One must observe with the gravest solemnity the pathetic little spectacle unfolding this afternoon, our so-called Prime Minister stamping his tiny feet like a spoilt child who’s just been told playtime is over, shuffling up to the podium to deliver his limp, hand-wringing “statement on Iran.”

Pray tell, you preposterous, cold-eyed, foot-stamping little cunt… you declare Britain played “no role” while British planes are already circling like nervous pigeons on “defensive operations.” Too little, too late, you trembling beige disaster. We want our borders fucking closed. We want the IRGC terrorist hub in London flattened tonight. We want true Iranian people who hate these mullah monsters protected, right alongside our Jewish friends.

Yet not one of you, not you, not a single member of your compromised, spineless Labour Party, can be trusted with any of it.

Thank God for President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu. Look at the difference, Keir, clean, precise strikes from our actual allies, smashing the head of the snake while you dither and virtue-signal. Meanwhile the IRGC, the very animals you, France, and that bunch of war-mongering cunts at the EU have been soft on for years, deliberately target civilians all over the Middle East. Pure fucking evil. And you support it. You enable it.

The British people would love nothing more than to see a certain foot-stamping, traitor little man strapped to one of those missiles, clearing up the world’s shit that you and your bunch of back-stabbing traitors helped build in the first place.

You are a fucking disgusting man, Keir Starmer. Weak. Pansy. A national embarrassment who flies terrorists in on private planes, lets them settle in our communities, and still refuses to protect British girls from the grooming gangs you covered up.

Step down now, you irredeemable, compromised little cunt. Before your cock-ups cause damage this country can never repair. Resign. Fuck off. The adults are in the room and Britain has had enough of your treason.

Britain First. No Surrender. 🦁🇬🇧

https://x.com/decorativeartt/status/2027814516407652424?s=20

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5839823&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310486#49704632)

There is a strange ritual in Western politics. A hostile regime fires missiles, funds militias, plots killings, represses its own people, and threatens allies, yet our politicians reach first not for the language of security but for the language of paperwork, as if the urgent question is whether the forms were completed correctly.

That ritual was on full display in the reaction to the strikes on Iran. Missiles were already in the air. American bases across the Gulf were hit. Israel was under attack. Yet within hours, left-wing voices in Britain were asking whether the action was lawful, with Emily Thornberry declaring it difficult to see the legal basis because there was no "imminent threat".

Pause and consider the sequence. Iran arms proxies across the Middle East, pursues nuclear capability, launches missiles at Western targets, plots assassinations in Britain, and brutally crushes dissent at home – with reports of tens of thousands killed in recent uprisings. MI5 director-general Ken McCallum has publicly warned of "plot after plot" on British soil and confirmed twenty Iran-backed plots targeting British citizens in just two years. Yet the first reflex from the Left is to debate legal theory instead of recognising the pattern of aggression.

Yes, UK bases are exposed, British personnel are at risk, and no one should be casual about escalation. But there is a difference between hard-headed restraint and studied evasion. Starmer did not decline to speak out because he had weighed the threat and made a difficult call. He declined to even characterise the threat – hiding behind legal uncertainty rather than confronting a question his own intelligence services had already answered for him in classified detail.

Spain followed a version of the same script. Pedro Sánchez rejected the "unilateral military actions" of the United States and Israel while warning about escalation – the familiar European formula: de-escalation first, responsibility later, reality somewhere in the background. What goes unsaid is that the escalation began long before the first American strike.

The public can see the contradiction. A regime that plots killings in Britain is treated as a partner in talks. A regime that fires missiles at Western bases becomes a legal puzzle. A regime that murders its own citizens is handled with caution and euphemism. The pattern of Iranian aggression is treated not as evidence of intent but as a series of isolated incidents requiring individual legal assessment.

And here is where the charge against Labour becomes most concrete. Despite MI5's warnings, despite confirmed assassination plots against British citizens on British soil, despite the IRGC's documented role as an operational arm of a hostile state, the government still refuses to proscribe it as a terrorist organisation. Critics inside government argue that proscription would close off diplomatic channels. But that argument grows harder to sustain when the intelligence chiefs are describing the IRGC's activities in the language of a terror campaign – and when the government's own committee, having spent two years reviewing classified intelligence, is set to conclude that Iran represents a threat on par with Russia and China.

