𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Sir Keir Starmer summoned the Press to Downing Street as he battled to shed his reputation as Ditherer-in-chief. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage had delivered a scathing assessment of his leadership throughout the Iran crisis hours earlier, claiming Britain has been left “humiliated” and the nation should have supported the United States and the Israelis in their strikes from “day one”.

When the President of the United States has told the world you are no Winston Churchill and the fabled Royal Navy cannot dispatch a warship to the Mediterranean to defend Britain’s military presence in Cyprus until next week, this is not a good look – especially when former generals line up to warn that our armed forces have been whittled away.

The time had come to get on the front foot. He needed to send out a message to worried MPs, the concerned military, anxious allies and any foes tempted to take advantage of British weakness that Britannia is not comatose.

Standing between two UK flags in the gleaming Downing Street briefing room, he tried to cast himself as paragon of cool-headed rationality in a dangerous and chaotic world.

“While the region has been plunged into chaos, my focus is providing calm, level-headed leadership in the national interest,” he declared.

Did he regret the decision not to join in the initial attacks on the Iranian regime? Not a bit of it.

President Trump may have decided it was time to unleash a superpower’s arsenal at the theocracy to kill off its nuclear ambitions, but Sir Keir did not agree.

“The long-standing British position is that the best way forward for the regime and the world is a negotiated settlement with Iran where they give up their nuclear ambitions,” he said. “Now, that’s why I took the decision that the UK would not join the initial strikes on Iran by the US and Israel. That decision was deliberate, it was in the national interest and I stand by it.”

The world has changed since then and Iran has “fired drones and missiles at 10 countries that did not attack them”.

British jets were in the sky as soon as the strikes started and our forces are shooting down drones.

So, is the UK now on a mission to turn Iran into a Persian democracy? Sir Keir did not show any appetite for the type of regime change which captured his predecessor Sir Tony Blair’s imagination.

“My strong view is that we need to de-escalate and ultimately this will have to be a matter of negotiation when it comes to some of the core issues like nuclear capability,” he said.

In other words, his core belief has not changed. The Iran crisis will have to be resolved in a negotiating room – no matter how many lives are lost, ships are sunk and lives are lost in the meantime.

He did not lavish praise on President Trump or look in a hurry to restore the UK’s position as First Buddy. Sir Keir spoke of the “firm by our values and our principles, no matter the pressure to do otherwise”.

He delivered his statement on a glorious day in London but the PM does not look like a man who has felt sunshine recently. The world is in crisis and, as he put it, this “conflict could continue for some time”.

Sir Keir last spoke to President Trump on Saturday evening. His cautious statement today, in which he makes it clear he believes jaw-jaw would have been better than war-war is unlikely to make the next conversation with the wartime president any less frosty.