Mackenzie France: Starmer should be shamed by the leadership vacuum he left on Israel and Iran

Mackenzie France is the director of strategy at the Pinsker Centre, a UK-based foreign affairs think tank focusing on Israel and the Middle East. He is also a Middle East History and Peace Fellow at Young Voices and a Krauthammer Fellow at the Tikvah Fund.

If there is one thing the Prime Minister hates, it is being asked what he thinks. Sir Keir’s aversion to coming off the fence has plagued his government since its earliest days, from green investment to winter fuel payments. In the test of leadership on the Israel-Iran conflict, the Prime Minister dithered from start to finish.

In his attempt to thread the needle so finely on supporting, but not endorsing, either Israeli or US strikes, the Prime Minister forgot to finish the stitching. That is, Starmer failed to illustrate the UK’s actual position on any developments. The result is a Britain that looked effete and irrelevant on the world stage; Israel did not even warn the Prime Minister in advance of their strikes.

From his initial response to the first Israeli strikes, it was clear that the Prime Minister was trying to please everyone. No.10 began by talking of a balancing act between “grave concerns” over Iran’s nuclear weapons programme and a desire to “return to diplomacy.” A perfect equivocation from the Prime Minister at the precise moment where leadership was required.

Contrast this with Kemi Badenoch’s reaction to the strikes; one of full-throated support. In a direct challenge to the Prime Minister’s ‘strategic’ ambiguity, Badenoch said that “we should not be confused about whose side we’re on”. In her endorsement of Israeli action, Badenoch named Iran as an enemy of the UK directly and raised the many attacks the regime has committed and tried to commit on UK soil as proof. The difference could hardly have been starker.

The Prime Minister continued vacillating for over a week until the US decided to intervene. You would be forgiven for thinking that since the UK’s most important ally was involved, Starmer might actually have had something meaningful to say. Instead, the opposite happened. In an utterly excruciating interview, Luke Pollard MP, the government’s Armed Forces Minister, dodged giving any indication of the government’s position on US strikes seven times.

Starmer failed to offer any real clarity either. His statement merely acknowledged US involvement, and it contained no endorsement or critique. He reiterated UK security concerns relating to an Iranian nuclear weapons programme and said that the US had acted to “alleviate that threat”. Just as with his first statement, this vague platitude clarified nothing. All major UK allies agree that the Iranian regime should not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon; reiterating this is pointless. The Prime Minister failed to comment directly on the actions to prevent this, which would address the actual issue at hand.

Starmer failed to meet even the lowest bar of this international leadership test. From the Leader of the Opposition here in the UK to allies like Chancellor Merz abroad, the Prime Minister was outshone on all sides. The fundamental reality is the one which Chancellor Merz acknowledged shortly after the initial Israeli strikes: in striking Iran’s nuclear programme, Israel was doing the “dirty work” which Western allies had failed to do for so long. At the very least, the Prime Minister should have offered real insight into how his government viewed the escalations in the region. Instead, he chose to act like a glorified news aggregator.

These dramatic events have slipped somewhat from the headlines. The Prime Minister helping the news cycle shift with his humiliating concession to his backbenchers over the government’s major welfare reforms – yet another failure of leadership. But even though this moment of international crisis is over, the damage of a weak Prime Minister will remain. From Chagos to Israel and Iran, this Prime Minister has proven himself incapable of even discussing the UK’s national interest, let alone standing up for it.

Starmer’s chronic indecisiveness has begun to irritate even those in his own party and his leadership looks consistently uncertain. This in itself is staggering given his enormous majority and the fact that his triumphant election was only one year ago. The Prime Minister is living proof that a successful political career is not built on a well-crafted ‘maybe’; let us hope that the leadership vacuum in Downing Street is filled before long.

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