Britain cannot be drawn into a war “with no clear end”, a former senior Nato commander has said, as he defended Keir Starmer after Donald Trump’s jibes that he was “not Winston Churchill”.
Trump was “another American president who had launched a war of choice”, said General Sir Richard Shirreff, as one minister insisted the UK prime minister had acted “with a cool head” in not allowing British bases to be used for the initial attacks.
The US president launched a deeply personal attack on Starmer for his refusal to allow Washington to launch initial strikes against Iran from British bases, telling reporters at the White House on Tuesday: “We are not dealing with Winston Churchill.”
In his latest extraordinary attack, Trump said he was unhappy with the United Kingdom, even though Starmer finally accepted that the United States could use the Diego Garcia military base on the Chagos Islands to attack Iranian missile facilities.
Asked in a series of interviews on Wednesday morning about Trump’s comments, Treasury Chief Secretary James Murray said: “The prime minister made the decision he made in the national interest.
“He has approached this with a cool head, with a real clarity of purpose, with a real focus and a determination to do what is right for the British people.”
Shirreff, who was NATO’s second supreme allied commander in Europe, was among those who supported Downing Street’s approach, saying: “Britain has to do what is right for Britain.
“There are absolutely reasons to get involved, but you should not get involved in any way in an operation where the final stage has not been clarified, there is no clear strategy and once again we have an American president who has launched a war of choice without a clear understanding of how this is going to end,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
“We’ve been here before with Iraq in 2004 and we don’t want to go back to a situation like that.”
However, right-wing opposition politicians in Britain seized on Trump’s attack, with Conservatives claiming the prime minister’s stance had made it more difficult to protect the UK’s national interest.
Shadow chancellor Mel Stride told Fox News: “The bottom line in all of this is that in a very uncertain and dangerous world allies matter, and no ally matters more to our country than the United States.
“To have ended up in a situation because of the way the prime minister has supported the United States over Iran, where Donald Trump is really questioning the relationship he has with us, is a serious situation.”
Stride also suggested that the time it was taking for a British warship to reach the seas near RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus would also cause the Cypriot government to question the role of having a British military presence on the island.
The prime minister said this week that HMS Dragon, a Type 45 destroyer, was being sent to the region as the US-Israel war with Iran continues. A suspected Iranian drone attacked the British Akrotiti base overnight on Sunday, causing no casualties and what the Ministry of Defense described as “minimal damage”.
According to the Cypriot government, two more drones heading towards Akrotiri were intercepted on Monday, while a new alert was also issued on Wednesday morning.
However, the British government has been accused of being caught off guard amid reports that the ship’s departure had been delayed and that a French ship would arrive in the area first to carry out similar defensive operations.
Murray told GB News: “The HMS Dragon and Wildcat helicopters will be available as soon as possible, but they build on the defensive capability we have been building up in recent weeks.”
