Sir Keir Starmer has irked a US leader who is on a vaguely defined mission to liberate Iran from oppressive theocratic mullahs, stop an out-of-control nuclear weapons programme, destroy a non-specific threat to “the American people”, and prevent Tehran’s proxies from destabilising the region. Which of these the present actions is aimed at delivering, or in what order, remains unclear, while Israel is simply content to see Iran weakened.

Hardly surprising then, that Starmer found it hard to find the nub of a convicting reason to back the US-Israeli strikes at the beginning of the conflict a week ago. War is always a high risk enterprise – war without strategy is a wild gamble.

The fact that he did not – only to commit British forces and material when Tehran responded by hitting targets across the Gulf – has earned savage opprobrium from US President. First in the body-blow swipe about a mild-mannered London lawyer turned politician being “no Churchill”.

Now comes another barrage of comments that the US does not need help from London – just as the resource-strapped Ministry of Defence scrabbles together an aircraft carrier to set sail to the region. No 10 and the Foreign Secretary, Yvette Cooper, have hastily reshaped a messy message of off-on involvement as a more crafted response, countering that Britain, not the US, will decide “what is in its national interest”.

The flaw in this is that by backing the spirit and ambition of the Trump assault on a rogue regime, while urging a return to negotiation about nukes with Iran (good luck with that one), other leaders like Germany’s Friedrich Merz, Canada’s Mark Carney and Emmanuel Macron, dispatching the French navy immediately, all avoided a spat with Trump.

The problem for Starmer not so much his position but the impression of wavering. As well as pressure from parts of his Cabinet and of his party to resist being dragged into the fracas, he now faces leaked comments from Tony Blair, whose record on Iraq, and staunch pro-Israel engagement, is anathema to most of the Labour Party today.

There is however a defence of the PM’s position, which is that it is reasonable to have doubts about the opaque strategy of the Trump administration in this war. The rudeness from Washington has also unveiled an ugly truth that the Atlantic relationship, in this President’s eyes, is a once-way street in favours. Plenty of other tensions between inhabitants of No 10 and the White House have emerged in conflicts and been dealt with better.

They range from Ronald Reagan invading Grenada (a Commonwealth country) to oust a Marxist movement, as well as the stand off over the Falklands in the 1980s and disagreements about strategy in the Balkan wars in the 1990s and early 2000s. They were resolved without resorting to humiliating the UK for no clear purpose.

Moreover, it turned out to be wise to treat the Trump rebuff coolly. Only hours after his attacks on the UK, Trump and Starmer spoke on Sunday afternoon and discussed “co-operation” on US aircraft flying out of British bases. In Trumpworld, nothing is forever and the President’s egregious rudeness has become Starmer’s strength.

It is not absolutely clear what the UK’s “national interest” is right now, beyond defending bases and backing up allies in the Gulf, who are also the UK’s trade defence sales partners, and letting the US and Israel get on with their mission.

But what is clear is that voters do not want a leadership which goes further or faster. In polling for The i Paper, 47 per cent of voters said they opposed the UK taking part in air strikes against Iran, with just 22 per cent saying they should help with the bombing. If anything, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage, calling for more overt action, are in the position of a far more difficult sell to a guarded public than Starmer.

And while the Government’s obfuscation indicates that there was indeed a Cabinet rift on going further towards supporting the US while circumventing legalistic objections, Starmer could not reasonably have pressed ahead in a more muscular fashion without Cabinet support. Much of the criticism of the Blair-era embrace of foreign entanglements rested on the accusation that they failed to consult or heed countervailing arguments. It seems odd to complain about that – and then blame the PM for seeking unanimity.

In purely personal terms, the conflict has also given Starmer a stay of potential execution at the hands of his irate party: the travails of the Gorton and Denton by-election and loss to the Greens, whose views on to manage geopolitical threat by disbanding Nato as it stands in return for elusively “peacebuilding”.

This is whimsical at best – being more pragmatic than the surging party to the left of Labour and not as heated as the parties to the right of it is actually a decent position to end up in.

A temporary lifeline has thus been extended to a flailing PM. For all the justified criticism that he lacks agility and still communicates in characterless bot-speak, he now has a party broadly content that he has stood up to Trump simply pointing out that the US and UK do not always travel on one ticket.

He is also on the same page as a public, but is prepared to go some way towards appeasing the mighty US to get some relief on punitive tariffs, but not at any price or humiliation. Certainly, this is not a golden ticket redemption for a premiership which is weighed down by lack of domestic grip and dismal failure to deliver on growth promises.

Soon enough, economic reality will bite in oil and gas price pressures and general business unease – and ungrateful voters are vanishingly unlikely to express in the May local elections. Another Labour mess, of which there has been a regular pipeline, will doubtless emerge.

For now at least, a luckless PM finds himself a lot closer to the country’s instincts than his rivals. He may be keeping nobody happy at the extremes of the argument – but the more cautious camp middle ground is not always the worst place to be, when the missiles start flying .

Anne McElvoy is executive editor at Politico and host of Politics at Sam and Anne’s

Scott Mills: My husband and I know we’d be great dads – here’s why we’re childfree

JD Vance is vanishing before our eyes

Trump’s administration has gone full fascist

Starmer is facing a dangerous new rebellion. It could actually bring him down

© iNews