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      Dear Keir Starmer, stop cosying up to Donald Trump – or he’ll drag Britain down with him | Simon Tisdall

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      Donald Trump’s victory in last November’s US presidential election presented Keir Starmer, Britain’s Labour prime minister, with a choice – and an opportunity. Either cosy up to a man whose obnoxious, hard-right, ultra-nationalist policies are inimical to UK security and foreign policy interests, economic prosperity and democratic values; or risk a rupture with the US, a longstanding but overbearing ally, and seize the moment to redefine Britain’s place in the world, primarily through reintegration in Europe.Starmer made the wrong call – and Britain has paid a heavy price ever since. The cost to national dignity and the public purse will be on painful show this weekend as Trump, pursued by the Epstein scandal and angry protesters, makes an expensively policed, ostensibly private visit to his golf courses in Scotland. On Monday, the prime minister will travel north to kiss the ring. More humiliations loom. In September, Trump will return for an unprecedented second state visit, at Starmer’s unctuous behest. At that point, the full, embarrassing extent of Britain’s thraldom will be there for all the world to see.Let’s be clear. Trump is no friend of Britain’s and is, in key respects, a dangerous foe. Efforts to curry favour with this narcissist will ultimately prove futile. Trump always reneges. His unedifying career is littered with broken promises and relationships, personal and political. His only loyalty is to himself. Right now, this wannabe dictator is busy making America not greater but weaker, poorer, less influential and more disliked. Don’t let him drag Britain down, too. It’s not too late to make the break.US leadership of the western democracies used to be taken for granted. Now it’s a problem. Politicians in both Britain’s main parties have difficulty accepting this shift. As so often, public opinion is ahead of them. Recent polling by the Pew Research Center found 62% of Britons have no confidence in Trump “to do the right thing regarding world affairs”. Most of those surveyed in 24 countries viewed him as dangerous, arrogant and dishonest. Thanks to him, the US’s international standing is in freefall.Giving Israel a free hand in Gaza is the most egregious example of how Trump’s policies conflict with UK interests. Starmer’s government has condemned the deliberate killing and starving of civilians. Among the 55% of Britons opposed to Israel’s actions, 82% believe they amount to genocide, a YouGov poll found last month. A majority backs additional sanctions. Trump’s support for forced relocations, opposition to a two-state solution and close collaboration with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli leader charged with war crimes, all contradict stated UK policy. Trump bears significant personal responsibility for what Starmer calls the “unspeakable and indefensible” horror in Gaza.Starmer warned dramatically last month that the UK was in growing danger of military attack following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Britain and other Nato states have steadfastly supported Kyiv. Not so Trump. Since taking office, he has toadied to Vladimir Putin, vilified Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, suspended military supplies and questioned Nato’s future. Ignoring proliferation fears, Trump is simultaneously fuelling a nuclear arms race. Now the hapless Starmer has been panicked into buying US jets capable of carrying warheads and, it is claimed, has secretly allowed US-owned nukes back into the UK. This is not the Britain Labour voters want.Trump recently reversed himself on Ukraine, patched things up with Nato and criticised Putin. But he could change his mind again tomorrow. Oblivious to the glaring double standard, he congratulates himself meanwhile on “obliterating” Iran’s nuclear facilities – even though last month’s illegal US bombing was only partly successful. Britain rightly favours negotiations with Tehran. It wasn’t consulted.Trump’s tariff wars pose a direct threat to the UK economy, jobs and living standards. Despite Starmer’s deal mitigating their impact, 10% tariffs or higher remain on most US-bound exports. Trump’s bullying of Canada, Mexico, Greenland, Panama and others over sovereignty, migration and trade feeds uncertainty. His irrational hostility to the EU may gratify the likes of Nigel Farage (and Putin). But endless rows between important allies do not serve Britain’s interests.The advance of hard-right, nationalist-populist parties in Europe and, most recently, in Japan suggests the socially divisive, chauvinist agendas championed by Trump’s Maga movement have widening international appeal. That augurs ill for democracy in Britain and the world generally. For the same reason, Trump’s assaults on US constitutional rights, notably minority and gender rights, attacks on judges, universities and public institutions, and attempts to suppress independent media scrutiny are ominous. Such toxic behaviour is contagious. Trumpism is the new Covid. Britain needs inoculation.By slashing overseas aid, cutting public service broadcasters such as Voice of America, defunding and ostracising UN agencies, flouting international courts and pretending the climate emergency is illusory, Trump inflicts immense harm on the US’s reputation, global influence and soft-power armoury. He is wrecking the rules-based order that Britain views as fundamental. It’s a gift to China, Russia and authoritarians everywhere. As Pentagon spending rockets to $1tn annually, his crude message is unmistakeable: might makes right. Brute strength rules.Trump is a disaster for the west and all in the UK who respect progressive democratic values. His second term will evidently be more globally perilous, destructive and destabilising than his first. In support of universal principles established centuries before anyone heard of him, Britain should steer clear of this walking, talking catastrophe. Rather than hug Trump close, Starmer should keep him at arm’s length for fear of infection.Don’t go to Scotland to see him, Prime Minister. Don’t waste your breath. Instead, start planning for the post-special-relationship era. Make the break. It’s time.

      Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Should we ban opinion polls?

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      Ahead of the 2016 US presidential election, opinion polls predicted a win for Hillary Clinton. She lost, and the polling industry went through one of its regular spasms of self-criticism and supposed reform. Alas, it did not vote itself entirely out of existence. France and Spain ban the publication of opinion polls in the days leading up to an election, but we should go one better and ban their publication at any time.No doubt it adds much to the gaiety of the British nation to see the Conservative party slip to third or fourth in the polls, but any poll asking who you would vote for if there were a Westminster election tomorrow, held at a time when there almost certainly will not be an election for another four years, is meaningless as a guide to the makeup of the next Parliament.If polls were simply useless that would be no reason to ban them, though. A better reason is that they are actively harmful: a species of misinformation that pollutes the public sphere.One fundamental problem, recognised long ago, is that there is no such thing as “the public”, thought of as a hive mind with a single homogeneous view. To report the results of any poll as “the British public thinks…” is simply a falsehood, except perhaps in the unlikely circumstance that fully 100% of respondents agree on some point. There is, for the same reason, no such thing as “the will of the British people”, a spectre conjured into being only when something very dubious is being proposed.So what is it exactly that opinion polls measure? A random sample, hopefully statistically reliable, of differing and irreconcilable opinions. Not informed opinions exclusively, of course, but also the opinions of conspiracy theorists, the news-phobic and the merely deranged. By such a scientific operation we may uncover the valuable truths that a third of Conservative voters would prefer to see Nigel Farage as prime minister, while 7% of American men believe they could beat a grizzly bear in unarmed combat.A deeper question is whether polls actually create, in whole or in part, what they purport to be revealing. Does everyone go around with settled, reasoned views on every hot-button issue of the day, just waiting to be revealed by a questioning pollster? The answer was clear to the American journalist Walter Lippmann in his 1922 book Public Opinion. It is unrealistic, he argued, to expect people to be able to form “sound public opinions on the whole business of government”, and they shouldn’t actually have to. “It is extremely doubtful whether many of us would … take the time to form an opinion on ‘any and every form of social action’ which affects us.”The act of asking a question, though, heightens the importance of the subject in the mind of the questionee, creating an urge to have one’s say where there might previously have been neither urge nor say at all. As Walter Bagehot, the 19th-century political theorist and editor of the Economist, once observed: “It has been said that if you can only get a middle-class Englishman to think whether there are ‘snails in Sirius’, he will soon have an opinion on it.” As though to prove him right, in 1980 a third of American respondents helpfully offered their view on whether the “1975 Public Affairs Act” should be repealed, even though that legislation did not actually exist.The way you ask the question, moreover, can profoundly influence the outcome. A 1989 study by the American social scientist Kenneth A Rasinski found that varying verbal framings of political issues changed the outcome: “More support was found for halting crime than for law enforcement, for dealing with drug addiction than for drug rehabilitation, and for assistance to the poor than for welfare.” Other such experiments have shown that the order of questioning also matters, that Americans express more support for government surveillance if terrorism is mentioned in the question, and that nearly twice as many people think that the government “should not forbid speeches against democracy” than it “should allow speeches against democracy”, though the options are exactly equivalent.Modern opinion polls, then, are part of the machinery behind the “manufacture of consent”, a phrase originally coined by Lippmann to describe the propaganda operations of politicians and the press. It is no accident, after all, that George Gallup had been an advertising man, with the Madison Avenue firm Young & Rubicam, before he helped to pioneer the methods of systematic opinion polling by borrowing from market research and PR. In 1936, Gallup and his colleagues correctly predicted the election of Franklin D Roosevelt, proving the old-fashioned forecasting methods outdated. Using the “new instrument” of polling, he declared happily in 1938, “the will of the majority of citizens can be ascertained at all times”. This was, of course, partly by way of advertising his own commercial interest as founder, in 1935, of the American Institute of Public Opinion (Gallup Poll). His fellow pollster Elmo Roper described their nascent industry as “a veritable goldmine”.Profitable it may be, but the constant drizzle of polling also incentivises short-term, knee-jerk decision-making by governments. A leader may make a hasty policy change merely in response to a poll, and then if the polling improves, take that as proof that the new policy is correct. Keir Starmer was no doubt cheered when, following his Enoch Powell-adjacent speech on immigration in May, polling found that “more Britons [now] believe that the government wants to reduce net migration”. But a policy designed to massage approval ratings over the course of weeks is not always going to be the same as a good policy that will last years.It would be invidious after all this not to mention one consideration that strongly favours opinion polls, which is that they provide a steady stream of pseudo-news to the media. If each day did not bring a new revelation about the imaginary public’s confected opinion on one or another issue, there would be much less for news programmes to report on. And what would we all do then?Further readingPublic Opinion by Walter Lippmann (Wilder, £7.49)Manufacturing Consent by Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky (Vintage, £12.99)Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics by Michael Wheeler (WW Norton & Company, £13.99) More

