Iran and within hours the confirmation that its tyrannical ‘Supreme Leader’, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had been blown to bits in his Tehran bunker, along with many top aides and their families.
Trump declares war on Sir Keir too
The UK news agenda totally shifted, although certain papers tried to forge an opportunistic link between the two stories. Helped by Donald Trump giving the Daily Telegraph a phone scoop in which he said he was “very disappointed” by Starmer’s lack of support and refusal to allow the US to use Diego Garcia and bases in the UK to join the attacks on Iran. (In the early hours of Tuesday, the president went further still in a phoner with The Sun, condemning the prime minister while tossing in an attack on Britain’s immigration policy and bafflingly reviving his hatred of London Mayor Sadiq Khan.)
Initially, Starmer looked on shaky ground as the left-leaning leaders of his Australian and Canadian allies threw their verbal support behind Trump’s war against Iran, effectively shrugging off the UK PM’s thinly veiled belief the US and Israel had breached international law.
Later on Sunday, Starmer had performed a partial U-turn by allowing the US to use Diego Garcia and RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire to target Iran’s missile bases, although it didn’t placate Trump and his team. The Starmer concession came when it became clear Iran’s counterattack strategy would target British bases in the region, including Akrotiri in Cyprus. The PM’s mind doubtless concentrated too by Iran’s attacks across the Gulf region, with its hundreds of thousands of British expats and holidaymakers.
The not so special relationship
Inevitably, the media focus turned to whether Starmer’s stance was hammering a potentially fatal nail into the (not so?) Special Relationship.
Sample the Daily Mail’s Monday leader, ‘Has wooden PM fallen off the fence?’ ran the headline. The opening paragraph: “With the world edging closer to a conflict of potentially seismic proportions, would it have been too much to expect Keir Starmer to nail his colours unambiguously to the mast? Short answer: it would appear so.”
The leader went on: “Reading from an autocue as he delivered his statement on Saturday, he sounded less like the leader of an influential nation and more like a commentator on events that had no bearing on him and our place in the world. Except he’s so wooden and dull, not even The Guardian would hire him in that role.”
On the facing page, a column by Stephen Glover was headlined: ‘Has Britain – once a major player in the Middle East – ever looked SO irrelevant on the world stage.”
But in an intriguing article, Glover went on, “In a moment of international crisis, to whom did Starmer turn for guidance? Why, his old friend and colleague, Attorney General Lord Hermer. The view of this tiresome human rights lawyer – that Trump is breaking international law – has made Starmer even more wobbly than usual.
One nasty regime war after another
“Of course Trump is breaking international law! We don’t need Hermer to tell us this is the case, since the US isn’t directly threated by Iran. The more important question is whether British national interests lie in supporting Trump in his latest escapade, and if so to what extent? For even the most zealous of the president’s supporters should ask themselves whether blitzing Iran is likely to bring about regime change. My fear is that we may, at best, exchange one nasty regime for another almost as unpleasant.”
Later in his column, Glover takes a swipe at Starmer for “sucking up” to Trump, arguing that with a handful of exceptions, “For the most part, he has genuflected to Trump. That may have won him some empty plaudits from the narcissistic president but it hasn’t earned him any respect. Any advice he chooses to give in respect of Iran will be noted and almost certainly ignored.”
Trust Trump at your peril
Glover’s ‘regime change’ warning certainly coincides with the fears of my own anti-regime Iranian friends and contacts. United in celebrating the supreme leader’s killing, they are dismissive of Trump’s talk of ‘regime change’. Their strong suspicion is that he would settle for a nuclear deal with the surviving regime leadership that he could promote as a huge personal triumph, even (absurdly) seek to trade into a Nobel Peace Prize and abandon any pretence at democratic ‘regime change’.
As one of them put it to me: “Hearing Trump and Netanyahu urging us to take to the streets and seize power is grotesque. The regime still has the weaponry and the will to use it against the civilian population. Has Trump forgotten it’s only a few weeks since he urged us to do that, pledging he would help us, the help never came and at least 35,000 protesters were slaughtered. Without US boots on the ground, the same could happen again. And many of us are realistic enough to recognise US public and political opinion wouldn’t accept sending American troops to die fighting for our freedom on Iranian soil.”
Another London-based exile put it another way: “Watching Trump announcing the attacks on TV wearing his white ‘America’ baseball cap and raving about raining down death and destruction made me think of the demented, gung-ho Robert Duvall character in Apocalypse Now.” She also made a point of agreeing with a line in Marina Hyde’s Wednesday Guardian column which focused on the intellectually challenged US secretary of war, Pete Hegseth (an over promoted former Fox News Trump fanboy) who let slip that “what’s going down in Iran is no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise”.
