The last time Donald Trump decided to bomb Iran, the UK was heavily involved. In June 2025, then-foreign secretary David Lammy flew to Washington DC for crucial meetings as the attacks were being planned. The UK was given notice of what was about to happen.
From DC, Lammy jetted straight to Geneva for tense discussions with European counterparts and Iranian officials. The UK did not take part in the air strikes but acted as a vital diplomatic bridge, conveying the US position and urging Iran to strike a deal. According to UK officials who were there, Lammy’s insight was such that the Iranian foreign minister sought a private meeting after the Geneva talks so as to better understand where the Trump administration was at.
The contrast with the latest round of US strikes against Iran could not be clearer. If the UK was an important player in last summer’s crisis, we now appear to be largely irrelevant. New Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper remained in the UK this weekend, speaking to counterparts from afar. I’m told there were no conversations with Iranian government representatives, no repeat of last summer’s shuttle diplomacy to try to convince Tehran to negotiate. The UK’s role as a go-between is over, the valuable insights into Trump’s thinking that Lammy drew on last summer no longer the UK’s diplomatic currency.
In fact, ministers seem to have been completely blindsided by the scale of the latest attacks. That, at least, was the stunning admission from Cooper on Monday, when she confirmed that the UK had no advance warning that the US and Israel were planning to take out Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“We didn’t know about that until after it happened,” Cooper told Nick Ferrari on LBC. It was a jaw-dropping revelation. This was a historic military mission by the US and Israel, two of Britain’s closest allies, one that would send shockwaves across the globe and have major implications for British security interests. And the UK Government seems to have had absolutely no idea it was happening.
It is all the more damning given that Cooper was in Washington for meetings only a week before the US launched its latest strikes, including holding talks with her counterpart, Marco Rubio. And yet, it seems, Rubio decided to hide from Cooper that plans were being drawn up with Israel to assassinate Khamenei within days. Some special relationship.
When the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary learn about these events at the same time as the rest of us, something has gone terribly wrong. Of course, this is partly due to the nature of the Trump administration and the chaos that engulfs it. Decades-old doctrines and long-standing conventions are promptly ditched based on what mood the President has woken up in that morning. That makes genuine co-ordination and co-operation more difficult.
But there is a more fundamental problem here: the UK appears to be fast becoming irrelevant in the eyes of our closest ally. Downing Street likes to portray Starmer as an adept Trump whisperer – a Prime Minister who, against the odds, has built a strong, beneficial relationship with a difficult US President. That illusion has been shattered in recent weeks.
First, Trump savaged Starmer’s plan to give up the Chagos Islands, despite having previously seemed to endorse the deal. Then, having not bothered to alert Starmer to the fact that he was hatching a plan to cut the head off the Iranian snake, Trump stuck the boot in further, telling an interviewer that he was “very disappointed” in Starmer’s approach to the Iran issue.
This was the culmination of a process that became inevitable the minute Starmer decided to approach Trump from a position of grovelling weakness rather than strength and shared endeavour. That fawning first meeting in the Oval Office, the toe-curling sycophancy since then, the unprecedented second State Visit, the repeated refusal to utter a word of condemnation about Trump’s malice and malfeasance. What does Starmer have to show for it now? How is the UK better off for this exercise in national prostration?
Trump has a bloodhound’s knack for sniffing out weakness. And Starmer’s approach to his US counterpart gave off more than a whiff – it was a stench. That was a fundamental misjudgement by Downing Street.
Of course, conveying strength is not easy as the junior partner in the special relationship. But Starmer could have treated the alliance much more as a genuine partnership, rather than resembling a lapdog grateful for any scraps its owner might throw under the table. He set the tone for how he is now treated.
Not only has Starmer failed to build a functioning relationship with Trump, his decisions have reduced the UK’s influence even further. First, he decided – catastrophically – to replace the incumbent UK ambassador to Washington, the proven and highly respected Dame Karen Pierce, with the since disgraced Labour peer Peter Mandelson on the insistence of his the-chief of staff, who was mates with Mandelson.
Then Starmer decided to jettison the only other member of his Government with genuine connections to the Trump White House. First in opposition and then in Government, Lammy had spent years carefully cultivating relations with leading Republicans, using his long-standing connections in the US (he studied at Harvard and maintained a wide network of political contacts) to gradually work his way into Trump’s inner circle.
He had built a genuinely warm and productive alliance with JD Vance, Trump’s Vice President. Lammy’s back-slapping approach went down well with US figures used to dealing with staid, stiff-lipped British diplomats. That he was in the White House when plans for the first round of Iran strikes were being drawn up was no coincidence – he had spent years making sure he would be in the room when it mattered. And then, out of the blue, Starmer decided to demote him and all that effort was squandered.
What was behind that decision? Labour insiders suggested there was little more to it than the Prime Minister needing to placate Cooper when he wanted to replace her as Home Secretary. And so the influence that Lammy had spent years carefully building with the US was sacrificed on the altar of party management. The man who had spent four years in the foreign affairs brief was suddenly asked to sort out Britain’s prisons instead while Cooper, who has no previous foreign policy experience, had to start from scratch. What way to run a Government.
And that is how we end up here: with Britain’s involvement in the events of recent days reduced to providing a few runways from which US jets take off, while taking barbs from the incumbent US President. The Starmer Government does not even seem to know what it thinks of the world-changing events taking place.
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For three full days now, ministers and Government spokespeople have been sent out either unable or unwilling to answer basic questions. Does the UK believe the air strikes which killed Ali Khamenei were legal? We have no idea. Does the UK support them? Unclear. What is Britain’s position on regime change in Iran? We don’t appear to have one. This is Starmer’s Downing Street in a nutshell: even on an issue as fundamental as this, it has no idea what it thinks.
Britain’s influence has long been on the wane, but the damage to the special relationship in recent months should worry us all. Having finally woken up to the fact that the US under Trump is not a dependable ally, Europe is finally making noises about taking responsibilities for its own defence. While this cannot happen soon enough, it will take years to achieve – if it is at all. In the meantime we remain heavily reliant on an alliance that appears on the verge of imploding.
If Starmer cannot rebuild that relationship, Labour MPs will wonder whether a different prime minister might.
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