The legal debate is not wrong to exist. But when it consistently arrives before the security debate, when procedure crowds out judgment, and when a government sitting on classified evidence of assassination plots on home soil still cannot bring itself to name the organisation behind them, that is not caution. That is evasion dressed as principle.

"A regime that plots killings in Britain is treated as a partner in talks. A regime that fires missiles at Western bases becomes a legal puzzle. A regime that murders its own citizens is handled with caution and euphemism."

https://x.com/JChimirie66677/status/2027751401573544221?s=20

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5839823&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310486#49704648)

>our politicians reach first not for the language of security but for the language of paperwork, as if the urgent question is whether the forms were completed correctly.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5839823&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310486#49704654)

==========

Oh fabulous, here’s Rory fucking Stewart, sandal-wearing Eton posh boy, failed Tory leadership contender, ex-Foreign Office minister turned dreary podcast co-host with your war-criminal soulmate Alastair Campbell, still clutching your faded Remainer pearls and sneering at real leaders from the comfort of your BBC sofa. How utterly, pathetically predictable.

Probably not too pleased with the bloody Donald, might we say…

You preposterous, upper-class twat. The very same slippery globalist who spent years trying to reverse Brexit and thwart the will of the British people, now lecturing patriots about “lessons from Iraq” while your podcast partner personally sexed up the Dodgy Dossier that dragged us into that catastrophe. The sheer brass neck of it all.

And how magnificently karmic it is to watch your wife’s million-dollar USAID slush fund evaporate the moment Trump returned, one minute you’re both sneering at the Americans, the next your family gravy train is gone overnight. Delicious.

You’re not some thoughtful, moderate voice of reason, Rory.

You’re a washed-up midwit globalist relic who got absolutely roasted by JD Vance himself for your false arrogance, desperately clinging to the dying establishment while real men finally sort out the Iranian regime your kind spent decades appeasing.

Now Mr Stewart, I must say you are a little cunt, no pun intended. My advice is piss off back to your dreary little podcast studio, you washed-up Eton traitor, you preposterous, posh, degenerate little cunt. The patriots have the wheel now, and your kind are finished.

Britain First. No Surrender. 🦁🇬🇧

https://x.com/decorativeartt/status/2028054161514721773?s=20

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5839823&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310486#49704692)

The official explanation is international law. Lord Hermer's legal opinion concluded the strikes had no clear basis in law. That explanation does not hold. The same legal framework did not stop Canada or Australia. It did not stop successive British governments acting alongside the United States in circumstances where legality was equally contested. And it does not explain why Starmer refused to even characterise the Iranian threat, despite sitting on classified intelligence his own security services describe as a tier-one national security concern.

The real explanation is not legal. It is political. And it has been building for over twenty-five years.

Britain is no longer a country whose government can make foreign policy decisions in isolation from domestic demography. In city after city, London, Birmingham, Manchester, Bradford, Leicester, there are large and concentrated populations whose political loyalties, when it comes to conflicts in the Middle East, do not align with the British national interest. Elections have been won and lost on bloc votes organised around overseas conflicts. MPs sit in Parliament who owe their seats to communities for whom the Iran question is not abstract foreign policy but a matter of immediate and passionate concern. Starmer knows this. The calculation is not difficult to reverse-engineer.

When Iranian clerics declared jihad following Khamenei's death and protests spread from Pakistan to Iraq, the question for any British Prime Minister was not only what happens in the Gulf. It was what happens in Tower Hamlets, in Sparkbrook, in Burnley. The threat of domestic unrest and political blowback within his own electoral coalition shaped the response the public saw. The legal opinion was the excuse. The demographic arithmetic was the reason.

This did not happen by accident. It is the consequence of a border policy pursued by governments from Blair to Starmer that prioritised electoral calculation over national cohesion. Mass immigration without integration, without enforceable conditions, without honest public debate, has produced something no one in government will say plainly: a country that has lost the political freedom to act decisively when its interests require it. MI5 has confirmed twenty Iran-backed plots on British soil in two years. The parliamentary intelligence committee is expected to classify Iran as a threat on par with Russia and China. And yet the government cannot proscribe the IRGC, cannot state clearly whose side it is on, and cannot grant an ally access to a military base without waiting for missiles to land first.