Vance the unconvinced?
Hyde wasn’t alone in drawing attention to how quiet VP JD Vance has been. But maybe not such a big mystery considering he was the mastermind of the Trump election campaign theme of ‘no more foreign forever wars’ that so effectively enthused a now distinctly disillusioned MAGA base.
But one of the more perceptive questions was posed by the historian and veteran war correspondent Max Hastings in a March 2nd Times guest column headlined: ‘Tell us, Trump, how this Iran operation ends’. It’s a question still without an answer because, Hastings implies, the most powerful man on the planet went to war without a thought through plan in his own butterfly mind.
On Tuesday, in yet another contradictory ramble, Trump even hinted the possibility of deploying US ground troops in Iran. It flew in the face of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s briefing to Congress a few hours earlier in which he said destroying Iran’s nuclear weapons ambition and not regime change is the administration’s prime objective. Rubio also – in contrast to the impression given by Trump – suggested that Israel had decided to attack Iran, giving the US no alternative but to join them in the knowledge that the Tehran regime would automatically target US bases in the region and the naval ‘armada’ Trump had assembled.
Mystifying timing
Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, the timing of last Saturday’s war kick-off has puzzled even some of Trump’s keenest political allies. Not least because it happened in the middle of the Omani-sponsored negotiations over a possible nuclear deal. Even though Trump had assembled an Armada capable of raining death and destruction down on Iran, many saw it more as an expensive tactical weapon designed to swiftly force Tehran into that coveted nuclear ‘surrender’ without igniting a Gulf-wide firestorm. In no particular order, three explanatory theories have gained strength on the Hill.
- Fear that congress was moving toward restricting (in line with the constitution) a president’s power to go to war without Congressional approval.
- Diversion from the growing pressure for the release of the remaining 2-3 million Epstein Files in which Donald Trump allegedly features even more than he has so far.
- That Trump’s ally, Israeli PM Netanyahu, faces both a tricky election and the resumption of his corruption trial. A major new war could help delay both. Only days before the war button was pressed last weekend, Trump had lashed out at Israel’s President Herzog for refusing his demand that Netanyahu should be pardoned over the alleged corruption case and the trial scrapped.
Keir’s cojones moment
Whether Keir Starmer had read the Stephen Glover broadside before facing the commons on Monday afternoon, who knows? But somehow, despite looking strained and pale, the prime minister appeared to have rediscovered the cojones Glover mocked him for lacking.
Faced by fierce crossfire from right and left, and a smallish cohort of rebellious snipers among his own ranks, Starmer stuck to his guns on his stance on Iran, reinforcing the limits of the UK’s defensive but not offensive, approach to the crisis and making it clear Britain wouldn’t breach international law by directly joining strikes inside Iran. It was, arguably, his strongest public disagreement with Trump, even though Labour’s left wing, the Greens, LibDems, SNP would have wanted him to go further. The Tories and Reform, by contrast, virtually accused him of cowardice and betraying Trump and the Special Relationship. Starmer was quick to agree (rightly) with the veteran Conservative Father of the House Edward Leigh that regime change has never successfully been achieved from the skies alone. Indeed, the prime minister didn’t hide from the fact the disastrous and bloody aspects of the US / UK history of Middle East interventions was influencing his caution on Iran now.
Kemi Badenoch wasn’t alone in suggesting fear of a Muslim voter backlash – Reform and some right-wing UK papers have pushed that line. But have they forgotten that Iran is a Shia nation and the vast majority of Muslims in Britain are from rival Sunni branch with little or no time for the Iranian regime?
Polls apart
Two polls on Tuesday brought sweet and sour news for Sir Keir. A YouGov one reported 49% of the British public back his cautious position with only 28% siding with Trump. Just a third (32%) favouring his partial U-turn allowing the US to use UK bases. But a second YouGov poll reported the Greens have surged ahead of Labour nationally and are only 2 points behind Reform. Certainly turning up the heat and the intrigue ahead of the May 7th elections in Scotland, Wales and parts of England that could determine the prime minister’s fate.
Before the polls emerged, the Daily Mail was in full anti-Sir Keir attack mode with a Tuesday splash headline, ‘US lambasts ‘handwringing, pearl-clutching’ Starmer as Kemi says he’s ‘scared’ of his own voters’.
