Sounding remarkably like tobacco baron Genial Harry Grout reprimanding Fletcher in Porridge, Donald Trump declares he is ‘very disappointed’ in Keir Starmer over Iran.
Very disappointed indeed.
Trump has every reason to feel let down, betrayed even, by Surkeir’s initial refusal to allow the US to use British bases for air strikes against the evil regime in Tehran.
Better late than never, I suppose, the Prime Minister relented and gave limited permission for American forces to launch bombing raids from our airfields at home and abroad – thought, but not confirmed officially, to be RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, Akrotiri in Cyprus and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
But even then there was a caveat. The bases could only be used for ‘defensive’ purposes, whatever that was supposed to mean. Is he not familiar with the tried-and-tested mantra: Attack is the best form of defence?
Still, when the Iranians lobbed a couple of drones at Akrotiri, it gave Starmer sufficient wriggle room to allow the Americans access.
Up until then he had been hiding behind legal advice from his sidekick ‘Lord’ Hermer – another north London yuman rites hack whom Starmer elevated to unelected Attorney General – that any strikes originating from British bases would be in breach of ‘international law’.
Never mind that international law is an ass – a politically motivated, moveable feast made up half the time by self-appointed courts comprising judges, far-Left academics and hardline anti-Semites drawn from some of the worst dictatorships and tyrannies on Earth.
‘Trump has every reason to feel let down, betrayed even, by Surkeir’s initial refusal to allow the US to use British bases for air strikes against the evil regime in Tehran,’ writes Richard Littlejohn
No, as I wrote only last week, Starmer will always, always put unaccountable foreign courts and conventions ahead of British national interests.
And now, ahead of the ‘special relationship’ with America, which he has spent the past 18 months trying to cement by pandering shamelessly to the President – playing Monica Lewinsky to Trump’s Bill Clinton.
Sadly, I fear, the damage has already been done. Trump’s ‘very disappointed’ remarks carried the same underlying air of menace as Genial Harry, complaining that the PM took ‘far too long’ to change his mind and called his earlier, cowardly refusal ‘unprecedented’.
Trump’s disappointment was quite restrained by his own standards. But my guess is that he is absolutely seething inside. He’s an Anglophile who has proven to be the most pro-British President in decades.
The ‘special relationship’ may not be everything we wish it to be on this side of the Atlantic, but Trump has been happy to feed the fiction.
Yet the first time he asks his alleged ‘closest ally’ for a favour, to rid the world of a genocidal terrorist regime hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, he’s knocked back.
Trump might have expected Britain to join the attacks, given that we’re supposed to be the second-strongest military power in Nato.
That, too, is probably a fiction, though. Our Armed Forces are smaller than at any time since the Napoleonic wars, there has been little or no progress on promises to spend five per cent of GDP on defence, and our own military chiefs warn that in the event of a Russian attack we wouldn’t last five minutes.
If Moscow does decide to expand its war on Ukraine deeper into Europe, we can only resist with the firepower of America. Yet after this weekend, why would the US bother coming to our aid? Trump could argue that he’s washing his hair that evening. Starmer seems to have taken none of this into consideration.
Despite the dangerous implications for the defence of the realm, Surkeir would rather put parochial political advantage – appeasing anti-American Labour backbenchers and the vast Muslim vote in heavily Islamic inner-city constituencies – before securing the vital Atlantic Alliance and toppling the world’s No 1 sponsor of terrorism.
This weekend will come to be seen as a tipping point in the sorry saga of our national decline. Stephen Glover, writing in the Daily Mail, says correctly that Britain has never looked so irrelevant on the world stage.
I’d go further. While Trump’s criticism has been uncharacteristically restrained, his MAGA base is fuming. Republicans now increasingly see Britain as a pariah.
Especially when they learn of the recent by-election triumph of the Greens, a party which wants to sever all links with the US, wants Britain to disarm, supports Hamas and equates Zionism with racism.