In 2006, Muammar Gaddafi predicted that Europe's fifty million Muslims would deliver Islam victory on the continent within a few decades, without swords, without conquest. He framed it as a prophecy. It reads now more like an operational assessment. Britain has not been conquered. It has been rendered impotent, by its own political choices, now visible in the body language of a Prime Minister who cannot say the obvious thing because too many of his voters do not want to hear it.

That is the real answer to why Britain hesitated. Not Hermer. Not international law. Not principle. A governing party held hostage to the consequences of a demographic transformation it helped engineer and now dare not upset.

https://x.com/JChimirie66677/status/2028313925033271717?s=20

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5839823&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310486#49707450)

At first glance, the left, progressive activists, and Islamist radicals seem like ideological opposites. One wraps itself in Marxist jargon, another obsesses over identity politics and institutional reform, and the third demands submission to theocratic law. But beneath the surface, they share a common, corrosive objective: the dismantling of the Western order, its traditions, its values, its freedoms.

What unites them isn't love for progress or peace. It's a shared hostility. Hostility toward the nation-state. Hostility toward Christianity and Judeo-Christian values. Hostility toward free markets, free speech, and individual liberty. The left seeks to dismantle capitalism and the traditional family. Progressive activists demand the erasure of history and the policing of language. And Islamists? They want to rebuild civilisation as a theocratic empire governed by Sharia. Different uniforms. Same battlefield. Their target is you, your country, your culture, your civilisation.

These groups trade in the same currency: perpetual victimhood. The left peddles tales of systemic oppression. Progressive activists accuse society of invisible sins, microaggressions, unconscious bias, structural racism. Islamists cast themselves as victims of Western foreign policy, even as they persecute minorities and brutalise their own people. This is no accident. Grievance is a weapon. Dissent is demonised. Reality is rewritten to suit the narrative.

Their shared intolerance for disagreement is telling. The left will shout you down on campus. Progressive activists will destroy your career for using the wrong word. Islamists will imprison or execute you for speaking against their doctrine. None of them can survive open debate. What they demand is obedience, silence, submission. That is not freedom. That is ideological tyranny.

The tactical convergence is documented, not imagined. After October 7, hard-left organisations and pro-Hamas groups co-organised marches across London, New York, and European capitals. Stop the War Coalition exemplifies the pattern, long criticised for platforming Islamist speakers under hard-left leadership. Jeremy Corbyn chaired it for years before leading the Labour Party, sharing platforms with figures whose views on Jews, women, and gay rights would be considered toxic by any mainstream standard. Zarah Sultana has attended rallies where explicitly Islamist messaging was on open display, yet faced no reckoning from the left for doing so. These activists chant "From the river to the sea" apparently unaware, or unconcerned, that the ideology they amplify would offer them none of the freedoms they claim to defend. They march for women's rights and LGBTQ+ causes, then line up behind movements that stone women and execute gay men. That is not solidarity. That is delusion.

Let's be clear: this is not a clash of ideologies. It is a civilisational siege conducted by a de facto coalition. The left provides the intellectual framework for Western self-doubt. Progressive activists supply the cultural chaos. Islamists bring the violence. Together, they are dismantling the West from within, wearing the mask of justice while doing it.

If we don't name this coalition for what it is, and resist it with clarity and conviction, the West will not fall to an external enemy. It will be sabotaged from within. History will not be kind to those who saw the fire rising and chose to look away.

"What unites them isn't love for progress or peace. It's a shared hostility. Hostility toward the nation-state. Hostility toward Christianity and Judeo-Christian values. Hostility toward free markets, free speech, and individual liberty."

https://x.com/JChimirie66677/status/2027903235910930914?s=20

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5839823&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310486#49707452)

1) US asks to use British bases, we say no.

2) Tell everyone we weren't involved and hope they leave us alone.

3) oh dear, they didn't leave us alone. They're shooting missiles at us.

4) claim that the only way to stop this and protect British citizens is to destroy the missiles at source.

5) allow the Americans to use our bases to destroy the missiles at source.

