“Well,” began the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, on being asked about whether America’s bunker-busting bombing mission against Iran was strictly, y’know, legal. “We weren’t involved.”
OK, replied the man from the BBC. But did we, a nuclear power with a seat on the UN Security Council, have a view on whether countries can just bomb other countries? “We weren’t involved,” Lammy replied. He suggested they try asking the Americans: “You can get the ambassador online.”
This wasn’t quite doing the trick. “We weren’t involved,” Lammy said, again. And again: “What I can tell you is that the UK was not involved in this issue.” And, indeed, again: “This was not the UK’s action.”
“We were not involved,” he said, adding an important point: “We were not involved.” He carried on: “We were not involved.” And, on a final point on the question of legality: “We were not involved.”
Trying another route, his interviewer asked whether, legality aside, bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities had been the right thing to do. The Foreign Secretary considered the question, before giving a reply that will go down alongside the greatest aphorisms of Lord Palmerston: “I said that we weren’t involved.”
For clarity, we were going to have to turn to Captain Plain-Speaking himself, Nigel Farage, the Man Who Knows His Own Mind And Isn’t Afraid To Say It. He’d called a press conference on Monday morning to announce a whizzy new tax dodge for super-rich foreigners. But first, he said, “Just a few words about the situation in Iran.” Farage’s new self-proclaimed status as our next prime minister means he feels obliged to opine on the great matters of the day, but for those of us who are long used to him, this new gravitas is utterly incongruous. It’s like your dog suddenly offering an opinion on the England batting order.
It’s the ideal Reform Party position: no one knows what it means and there’s something in there for everyone
Anyway, the Farage position on bombing Iran is that he thinks America had no choice, but he is also against military interventions, but he is also against Iran, and he is also against negotiating with them and also against Keir Starmer calling for de-escalation.
Someone asked if Britain should be taking part in the US attacks. “If they ask for help should we give it? I believe yes.” This is opposition to military intervention like you’ve never seen it before. That’s not to say his position isn’t nuanced. “Blindly following America can be a big mistake,” he warned. Although that turned out to be a reference to Barack Obama. Blindly following Donald Trump is just fine.
Some might call all that an incoherent mess, but another way of looking at it is that it’s the ideal Reform Party position: no one knows what it means and there’s something in there for everyone.
Which brings us to the thing he actually wanted to discuss: the “Britannia Card”, which would allow foreign millionaires to pay a quarter of a million pounds for a decade of non-dom status in Britain. This money would be sent straight into the bank accounts of the lowest-paid Brits, who would each get up to £1,000 a year. Does that sound too good to be true? Shame on you for knowing how to count past ten.
The policy would reverse the exodus of the wealthy, Farage explained. Even better than that, he went on, people who weren’t even planning to move to the UK would volunteer to pay us a quarter of a million pounds “to give themselves an option”. These super-rich guys are amazing: at the same time that one bunch are fleeing our taxes, another group who don’t even live here are desperate to write us cheques!
There’s something marvellous about watching Farage at work: the throaty smoker’s cough, the honey-smooth voice, the total evasion on every point of detail. Asked about the suggestion from one tax analyst that far from causing £50 notes to rain from the sky, his policy might end up costing many billions, he simply dodged: “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. I’m not clever enough to answer any of that. That just sounds just completely off-the-wall nonsense.” I hope that’s reassuring.
Although few of the questions were what you’d call challenging. Would Farage mind, one journalist asked, if people compared him to Robin Hood? “I kind of get why people say it,” he mused, with typical modesty.
Also willing to accept flattering comparisons was Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, who had agreed to be interviewed by Charles Moore, biographer of Margaret Thatcher, at an event hosted by the Policy Exchange think tank. Badenoch has her critics, but Moore tried to offer support. “The sort of things that are said about Mrs Thatcher in 1975 are very, very similar,” he said. “Being narrow, not knowing enough, not having the right tone in the House of Commons.” It was kindly meant, but on that basis, you wouldn’t want to hear him being unkind.
Badenoch was full of scorn for the government’s evasions on Iran. They represented, she said, “a complete absence of moral clarity and in fact moral courage.” She scorned calls for de-escalation as “motherhood and apple pie”. But of course Badenoch disagrees with calls for de-escalation in Iran. Badenoch disagrees with calls for de-escalation everywhere. It is an article of faith for her that all conflicts should be escalated, ideally by her own personal intervention. If she were prime minister, the RAF would be over Tehran right now, dropping Spectator blog posts from 20,000 feet.
To a woman with a critique of the Labour Party, every international event is a reflection on the prime minister. Current tense relations with Washington were all London’s fault. She couldn’t “prove it”, she said, but she “suspects’ the UK “is being cut out of intelligence because we cannot be trusted”. Maybe John Healey should rebuild trust by adding some random journalists to a Signal chat about forthcoming military ops.
Asked about Farage, Badenoch took another lesson from Thatcher’s experience, pointing to the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe. “He was a genuine threat until the thing with the dog happened,” she said. So all the Tories need to win the next election is for Farage to arrange a comically incompetent murder plot against a former lover. As Badenoch put it: “Sometimes you do need a bit of luck.”
And if someone once close to the Reform leader does suddenly lose a pet, everyone else should take a leaf out of Lammy’s book: just insist you weren’t involved.
