So, let’s take stock for a moment of the damage that Sir Keir Starmer has inflicted in less than a fortnight to this country’s global reputation.
We are a nuclear power, a P5 country – one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.
The UK is, by tradition, the second most important player in Nato, which is still the most successful military alliance in history. We are in the G7.
In spite of all the fiscal vandalism of Starmer and his Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, the UK remains the fifth or sixth biggest economy in the world.
We have superlative security and intelligence services, and colossal reach and influence.
Yet Starmer has somehow contrived to make us not merely a laughing stock but something actually worse – a piffling irrelevance.
By refusing to back our traditional friends and allies in their war on the ayatollahs, and by sitting on the sidelines, he has shown the biggest display of invertebracy since the Cambrian Explosion. And the world can see it.
It is not just the Americans who are furious (and amazed) at our initial refusal to let them use our military bases – the first time this has happened in my lifetime. Look at the reaction across the world; look at what our friends are saying about Britain.
We look like total chumps in Cyprus, where the Greeks and the French are thought – rightly or wrongly – to have done more to protect the RAF base at Akrotiri than the Royal Navy itself. It seems that we do have a ship – HMS Dragon – that was meant to be on the way, but it turns out that its voyage has been delayed by operational cuts.
It gives you a flavour of the insanity of Labour defence policy if I say that those defence cuts have been caused by Reeves’ hike in National Insurance, which has hit the MoD along with everyone else. This was the very Cyprus base, remember, that was allegedly threatened by Saddam Hussein.
According to the infamous ‘dodgy dossier’ of Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell in 2003, the Iraqi leader was capable of hitting Akrotiri with biological weapons – and with a notice of only 45 minutes.
As it turned out, that was a lie. Saddam had no biological weapons, and he certainly wasn’t capable of hitting Akrotiri within 45 minutes. But it was largely on the basis of that fictitious Campbell-spun threat to UK bases in Cyprus that this country went to war with Iraq.
So, it is surely one of the richer ironies of history that when this same base has come under genuine attack – it was hit by a one-way attack drone on Monday evening – this Labour prime minister has done absolutely nothing.
Well, he sent the Defence Secretary, John Healey – who on Thursday had to run for cover and cower in a bomb shelter, because of the threat from another (possibly Iranian) missile or drone.
At the time of writing, HMS Dragon is still in UK waters – not through any fault of the Navy, but entirely because of the vacillation and hopelessness of Labour, while the French nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle patrols the eastern Mediterranean.
Starmer has of course U-turned (as usual) on allowing the US to use our bases – weeks after this column urged him to do so – but it has taken too long. We still look like temporising twerps.
And why has it taken us so long to send forces to protect our friends and allies in the Gulf?
There is a reason why there are so many Brits in Dubai, and it is not just that they are fleeing the Labour tax terror. It is because these places are so fundamentally pro-British, and so yearning for our greater engagement and support.
The UK flag only went down in the United Arab Emirates in 1971. Starmer is old enough to remember when we were actually responsible for these countries.
They are our fastest growing export markets and colossal inward investors in the UK – and now they are being brutally bombarded by Iran, in a way that was utterly foreseeable.
It was never realistic to think that we could somehow escape involvement, as the US built up forces in the region.
Why didn’t we send jets earlier, to help protect them, and protect the UK populations? Can Starmer not understand how they feel bitterly let down?
I sometimes wonder whether he has ever read any British history, or whether he has any real understanding of the nexus of relationships that we have built up around the world.
Then consider the people of Iran, that great and brilliant people. Ask yourself this question: what has been the biggest foreign policy failure of the West in the last 15 years?
Is it that we have been too bullying, too arrogant? Have we repeated the mistake of Iraq, and tried to impose democracy on countries that simply were not ready for it?
On the contrary, I think that recently we have been too willing to hang back. We – the West – have been too weak.
You could argue that this fatal weakness began in 2013 when Barack Obama allowed the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to gas his own population, and then – in spite of his promises – did nothing to punish him.
Things got worse in 2014, when we effectively turned a blind eye to Putin’s invasion of Crimea and the Donbas – making a nonsense of our pledges, under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, to protect Ukraine.
We looked weakest of all when in 2021 the US triggered a chaotic Western departure from Afghanistan, in scenes that sent shock waves through our friends and allies. And, of course, our enemies registered this weakness – and have tried to exploit it.
Why do you think Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022? Why do you think Iran encouraged Hamas to attack Israel in October 2023? Because they thought the West was weak, and they thought that they could get away with it.
Finally, we have a US president who – whatever you may think about him – is willing to stand up to the enemies of the West. Hamas gave up the hostages. Assad has gone from Syria. Maduro has gone from Venezuela.
Finally, we have a chance to end the appalling reign of the Putin-backing ayatollahs – a regime that executes women for failing to cover their hair properly.
It will not be easy, and it may not be quick. It is clear that this time there will be no Western ground forces in Iran, and in challenging the regime the Iranian protestors clearly run terrible risks.
But there is a sense in which the US and Israel have already achieved something remarkable. As one Gulf leader told me yesterday: ’The Iranian regime will never be the same again, and that is a good thing.’
So here is the choice, my friends. Would you rather that we had a chance of ending the tyranny of the mullahs, or no chance? Starmer opted for no chance – and why?
Not because of international law, not because of his legal pal Lord Hermer, but because he was suddenly intimidated by the threat of a Cabinet revolt from Ed Miliband, a man who lost in a hand-to-hand fight with a bacon sandwich.
It’s not only shameful, it is feeble beyond belief.
