TOM WATSON: ‘Trump’s Iran invasion like a teen with the nuclear codes’
‘Keir Starmer’s cautious and realistic approach is every bit as brave as charging into a conflict with no exit’, the former Deputy Labour leader Tom Watson writes
Donald Trump was compared to a teenager(Image: Getty Images)
Call him Cautious Keir. I do.
This week it sounds less like an insult and more like the only grown-up in the room.
While Donald Trump struts around the globe like a teenager who has just discovered the nuclear codes, Starmer has kept Britain out of a war with the ayatollahs. Not bad for a prime minister everyone had written off.
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READ MORE: Brits told to work from home and drive slower in 10-point plan for energy crisisREAD MORE: Energy bills to surge to nearly £2,000 a year due to Iran war
America is our greatest ally. Always has been. Always will be. Churchill knew it too. In his famous Iron Curtain speech, delivered in the USA exactly eighty years ago this month, he said that neither the prevention of war nor the rise of world order could be achieved without what he called “the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples.”
That is what the special relationship is for. It is not a blank cheque. It is not a rubber stamp. An ally is not a lapdog. It does not roll over every time Washington clicks its fingers. America right now is behaving like a superpower having a breakdown. With bombers. That should terrify you. It terrifies me.
Trump sneered that Starmer is “not Winston Churchill.” Winston did not blunder into other people’s wars on a whim, with no exit plan and no Plan B. He picked his battles. That was rather the point of him.
Before Britain joins any shooting war, serious people ask serious questions. The kind any leader worth the name asks before sending other people’s children to war. What is the objective? How does it end? Who clears up when the bombers have flown home?
Trump has no answers. He never did. This week we learned that the United States and Israel cannot even agree on which sites to bomb. That is not a coalition. That is a shambles.
Do not kid yourself this is some faraway drama to be watched with a cup of tea and a shrug. This war is in your kitchen. It is in your heating bill, your petrol receipt, your weekly shop and your pension pot. When energy routes wobble, British families feel it quickly.
Starmer knows all of this. And yet there are people in Labour who want to remove him. I have a message for those Labour MPs gleefully agitating for a leadership contest after May. You do not swap the driver when the car is doing ninety on the motorway.
With Iran still firing salvos at Britain’s allies in the Middle East, this may well be Keir’s finest hour. Call him Cautious Keir. In a week of swaggering, preening, self-regarding blowhards, Keir’s cautious and realistic approach is every bit as brave as charging into a conflict with no exit. Braver, actually.
‘Britain should rejoin the EU’
The Mayor of London Sadiq Khan says Britain should rejoin the EU. He’s right. Hard-headed economic analysis puts the average household £870 a year worse off because of Brexit. That’s not project fear. That’s project fact.
Tell it to the family juggling three jobs to cover the rent. Tell it to the young lad who can’t find a traineeship because the scheme that funded it has gone. Tell it to the small business owner drowning in paperwork to sell widgets to France.
Nigel Farage won’t lose sleep over £870. He’s got more than a bob or two salted away. But the grafters on average wages? That money matters. That’s not a pay gap. That’s a monthly shop for some families. Time to be honest about the cost of Brexit.
‘Stop the clock on the clock change’
We’ve just had the spring equinox. Days are now longer than nights. The light is winning. The week after next, the clocks go forward. So why, in six months, do we hand that light back? Permanent British Summer Time keeps evenings bright, cuts road deaths, boosts the economy and improves our sleep. The case for change has never been stronger. Time to stop the clock on the clock change.
‘Most sinfully good night in Oscar history’
Hollywood’s night of nights had a divine ring to it. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, a vampire thriller set in the American Deep South, swept four Oscars including best actor for Michael B. Jordan. A film called Sinners conquering America? It was, without doubt, the most sinfully good night in Oscar history. Amen to that.