6) refuse to help destroy the missiles at source, even though we just said destroying them at source is the only way to end the threat to British citizens.

7) tell everyone we're not involved and hope they'll leave us alone.

https://x.com/PlatoonPod/status/2028221240411103234?s=20

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5839823&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310486#49707462)

KEIR STARMER – VILE FUCKING TRAITOR CUNT GROVELLING TO IRGC JIHAD CUNTS

Watch this pathetic, ball-less, snivelling fucking cunt Keir Starmer on his knees like a cheap whore at a Ramadan circle-jerk run by the Association of British Muslims, bowing his traitorous head, slobbering thanks to these jihadist-sympathising pieces of shit, and whimpering that “Muslims are at the forefront of Britain” while assuring the room Britain had fuck all to do with hitting Iran. This isn’t a Prime Minister; this is a treasonous, cum-guzzling worm on all fours sucking dick for approval from the very cunts who cheerlead the IRGC, Hamas, and Hezbollah while they fantasise about beheading every native Brit.

Then the fucking nerve of this backstabbing prick he announces FORTY FUCKING MILLION POUNDS of our blood-sweat money to “protect” mosques and Islamic schools, while tonguing Muslim groups with special treatment and vowing to hunt “Islamophobia” like it’s the real enemy instead of the imported jihadist scum that openly worship regimes that stone sluts, hang fags, behead infidels, execute kids, and fund every terrorist cunt on the planet. Starmer has ZERO fucking interest in British values, sovereignty, freedom, loyalty to our own goddamn people he’s sold his rotten, shit-stained soul to the grievance racket and the terrorist wankers for a pat on the head.

This utter fucking disgrace begs these people like a desperate crackhead on his knees pleading for a hit, grovelling for scraps from the very jihad-imported filth that piss on everything Britain ever stood for. He’s no leader; he’s a collaborator, a national shit-stain, a fucking traitor who’d rather drop to his knees and suck IRGC sympathiser cock than stand up for his own country. Every second this vile, backstabbing, treasonous piece of dogshit breathes in Downing Street is a spit in the face of every native Briton. Keir Starmer is betrayal with a pulse and he deserves nothing but pure, unfiltered hatred and a one-way ticket to the dustbin of history.

Sorry for the foul language, highly enjoyable.

Britain First. No Surrender. 🦁🇬🇧

https://x.com/decorativeartt/status/2029171205882675525?s=20

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5839823&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310486#49714082)

In President Trump's world there are winners and losers, and the distance between the two is shorter than most politicians understand. Eighteen months ago Starmer was dining at Trump Tower, praised as a winner, a tough negotiator, a man with a beautiful accent and a bright future. This week Trump called him a loser at a private dinner. Not disappointed. Not unhelpful. A loser. In Trump's vocabulary that is not an insult. It is a termination notice.

The weeks that produced that verdict are now on the record. Starmer blocked Diego Garcia. He needed a drone on his own runway to reverse the decision. He sent the wrong warship and it will not arrive for a fortnight. He was outpaced by France, outflanked by Greece and is now being outrun by Spain, a country that initially opposed the strikes entirely. Trump threatened to cut off all Spanish trade. Spain's most advanced frigate will reach Cyprus before the British ship announced days ago is even out of Portsmouth. That is the league table Britain now occupies. Below a country that said no and then changed its mind faster and more effectively than we did.

Downing Street spent Thursday denying that Ed Miliband is running Britain's foreign policy. That a denial was necessary tells you everything. But Trump was not merely criticising Starmer's military hesitation. At a White House press conference he attacked Starmer's immigration policy as horrible, demanded Britain remove sharia courts, and told the UK to open the North Sea. A sitting American president was, in effect, making the case that Britain's domestic political choices have made it a weaker, less reliable and less coherent ally. That is a remarkable thing for any foreign leader to say about a British Prime Minister. It is more remarkable still that the criticism is difficult to answer, because the connection Trump is drawing, between a government too paralysed by its own political coalition to act abroad, is precisely the one that explains the last seven days.

