"At a private lunch event on Friday, the former Labour prime minister said Keir Starmer “should have backed America from the very beginning” and let the Trump administration use British airbases, adding: “If they are your ally and they are an indispensable cornerstone for your security … you had better show up when they want you to.”Well, he is just objectively wrong, isn’t he ? The USA under Trump is clearly no longer “an indispensable cornerstone for [our] security”, and we most emphatically do not have to comply with every fucking lunatic decision made by their clinically insane current occupant of the White House.
Here is a funny thing. There was an intriguing omission from the extraordinary and almost unprecedented leak from the 27 February meeting of the National Security Council to the Spectator.
This accurate leak said that Ed Miliband, Rachel Reeves and Yvette Cooper were all wary about allowing President Trump’s bombers to use UK airfields, Diego Garcia in Chagos and Fairford in Gloucestershire. It said Starmer “was blocked by an alliance of Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Yvette Cooper, the Foreign Secretary.”
Which is largely true.
But I am told by multiple sources there is an important elision, because the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood was also making the same case as Miliband, Reeves and Cooper, namely that there were significant dangers in providing British facilities to the American military for attacks defined by the Attorney General Richard Hermer as unlawful and whose aims and likely consequences are highly uncertain.
Mahmood is, however, mentioned by the Spectator as supporting the foreign secretary’s position. But this reference to her is lower down the report, and as a seeming afterthought, whereas my sources say she was one of those explicitly urging caution on the PM.
This matters, partly because in follow-up reports by other media outlets, her name is omitted. More importantly, it means that every holder of a great office of state - chancellor, foreign secretary and Home Secretary - was telling Starmer to beware of rowing in behind Trump, as was the only former Labour leader still in the cabinet, Miliband.
Opinion polls show the British public is supportive of Starmer’s refusal to join Israel’s and America’s strikes on Iran and to restrict our military to defensive operations in the Middle East.
But that popular support for his caution could just as easily evaporate if the security of the UK were to be put at risk by the disintegration of the UK’s historic and important alliance with America.
- By Youngian
- By Boiler