For those with family and friends stranded in the Middle East, the prime minister sought to manage expectations.
He announced that the repatriation flight from Oman that was meant to take off on Wednesday but was scuppered by technical issues is now in the air, and around 4,000 Britons had already made it home.
However, that is just a tiny fraction of the 140,000 British nationals who have told the government they are in the Middle East.
“This is a huge undertaking,” he said, describing it as many times bigger than the much-criticised evacuation of Afghanistan in 2021.
“It’s not going to happen overnight,” he said.
The government’s private hope – but it is just a hope, not an expectation – is that the conflict will calm in time for the government not to have to find a way to evacuate all of those people.
They also know that, as Afghanistan showed, those complex consular issues can become for much of the public the most vivid way of judging how competently the government is handling an international crisis.