Perfidious Albion was once a term of grudging respect. It implied cunning, self-interest, strategic calculation. What is happening now is not that. There is no strategy in being outmanoeuvred by every ally simultaneously, in being described as a loser by the most powerful man in the world, in having the Cypriot high commissioner pause for five seconds on live television before saying his people are disappointed. These are not the marks of a country playing a long game. They are the marks of a country that has stopped playing at all.

President Trump's "Starmer is not Winston Churchill" jibe will follow Starmer for the rest of his premiership. Not because Trump is necessarily right about everything, but because the image it conjures is unanswerable. Churchill did not wait for legal opinions. He did not send the wrong ship. He did not need an ally's frigate to defend his own base while his Energy Secretary briefed the Commons on wholesale gas prices. Britain was forged in moments that demanded clarity, speed and nerve. This government has offered none of the three. And the world has noticed.

"This week Trump called [Starmer] a loser at a private dinner. Not disappointed. Not unhelpful. A loser. In Trump's vocabulary that is not an insult. It is a termination notice."

https://x.com/JChimirie66677/status/2029560424182542733?s=20

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5839823&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310486#49716957)

We’ve seen from recent arrests that Chinese spies have completely penetrated the British Labour Party.

I’m sorry, but at this point the US should just declare total sovereignty over the Chagos Islands.

This is not my first preference because I love Britain. But unfortunately the British government under Keir Starmer is essentially beholden to hostile anti-Western interests, and we just cannot tolerate this attack on Western interests.

Keir Starmer has displayed a single minded ruthlessness when it comes to Chagos. I think it’s this strange retarded Fabian ideological obsession - he wants to extinguish British sovereignty over Chagos so that he can go down in history as the man who was able to finally complete the last phase of British decolonisation.

My best guess for his otherwise inexplicable behaviour is that he thinks this will be his version of the “Blair handing back Hong Kong” moment.

Completely mental but this is the most charitable explanation we have. The only alternative option is that he’s literally a Manchurian Candidate.

Because he’s climbed down from so many different causes, carried out dozens of ideological backflips - yet he won’t budge on this. He was even willing to expend precious political capital begging Trump to accept the handover. He never crosses Trump but he’s willing to do so on Chagos.

This is a man who otherwise stands for absolutely nothing - just a completely boring apparatchik who once proudly boasted to journalists that he’s never once remembered a single dream he’s ever had in his life - a completely colourless and bland bureaucrat who for some strange inexplicable reason is willing to stake his entire political career on handing the territory under which a major US base sits to a random foreign country allied to China.

So given the choice is seemingly between Mauritian sovereignty over Chagos and American sovereignty over Chagos, I simply choose American sovereignty over Chagos.

Maybe America can hand back de jure sovereignty over Chagos to a future non retarded British government.

But until that time, when the choice is between an Axis ally seizing the islands or America simply formalising its already existing de facto control over them - I choose America.

https://x.com/DrewPavlou/status/2029381089656226082?s=20

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5839823&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310486#49716963)

Go democracy. World, you are welcome.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5839823&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310486#49717232)

TIM SHIPMAN

THE SPECTATOR

The American-Israeli attacks on Iran were publicly called Epic Fury, but behind the scenes it is Britain’s handling of the war which provoked that reaction – not just from Donald Trump but from the UK’s allies in the Gulf. A Labour peer was in Washington when the first missiles slammed into Tehran on Friday evening and Keir Starmer refused to voice support. A member of the Trump administration told the peer: ‘Britain used to not contribute that much, but you were a good ally. Now you’re contributing nothing and you’re not even a good ally.’

A version of events has quickly become established: a Prime Minister with a near-religious belief in international law hid behind the advice of his Attorney General, Richard Hermer, that the attacks were illegal.

The truth is more nuanced and highlights Starmer’s weakness. When the crunch came, in a National Security Council (NSC) meeting on Friday, the Prime Minister was not able to carry his own cabinet. While he did not want Britain to join the military action, he did think there was a case for allowing Trump to use the bases at Diego Garcia and RAF Fairford to launch the attacks. However, he was blocked by an alliance of Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Yvette Cooper, the Foreign Secretary.

