{"id":459398,"date":"2026-03-05T19:33:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-05T19:33:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/459398\/"},"modified":"2026-03-05T19:33:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-05T19:33:08","slug":"starmer-tries-to-reassure-british-public-as-iran-crisis-deepens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/459398\/","title":{"rendered":"Starmer tries to reassure British public as Iran crisis deepens"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">For those with family and friends stranded in the Middle East, the prime minister sought to manage expectations.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">However, that is just a tiny fraction of the 140,000 British nationals who have told the government they are in the Middle East. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;This is a huge undertaking,&#8221; he said, describing it as many times bigger than the much-criticised <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/uk-politics-61555821\" class=\"ssrcss-1e0jzsh-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">evacuation of Afghanistan<\/a> in 2021. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;It&#8217;s not going to happen overnight,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The government&#8217;s private hope &#8211; but it is just a hope, not an expectation &#8211; is that the conflict will calm in time for the government not to have to find a way to evacuate all of those people. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For those with family and friends stranded in the Middle East, the prime minister sought to manage expectations.&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":459399,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-459398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=459398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459398\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/459399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=459398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=459398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=459398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}