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      FTSE 100 breaks through the 9,000-point barrier to reach new record high

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      Britain’s blue-chip stock index has risen through the 9,000-point mark to touch a new record high.The FTSE 100 share index hit 9,016.98 points in early trading on Tuesday, taking its gains during 2025 to more than 10%.Analysts said the London stock market had benefited from a range of factors this year, including a move by some investors to diversify away from US shares due to concerns over Donald Trump’s economic policies.The US president’s trade war has also helped UK stocks, as Britain is one of the few countries to have reached a trade deal guaranteeing lower tariffs.The AJ Bell investment analyst Dan Coatsworth said: “With the UK having already reached an agreement on a 10% tariff for trade with the US, with exemptions for certain industries, the country is now seen to have an advantage in terms of trade relations.”In recent years, the London stock market has been derided as a “Jurassic Park” index, due to its reliance on companies in long-established industries and a shortage of fast-growing tech companies. However, that has proved an asset in uncertain times.“The UK stock market is the calming cup of tea and biscuit in an uncertain world. There’s nothing fancy on offer, just reliable names that do their job day in, day out. That’s an underrated characteristic and a reason why investors are finally warming to the UK stock market’s appeal in 2025,” Coatsworth added.However, Trump’s trade war has created choppy conditions in financial markets throughout 2025. The FTSE 100 index fell as low as 7,544 points in early April, when tariff announcements sent shares tumbling. It then recovered sharply, as traders embraced the “Taco trade” – the idea that Trump always chickens out if his policies spook investors.The precious metals producer Fresnillo has been the top riser on the FTSE 100 so far this year, up by 155%. It has benefited from surging prices, with gold hitting several record highs this year and silver trading at a 14-year peak this week.The prospect of higher military spending has pushed up shares in the defence contractor Babcock by 120% this year, with BAE Systems up 66%. The engineering firm Rolls-Royce has gained 75%, as its turnaround plan has yielded results.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJohn Moore, a wealth manager at RBC Brewin Dolphin, said “strong earnings momentum in the banking and defence sectors” had helped push the FTSE 100 to a record high.Moore also credited the UK’s “relative political stability”. “While there may be tax increases to come, which was part of the reason for the sell-off of the pound in early June, the government has a clear mandate and tenure for the next few years.“That compares favourably to other parts of Europe, even, where coalition governments are having a tough time,” he said. More