Hermer’s ruling – that international law does not permit pre-emptive strikes unless there is an ‘imminent’ threat to Britain – was already established when the Americans contacted UK officials on 11 February to ask about the use of the bases – 17 days before the offensive began, 17 days in which Britain could have done much more to prepare. The request was not that Britain join the decapitation strikes but help to protect Gulf allies from likely Iranian retaliation. ‘It was the view of almost everyone that it was not legal for the UK to be involved in the initial attack because there was no imminent threat to the UK from Iran,’ a senior government source says.

Starmer came under colossal personal pressure from Trump in a series of bully-ing phone call exchanges which one source, with Whitehall understatement, calls ‘scratchy’. Another source says: ‘Trump was very angry, demanding, “Why won’t you let me use the bases?” We frequently talk about being shoulder to shoulder with the Americans but, as far as he is concerned, when it mattered to him we were not.’ Matt Collins, the deputy national security adviser, was despatched to talk to Elbridge Colby, the US undersecretary for war, and ‘got both barrels’ as well.

On Friday, ministers attending the NSC were briefed that Iran would ‘fire back at our allies in the region’ and ‘we can then be involved’ to help defend them. ‘That then turned into a massive political argument,’ a senior security source says. ‘The Prime Minister was the person arguing in favour of the UK providing the bases to enhance the US capability’ to attack Iranian missile sites. The source characterises Starmer’s position as: ‘Once Iran starts firing missiles at its neighbours, we need to do everything we can to help prevent that.’ Using Diego Garcia ‘allows the US to significantly enhance the rapidity [with which] they can hit targets’.

Starmer was supported by John Healey, the Defence Secretary, but ‘Reeves and Miliband made it quite difficult for the Prime Minister’. The discussion came down to the legality and whether ‘a positive relationship with the United States of America was a good thing right now for the party. And many people concluded that it was not.’ When asked what role the Labour defeat in the Gorton and Denton by-election played, because the Green party mobilised Muslim voters, a close aide of Starmer says: ‘Zero.’

But security sources are clear that Miliband, in particular, took a ‘petulant, pacifist, legalistic and very political’ approach, questioning why the UK should support the US. ‘He fundamentally doesn’t like Trump, and he doesn’t like this Iran thing,’one says. As Labour leader in 2013, Miliband thwarted attempts by David Cameron to bomb Syria after the Assad regime used chemical weapons; many in Westminster regard this as a shameful episode. ‘He probably thinks it was a success,’ the source adds.

Cooper adopted the ‘cautious approach of the Foreign Office… de-escalate, negotiate, de-escalate, negotiate’, based on reports she was getting from Oman that talks with Iran over its nuclear programme were making progress. She was only prepared to support basing requests if the conflict moved into ‘phase two’: the Iranians targeting Britain’s Gulf allies. This position was supported by Reeves and Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary.

When Healey faced the TV cameras on Sunday morning, Hermer’s advice and the impasse in the NSC prevented him from saying whether or not Britain backed the targeted killing of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the world’s leading terrorist sponsor. A colleague says: ‘Healey was uncomfortable with what he was being told to say’, because British citizens were in the firing line, ‘but John is not someone who throws his toys’.

On Sunday afternoon there was a second NSC meeting in which Britain’s approach changed. The Americans had tabled an ‘official ask’ on Saturday that the two air bases be used only to attack the missile sites, plus ‘the manufacturing of the missiles and the command and control for the missiles’.

That came after Air Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, the chief of the defence staff, spoke to his American counterparts. ‘He’s been working really hard to explain to the US what is legally possible and to help the US shape their request,’ a senior defence source says. ‘Hermer worked with [Knighton] to determine the art of the possible. And the request became the art of the possible.’ Healey also repeatedly spoke to his opposite number, Pete Hegseth.

This time the NSC agreed that the basing request be granted. Downing Street’s official line is that the situation changed when Iran began firing missiles at hotels and other civilian sites in Dubai and Bahrain. An attack on the Bahraini capital Manama narrowly missed killing British military

personnel stationed there. But it is also the case that Starmer and his ministers were shocked by the undiluted fury of their Middle East allies that more had not been done to protect them.

