Reform UK<\/a> leader said when the conflict began: \u201cWe should do all we can to support the operation.\u201d<\/p>\nHowever, as petrol prices rose and public opinion hardened against the war over the past week, both adjusted their positions. A YouGov survey found this week that six in 10 Britons are opposed to the military action, while a quarter are in favour of it.<\/p>\n
Badenoch now denies she wanted the UK to join the war and says she wanted Britain only to help take out Iranian missiles. Meanwhile, Farage held a stunt at a petrol station promising 25p off a litre of fuel and claiming: \u201cIf we can\u2019t even defend Cyprus, let\u2019s not get ourselves involved in another foreign war.\u201d<\/p>\n
One senior Tory said: \u201cWe have just looked confused and the messaging has been terrible. But most of us on the right do actually believe Starmer was completely wrong not to support Trump at the beginning, so the right thing to do would be to stick to our guns, whatever the public say.\u201d<\/p>\n
Andrew Mitchell, a veteran Conservative and former deputy foreign secretary, said refusing Trump\u2019s request was a \u201cvery big mistake\u201d and that Starmer would be proven not to have acted in the UK\u2019s national interest in the long run.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe US is our closest ally and friend, and when the president asked for our help with the use of joint bases \u2013 essentially what he wanted them for was refuelling \u2013 the answer should have been yes,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s embarrassing, really, that Starmer said no on the basis of questionable legal advice, thus demonstrating that Starmer is a lawyer, not a political leader.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although the majority of the public are anti-war, opinion polls suggest Conservative voters are almost equally split. Reform voters are more likely than other party supporters to back the Iran war, but there is still an isolationist flank on the hard right drawn to the message of Rupert Lowe \u2013 a former Reform MP who now sits as an independent \u2013 that it is \u201cnot our fight\u201d. The risks of appearing too pro-war and pro-Trump appear to have forced both parties on the right to have moderated their initial messaging.<\/p>\n
But Alan Mendoza, Reform\u2019s chief adviser on global affairs and executive director of the rightwing Henry Jackson Society thinktank, said the party still believed that Starmer was wrong to have refused Trump\u2019s request and maintained that Farage had been consistent throughout.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019d have said yes when America asked that question on day one. And he, of course, would have also firstly ensured the British bases were defended,\u201d Mendoza said, adding that no one in the UK was ever suggesting or in favour of joining in offensive bombing action or a ground invasion.<\/p>\n
He also questioned whether polls were asking the right questions about support for the Iranian military action, and suggested that framing questions around whether it was in Britain\u2019s strategic interests to back an ally would generate a more positive response.<\/p>\n
However, those within Downing Street are confident they have got the strategy right on this one, with internal polling showing support for Starmer\u2019s approach. One senior Downing Street figure said: \u201c[Reform mayor] Andrea Jenkyns not ruling out boots on the ground is exactly the wrong side.\u201d<\/p>\n
Labour\u2019s position is also helpful in explaining any potential hit to the cost of living. \u201cObviously how people attribute blame is a multifaceted thing, but we can turn around and say, this is exactly why we don\u2019t think we should be involved in the Middle East,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n
The Iran conflict has led to a rise in petrol prices, further squeezing Britons struggling with the cost of living. Photograph: Tolga Akmen\/EPA<\/p>\n
Other senior MPs within Labour have been reflecting on whether Starmer would have made the same decision to block the US using the military bases if Peter Mandelson were still ambassador to the US and his ally Morgan McSweeney were still chief of staff.<\/p>\n
Ben Judah, a former adviser to David Lammy when he was foreign secretary, said the rightwing parties had got into difficulties because they \u201cbasically took a decision on the first day to try and use that old card of \u2018have you failed the special relationship?\u2019 to try and bash the prime minister\u201d.<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cI think, out of their own leadership\u2019s foreign policy inexperience and lack of curiosity about the world beyond Westminster, that they were sort of anticipating that this would be a Venezuela-style one-night story. And it\u2019s turned out, actually, this is kind of a weeks-long, deeply disruptive event in the world economy, which voters are really concerned about, and at the petrol pump. And you see them changing position.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said that for the Tories it had come from the party \u201closing that kind of foreign policy muscle now they\u2019re in opposition\u201d, and that Farage \u201chas an America problem\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cTrump 2.0 is not governing in the same [way] as he campaigned,\u201d Judah said. \u201cHe campaigned on an isolationist platform, he literally campaigned to bring world peace.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve seen Reform in its attempt to professionalise and become the real competitive conservative party, from the old sort of Ukip isolationists to a more kind of neocon, pro-American stance.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat sort of neocon tradition in the UK is one thing when America is behaving in a way that\u2019s good for your politician, shining praise on him, or when America is perceived to [be] booming, or charging ahead, but now it\u2019s become a problem for him.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, not everyone within the cabinet is on the same page on whether the UK\u2019s strategy will ultimately prove to be the right one. While an unprecedented leak to the Spectator of a national security council meeting showed Ed Miliband, Rachel Reeves and Yvette Cooper had strongly supported blocking the US from using Britain\u2019s military bases, at least one senior cabinet minister is worried that the longer-term impact on the transatlantic relationship will be disastrous for the UK\u2019s standing and security.<\/p>\n
Thornberry is more confident that the relationship will recover. \u201cWe will always be close to America,\u201d she said. \u201cThey are our closest ally. But there are times when you can disagree. We survived Vietnam, we will survive this. And it\u2019s not like we haven\u2019t been led by them into some pretty disastrous decisions in the near past.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople get \u2013 well, men particularly get \u2013 particularly excited about wars, and it\u2019s quite popular to start with. And then, as they begin to think through what it means and what the ramifications are, then the war starts to affect daily life, war starts to kind of lose popularity. You don\u2019t have to have been around that long to have experience of Middle East wars. You know, we know how this goes.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is not often that Keir Starmer\u2019s allies believe he has Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch on the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":474807,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-474806","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\/474806","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=474806"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474806\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/474807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=474806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=474806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=474806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}