Why the Iran War changes everything for Starmer (part one)

In response to Starmer’s declaration of independence from Trump in relation to the Iran war - his refusal to join offensive strikes against the Islamic theocracy - his ministerial colleagues are both reassured and anxious.

“It’s landed quite well with the public, don’t you think?” one said to me.

Opinion polls would corroborate, namely that a majority of British people are relieved we are not formal participants in the attacks on Iran itself.

And although it is not comfortable for many to hear an American president denigrate a British prime minister as Trump does daily at the moment, the operational co-operation between British and US military and intelligence has not been impaired - or at least not yet.

That is what I am told by officials whose only skin in this game is British security, and have no political reason to shore up Starmer.

However after two and a half weeks of the Trump and Israeli induced chaos engulfing the Middle East, the impact on our daily lives is not yet tangible - but will be soon enough.

Senior members of the government, like me, believe financial and commodity markets are under-pricing the severity of the impact of Iran’s de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the vital supply waterway for oil, gas, fertiliser, helium and so on.

The point, as one minister, put it to me, is that tankers that left the Gulf shortly before the war started on 28 February have not yet arrived in Europe - because passage takes between three and five weeks, depending on their size.

So Europe has not yet experienced any disruption to physical supplies. But that shock to energy and other supplies is about to hit, and will endure for many weeks, probably months - even if, against all evidence, Trump is able to claim something he can semi-plausibly describe as victory any time soon.

Apart from anything else, the threat from Iranian drones and mines in the Strait probably won’t vanish, even if Trump declares his peace, because it is not at all clear that Tehran has central control of all the Iranian militias. The process of rebuilding confidence in the security of the Strait will not be easy.

And anyway production facilities in the Gulf that have been switched off can’t be switched on overnight.

So although the Business and Energy departments are being reassured by chemicals manufacturers and petrol retailers and other relevant businesses that they won’t run out of vital supplies this week or next, that is obvious and of limited utility.

The economic pain is coming. And the only questions are about severity - bad or very bad - and duration.

The political point for the PM is it is his responsibility to protect the living standards and quality of life of British people. And even if our looming hardship is largely Trump’s fault, it’s Starmer who will be held accountable by voters for whether he is protecting them appropriately and effectively.

It is worth noting that the massive rise in the cost of living in the last parliament was largely the result of Covid and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and yet the Tories were massacred at the last election (though of course the incompetence of Truss’s mini budget didn’t help them).

This is another way of saying that just as Starmer has acknowledged the UK has a material interest in keeping the peace in Ukraine, if a ceasefire with Putin is ever agreed, the same holds true of the Strait of Hormuz and the UK more generally.

But if some kind of stability returns to the Gulf, and British ships and planes are deployed there to maintain that stability, that will be a challenge to the government - because it will seriously deplete military resources available for Ukraine’s “coalition of the willing”, policing the so-called High North of the Arctic and the many other regions vulnerable to conflict and instability.

And one other thing: Iran has shown in spectacular fashion the damage that can be wreaked with drones. So as several ministers have said to me with rising alarm, the UK armed forces own too few attack drones or counter drone systems. So called un-crewed warfare is the new norm, but it is not clear the UK armed forces- or the US - is ready.

“This war is changing everything” a minister said to me “about the outlook for the global economy in the short term, the energy supply chains that we can rely on and how we defend ourselves in all senses.”

It’s hard to disagree.