Keir factor

“Quite clearly, this is not a straightforward task,” sighed Keir Starmer, a man who, it is increasingly clear, used up all his wishes when he was in opposition. Monday’s intractable problem was the Strait of Hormuz. On Tuesday it will be striking doctors and by Wednesday, if things carry on as they are, a plague of locusts. 

One of the reasons that the task of getting ships moving past Iran is so unstraightfoward is the prime minister’s inability to identify all the contributors to the crisis. His statement to the Commons was full of condemnations of Iran, tough on Israel’s behaviour in Lebanon, but silent on any other participants in this mess. Even now that his relations with Donald Trump have completely collapsed, Starmer is coy about what he thinks. It is the loathe that dare not speak its name. 

The prime minister listed all the terrible things that had befallen the country in recent years: “from the 2008 financial crash through austerity, Brexit, Covid, the war that still rages in Ukraine and the disastrous premiership of Liz Truss.” Even Kemi Badenoch smiled at that bathetic final note.

The Conservative leader was equally reluctant to get into the question of exactly whose plan to bomb Iran hadn’t considered the possibility that the Iranians might respond. She focused instead on the domestic. “We can all see that we were not ready for this situation,” she said, describing the country but also her party. “We must be ready for these situations before they happen,” she went on. It was a “national embarrassment” that the Royal Navy hadn’t had a ship ready to defend Cyprus. Labour MPs, who have the advantage of knowing both who was in government two years ago and how long it takes to build a ship, laughed at that. Badenoch, who seems unclear on both these points, accused them of “historical illiteracy”.

“I’m glad they’re laughing!” the Tory leader said. “Please keep laughing!” And, to be fair to her, they did.

It fell to Ed Davey to point out that quite a lot of blame for the current situation lay in Washington. “The president is, regrettably, no friend of the UK,” he said. “He is a dangerous and corrupt gangster, and that is how we must treat him.”

It is hardly Starmer’s style to denounce Trump, and he probably takes the view that it’s in the national interest to simply suck up the abuse that the White House fires his way. As voters in Hungary have shown, the one thing worse for a European politician than being abused by Trump is being praised by him. 

Which brings us to Nigel Farage, a man who has spent the last decade sucking up to the president with such intensity that Dyson has a team studying him. He’d held his own event on Monday to announce that a Reform government would hold a public inquiry into the rise in immigration at the start of this decade, and might look at throwing Boris Johnson in jail. We ought to be slightly nervous of governments locking opponents up, but perhaps we could make an exception in this case.

He was asked where this would leave Robert Jenrick, who had been immigration minister when a lot of this immigration was happening, but Farage had an answer. “Robert Jenrick resigned because he was appalled at what was going on.” This is quite true, if you remember that “what was going on” was “Rishi Sunak was repeatedly not giving a Cabinet post to Robert Jenrick.”

What lessons did Farage take from the Conservative failure to reduce immigration? “Never trust the Tories. That’s what I would say. Never trust the Tories.”  In fairness, that’s what a lot of us might say if we’d spent the last couple of months with Jenrick and Nadhim Zahawii. 

But what did the Reform leader make of events in the Middle East, and Trump’s decision to impose his own blockade on top of the Iranian one? Farage looked thoughtful, and explained that the president was trying to push China to lean on Tehran. “I think that’s the game of chess we’re seeing here.” Chess? In the mind’s eye we suddenly saw the president in the Oval Office, trying to get his head around how the little horse moves. It seems more plausible that Trump still struggles with noughts and crosses. 

“It does begin to feel,” Farage went on, “that the exit strategy might not have been as clearly thought through as one would wish.” Oh really, Nige? It “begins” to feel that way, does it? You’re just picking up the tiniest hint, after weeks of chaos, that the chess player in the Oval Office might not be thinking very many moves ahead? If only the rest of us enjoyed your levels of deep perception.

Not, of course, that Farage is really the person to ask about this. “I’ve not had conversations with the president,” he said. He barely knows him. Donald who? Somewhere at Reform HQ, an intern is busy printing out pictures of Farage and Trump together, then shredding them.

Trump had, overnight, shared a picture that seemed to suggest he was the actual son of God. A reporter asked about it. “Do you think Donald Trump is Jesus Christ or do you think this is evidence of cognitive decline?”

“He’s 80 in a few weeks’ time,” Farage said, and was then quiet for a very long time. “I haven’t … I mean … He has a very unusual way of operating.” Oh Donald, not even Nigel will admit to being your friend.