Inside, Westminster sketch writer Quentin Letts reviewed the PM’s commons performance with the headline, ‘Droning on about ‘the law, the law’, Sir Keir was no more belligerent than the speaking clock’. Not that many MPs would have agreed with that and neither, the YouGov findings suggest, do the public when it comes to Trump and Iran.
Elsewhere in Tuesday’s Mail, Trump cheerleader-in-chief Richard Littlejohn weighed in with ‘No wonder Trump’s mad at Starmer over Iran. We’ll keep the white flag flying here!’.
While Andrew Neil, normally a serious Trump critic, more surprisingly offered, ‘The Middle East will never be perfect but it could be much better than it is. So stay the course, Mr President’.
The paper’s Trump supportive leader headlined, ‘Never forget who our real friend are’. In a commentary by Dan Hodges, the headline claimed, ‘48 hours that proved Zack Polanski and his marauding Greens now run Britain’s foreign policy’. A piece in line with several days in which the Mail titles have platformed Nigel Farage’s dubious assertion that foreign born voters and illegal family voting at polling booths had robbed Reform of by-election victory. (Echoes of The Donald?)
Crace cracks it
Amid the bombs, missiles, drones, death, destruction in Iran and the Gulf states, together with the ensuing economic mayhem, humour hasn’t been much in evidence. But the Guardian’s political sketch writer, John Crace, managed it with, ‘Ever since Trump was overlooked for the Nobel Peace prize, the US president has rather turned his back on his peace mission. Now he is hellbent on winning the Nobel prize for war.’
Crace muses why no one persuaded creepy FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, to upgrade his much mocked ‘Peaciest Ever President’ award to Trump to ‘Makes Jesus Look Second Rate’ prize,
While Crace made great play of Nigel Farage’s absence from Monday’s commons debate when he left it to his deputy Richard Tice to slag off the PM’s unwillingness to throw in his lot behind Trump.
Wrote Crace on Tuesday: “There was no sign of Farage. At an event in the morning he had called Starmer pathetic. Now it was his turn to be pathetic by staying away. Iran is a problem for Nige. He was dead against Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. But now he finds himself all for Iran. Why? Simply because it’s a war led by one of his friends. This may backfire. Most Americans are against the US aerial invasion.” (* Around 80% according to one new US poll).
Trump’s Churchill own goal?
By Tuesday afternoon, at another rambling self-promoting White House press conference, Trump was back to blasting ‘uncooperative UK’ and a ‘this is no Churchill we’re dealing with’ potshot at Starmer personally. That triggered exactly the UK media coverage The Donald was counting on to wound the prime minister. Invoking Churchill’s name led news bulletins and made Wednesday’s splash for The Times, The Telegraph, The Sun, the i, The Independent and later editions of the Express who misjudged it earlier. It also featured on the Guardian and Mirror front pages.
The Daily Mail’s front page carrying a savage editorial that read: “Imagine if Sir Keir Starmer had been in charge when Argentina invaded the Falklands. Or, worse still, when Britain stood alone against Hitler. As Trump said last night, sitting in front of a bust of our greatest PM, Starmer is ‘no Churchill’. For once, the US president was putting it mildly… Starmer has now wrecked Britain’s relationship with our oldest ally. He’s a national embarrassment.”
Although the Mail was somewhat out of tune with the subsequent public mood music and opinion polls, I’m sure an admirer will be sending Trump a framed copy to hang on a White House wall.
As someone who once knew The Donald well personally, I wasn’t surprised he saw deploying Churchill’s name as a verbal guided missile he envisaged would badly damage Starmer. But what was encouraging on Wednesday was that the missile was backfiring and boosting the PM not the president in the court of UK public opinion. At least on the early evidence of the phone-in shows and the social media reaction. Several Tory MPs were quick to disassociate themselves from it. Privately senior Reform figures were squirming nervously.
At PMQs on Wednesday, Starmer rather neatly sidestepped a Tory MP’s attempt to provoke him over Trump’s taunt by saying, “Hanging on President Trump’s latest word is not the Special Relationship in action.”
Whether the badly-holed ‘Special Relationship’ can even survive until the end of Trump’s Iran war is now a very open question. Along with: Will Keir hold his Trump defiant nerve? And who’d bet against this preening POTUS intervening ahead of the May 7th elections seeking to decapitate Starmer and urge a vote for Farage’s Reform. Which, come to think of it, might just be what the prime minister and, er, Zack Polanksi would welcome. Very strange days indeed!