Its deputy leader attended a pro-Iran rally at the weekend. And then they read that some commentators are predicting the Greens could form part of the next government, heaven help us.
Not for the first time, I’ve heard from bewildered American friends asking: What the hell is going on in your country? And who can blame them?
I spent Saturday switching between British TV reports and, online, US channels such as CNN and Fox News, Trump’s media cheerleader.
Presenters and contributors lined up on Fox to slam Starmer. Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the President’s most vehement supporters, called the UK’s response ‘pathetic’. The wider view was that Britain can no longer be considered a reliable ally.
Sounding remarkably like tobacco baron Genial Harry Grout reprimanding Fletcher in Porridge (pictured), Donald Trump declares he is ‘very disappointed’ in Keir Starmer over Iran
Starmer had been hiding behind legal advice from his Attorney General, Lord Hermer, who was instrumental in the PM’s decision to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius
No doubt the usual far-Left suspects will consider such jibes a badge of honour, regardless of the ominous implications for our national security in an increasingly dangerous world.
But it isn’t the British people who are unreliable. It’s our ‘minority’ Labour government, handed a huge parliamentary majority but only elected by one in five of those eligible to vote, and led by a couple of elitist, Ivory Tower Left-wing lawyers, Starmer and Hermer – a man, let us not forget, who trousered £30,000 for representing Gerry Adams against the British government (a sum he now says he can’t recall).
Hermer, and another of Starmer’s yuman rites mates, Philippe Sands – who shared in an £8 million legal fees pot from Mauritius – were instrumental in the PM’s decision to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, and by extension the Chinese. And pay a reported £30 billion dowry into the bargain.
The good news is that after this weekend, that deal is dead in the water. Trump won’t let it happen at any cost.
But this is just another example of how Surkeir always bends the knee to ‘international law’ rather than defend British parliamentary sovereignty.
He approaches negotiations with our national wallet wide open, ready to assume the position and anxious to concede whatever the other party is demanding – whether that’s the disgraceful EU ‘reset’ sell-out, or the latest capitulation over Gibraltar, which will see British arms shipments to our base on the Rock inspected by Spanish military officials. What other self-respecting nation would allow that?
Where did anyone get the notion that Surkeir is a top brief, apart from the fact that he was a political New Labour pick to become Director of Public Prosecutions.
You certainly wouldn’t want Starmer as your defence counsel if you were in the dock at the Old Bailey. He’d advise you to plead guilty even if you had a dozen witnesses and the forensic evidence to prove your innocence. I wouldn’t trust him to do a little light conveyancing.
I’ve often wondered what would have happened had he been PM during the Second World War. He’d probably have recognised Hitler’s claim on the Sudetenland and refused to proscribe the Waffen-SS as a terrorist organisation – just as he has refused to do with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
He would have handed Cyprus to Morocco, despite the claims of Greece and Turkey, and bunged them £30 billion for the privilege. Gibraltar, too, would have been ceded to Spain, leaving us with no way of defending the Med.
On recent form, he’d probably have prevented the Americans from casting off from British ports on D-Day. They’d have to tow the landing craft across the Atlantic from Norfolk, Virginia.
OK, so maybe I exaggerate for comic effect. But does anyone seriously think that had Starmer been in Downing Street in 1982, the Falkland Islands – or ‘Las Malvinas’ as he would inevitably have called them – would still be British? In your dreams.
Starmer’s first allegiance is to hair-splitting, pinhead-dancing ‘international law’, not his own country. He is unfit to be Prime Minister, an utter disgrace. When the ridiculous Chagos betrayal was announced last summer, I wondered if I should rename Surkeir ‘Surrender’.
Trump is entitled to feel very disappointed in him. Very disappointed indeed.
If Starmer survives as PM until the next Labour conference – which I very much doubt – perhaps he might close proceedings by leading delegates in singing his very own version of the party’s traditional anthem:
We’ll Keep The White Flag Flying Here!