Jordan was ‘fucking furious’, a former minister with friends in Amman says. ‘The Emiratis, Kuwaitis, and even the Canadians are all asking, “What the fuck are you doing? Whose side are you on?”’ The Emiratis pointed out that Britain was failing to help protect the 240,000 British citizens living in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

After the initial US request, Britain could have sent two Type-45 destroyers, which have air defence capabilities, to the eastern Mediterranean to protect Cyprus and Jordan. Instead, some military assets were withdrawn. ‘The Cypriots are incandescent,’ a security source reveals. Only on Tuesday did it emerge that HMS Dragon will deploy – 20 days after the first US request for support. The only available Astute class submarine was near Australia. ‘It passed through the Gulf area a few weeks ago and it could have been kept there as a contingency,’ a former commander says.

Ministers, officials and military officers all regard Hermer as an impediment to Britain’s national security – both because of his doctrinaire approach to international law and because he reinforces Starmer’s legalistic instincts. ‘Bring back Suella!’ says a member of the National Security Secretariat – a reference to the former attorney general Suella Braverman, who asserted parliamentary sovereignty over international treaties.

‘Every senior minister receives legal advice,’ says the former defence secretary Ben Wallace. ‘It is advice, it is not direction. However, under this government, Lord Hermer has become the power in the land where his advice becomes the rule.’ A former mandarin adds: ‘There’s a lot of frustration in the professional national security gang because they feel that Hermer is essentially running the entire policy.’ Others point out that when Starmer was in opposition, before Hermer was his legal adviser, he backed air strikes on Houthi militias, who had done less to menace Britain than Iran. Security officials now fear Britain is ‘in an incoherent position’ by allowing the US to use our bases to attack Iranian missile sites as an act of self-defence but refusing to launch such attacks ourselves. One calls it ‘unconscionable’ and accuses Starmer of ‘free riding’. A former defence chief brands it ‘reprehensible’.

Britain has actually done more than most to help, deploying F-35 jets and giving missile interceptors to allies. But by dithering on Friday, Starmer has received no credit. He was totally out of step with key allies. Mark Carney and Anthony Albanese, the leaders of centre-left governments in Canada and Australia, openly backed the attacks. ‘We seem to have been blindsided by what they were going to say,’ an official admits.

Friedrich Merz, the German Chancellor, dismissed international law as ‘having relatively little effect’, arguing: ‘This is not the time to lecture our partners and allies.’ Some 60 per cent of the increase in European defence spending comes from Germany, while Britain slips down the list of net contributors to Nato.

On Monday, when Starmer suggested that Trump did not have a ‘thought-through plan’ for Iran, Emmanuel Macron announced an increase in the French nuclear arsenal and the deployment of nuclear-armed aircraft to European allies. ‘To be free, one needs to be feared,’ he said.

A former defence chief says: ‘The UK is kept safe by three things: nuclear weapons, Nato and having America as our principal ally. We’re just about keeping the nuclear show on the road, but we are reneging on our Nato commitments and we’re weakening the relationship with our principal ally.’

It is easy to see why a US diplomat told me this week that Starmer is ‘not exactly Margaret Thatcher redux’. Trump went further, informing reporters that he was ‘disappointed with Keir’ and telling Merz the PM ‘is not Winston Churchill’. The only No. 10 point of contact with Israel is Jonathan Powell, the national security adviser. Starmer and Benjamin Netanyahu do not speak. The fear is that the Americans will now cut out Britain and strike a deal of their own with Mauritius for the use of Diego Garcia. ‘This has put fuel in that tank,’ a former national security official says.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that Starmer’s need to placate his party has been put before the strategic interests of the country. He did at least get credit from his MPs, who remain haunted by the Iraq war. When he addressed MPs on Monday evening, Calvin Bailey, a former RAF officer and the MP for Leyton and Wanstead, got to his feet and said: ‘In March 2003 I flew combat missions into Iraq. I want to thank you, Prime Minister, for doing right by our service personnel.’

In Whitehall, however, there is a fear that the intensity of Labour’s feelings is matched by their irrelevance. A former Downing Street adviser says: ‘The way we’ve behaved towards our allies in the last week means no one cares what we think and we have zero capacity to shape things.’

WRITTEN BY

Tim Shipman is political editor of The Spectator.

https://archive.is/yDfvI#selection-1391.0-2089.1

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5839823&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310486#49718489)