The Iran crisis has Labour insiders asking if Rayner could really be PM |
The fate of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei along with the head of the mighty Revolutionary Guards and the country’s defence minister and security corps, decimated in a precision air strike which reduced over four-decades of theocratic regime in Tehran to rubble, is the most pivotal moment for Donald Trump’s impact on the world outside America.
Its aftermath will also the most testing to date for US allies. In immediate terms, this is an American success. The risk lies in the vast uncertainty about how to control the fallout.
An Iran with its leadership decimated by air strikes is in a different position to one with its monopoly power intact. That changes the calculus in terms of its ability to project force using its proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas.
The difficulty for the UK – which has long occupied the position of the “little Satan” ally of the US in Tehran’s eyes, and is subject to significant ongoing cyberattacks from Iran – is how to respond to a range of options after the lethal strike.
For Keir Starmer – a distinctly un-supreme leader at home, teetering after a disastrous by-election in Manchester, ministerial unrest and internal divisions on immigration and asylum policy – conflict in the Middle East is wildcard factor.
On one level, the sheer significance of the weekend’s events in the Gulf is not the worst news for him, because they put Labour’s tendency to introspective parochialism in sombre perspective. While senior figures such as Lucy Powell, Angela Rayner and Shabana Mahmood fight out proxy wars about what “Labour values” and “being bold” mean in practice, the Tehran assault is a reminder that any potential........