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Maybe we should have just had done with it back in December. Instead of offering a polite reservation, every western country should have sent a full, state delegation to Norway. Begging, imploring the Nobel Committee to award Donald Trump the peace prize. We could all have chipped in a couple of billion just to make it even more worth winning.
And if that wasn’t enough, we could have twisted the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, to upgrade his “Peaceiest Ever President” award to the “Makes Jesus Look Second Rate” prize. A large solid gold statue of The Donald would have done the trick. There’s more than enough in the Fifa slush funds.
As it is, 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. Having first kidnapped the Venezuelan president, on Saturday Trump chose to bomb Iran.
Pete Hegseth has since said that Iran had been fighting a 47-year one-way war against the US. It just must be that Trump is the first person to notice. Shame. He could have added that to the other eight wars he claims to have ended.
So here we are again. A war in the Middle East with no real plan other than to inflict damage and regime change. No one is crying for Ayatollah Khamenei, but with him dead there are no obvious successors. Regime change is never achieved by bombing alone and Trump has admitted he has also accidentally killed his second and third choices to take over. Ah well.
There is no democratic, US-friendly elite waiting to fill the vacancies. Just years of instability and sectarian fighting lie ahead. As for the US involvement? It will be over once Trump gets bored with it. He will move on to something else. Leave it to someone else to sort out the mess.
All of which has been a nightmare for Keir Starmer. You can’t help but feel for the prime minister. Even when he actually makes a reasonably sound judgment, he somehow ends up losing both sides of the argument.
On Saturday, Keir chose not to join the US and Israeli attacks. A day later, in response to an Iranian attack on a Cyprus airbase, he announced he would be allowing the US to use British bases for defensive actions, taking out Iranian missile bases.
It felt far from the usual Starmer headless U-turn. A considered response to an evolving situation. Yet, to listen to some MPs on the left and the right, you’d have thought he had committed an act of betrayal. You’ve let your country down Keir. But worse than that, you’ve let yourself down.
Starmer looked out on his feet before he even started his Commons statement on Iran. The previous week had been a nightmare and the last thing he needed was another global conflict. He had clearly been up for most of the weekend receiving updates from the region in real time and all his sentences were squeezed out with exhaustion.
It was like this, he said. The decisions had been made in two parts. As simple as that. There was no obfuscation. No hedging his bets. Just a straight choice of increasing the country’s defensive capabilities. There was no secret plan to slide into a war of aggression. Well, not yet anyway.
This was a matter of international law. Starmer didn’t want to ask anything of British troops that might place them in a morally ambiguous place. And above all, he didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of the UK’s actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.
Surely we could at least learn the lessons from these failures? Don’t get involved unless there is a clear plan of action. And there wasn’t anything approaching a plan. The former draft-dodging president had gone to war because he had a clear weekend. The irony.
You’d have thought all this was fairly uncontroversial. It was certainly simply enough explained. Words of more or less one syllable. No room for confusion. Except of course by Kemi Badenoch. Kemi, it has to be said, is becoming more and more deranged the more irrelevant she becomes. Spending her life watching Maga maniacs on X instead of realising she polled only 1% of the votes in the Gorton and Denton byelection.
This had been a defining moment in the battle against state-sponsored terror, she said. The UK had been let down by a weak government. We were a laughing stock. If Kemi had been prime minister she would have given the thumbs up to joining the US without a second glance at international law.
Weirdly, this wasn’t even the full extent of Kemi’s madness for the day. At a lunchtime event at the Policy Exchange, she insisted that the only reason Keir had not bombed the hell out of Tehran was because he was in hock to the Muslim vote.
She didn’t seem to realise most British Muslims are Sunnis. Iran is a Shia theocracy. Fair to say most Brits are not losing sleep over Khamenei. She ended this short speech on turning the whole world English with the suggestion that it would probably be best if the Commons didn’t get to vote on any decision to go to war. They might vote against, which would never do.
Unsurprisingly, the scars of the Iraq war were front and centre for those who had been in parliament at the time. Diane Abbott, John McDonnell and the Tory Edward Leigh all urged caution. As did Ed Davey. He also wondered if Dubai-based exiles such as Richard Tice’s fiancee Isabel Oakeshott should be asked to pay for the armed forces as they were going to need them for an evacuation. Tice shouted: “Coward.” Quite right, Davey should be prepared to put himself on a war footing in Dubai.
There was no sign of Nigel 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 he now 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 invasion. You wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that most Brits are too.