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      Keir Starmer says good relationship with Donald Trump based on shared family values

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      Keir Starmer has spoken about his good relationship with the US president, Donald Trump, and their shared family values.To mark the first anniversary of the Labour government coming to power on Friday, the prime minister spoke to the BBC podcast Political Thinking and said it was “in the national interest” for the two men to connect.“We are different people and we’ve got different political backgrounds and leanings, but we do have a good relationship and that comes from a number of places,” he said.“I think I do understand what anchors the president, what he really cares about. For both of us, we really care about family and there’s a point of connection there.”In the interview, Starmer said he had a “good personal relationship” with Trump, and revealed that the first time they spoke was after the then-presidential candidate was shot at during a campaign rally in July last year.He said Trump had reciprocated with a personal phone call a few days after Starmer’s brother Nick died on Boxing Day.Addressing recent political turmoil, Starmer said he would always “carry the can” as leader after coming under fire over a climbdown on welfare reforms and that he would “always take responsibility” when asked questions.“When things go well … the leader gets the plaudits, but when things don’t go well, it is really important that the leader carries the can – and that’s what I will always do.”Starmer also backed Rachel Reeves and said she would be chancellor “for a very long time to come”, after she was visibly tearful in the House of Commons.The scenes came after the government U-turned on planned welfare changes that put an almost £5bn hole in the chancellor’s plans.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionReeves said she had been upset by a “personal matter” before prime minister’s questions on Wednesday.Appearing on broadcast media on Friday, one year to the day since the 2024 general election, the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, was asked on BBC Breakfast to score the government out of 10. “I don’t think it is for cabinet ministers to mark themselves and mark their own homework,” she said. More

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      Trump dropped an F-bomb this week – and just for a moment, I warmed to him | Gary Nunn

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      I did not get out of bed this morning expecting to praise the public use of an expletive, but such is 2025. If any president was going to break this presidential norm, as NPR put it, it was always going to be Donald Trump.“We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing,” the president told a group of reporters this week. “Do you understand that?” he asked, before storming off.It appears to be the first time a president has deliberately used the F-word live on camera to a press scrum or in a public forum, instead of being “caught” using the term accidentally on a hot mic (even that has only happened a handful of times). Cue plenty of puns from journalists about the “dropping of the F-bomb”.For the record, Trump actually used the F-word about Iran in 2020, but the slightly delayed radio broadcast bleeped it out. Plus, as this 2016 video compilation shows, it’s not unusual for him to swear.But what was different about this time – coming as it did at a moment of heightened global anxiety about military escalation – is that it came across as … authentic. Many people watching will have felt, heard and even shared that frustration about Israel and Iran’s alleged breaking of the ceasefire. Trump’s swearing made the point more forcefully than any diplomatic “disappointment” could have done. It wasn’t eloquent, but I believed it.We know other presidents – such as Lyndon Johnson, and especially Richard Nixon – swore in private. They wouldn’t have dreamed of risking the reputational damage to do so in public, and would have had to apologise if they did. No British prime minister has ever said “fuck” publicly to my knowledge. Few world leaders ever have.Which is potentially part of the problem. The most common complaint about the political elite is that they’re out of touch; that we can’t trust a word that comes out of their mouths because it’s all untrustworthy scripted spin. Yet at the same time we believe they’re swearing like sailors – and saying what they really think – behind closed doors (a perception bolstered by iconic roles such as Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker, the foul-mouthed spin doctor in The Thick of It, or the blue-mouthed Roger Furlong from Veep.)Of course, swearing doesn’t equate to honesty. And, in Trump’s case, the obscenity only masked his own complicity in creating the situation that frustrated him – from pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 to his “monumental” airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend. But my point is that the public clearly doesn’t trust the polished and sanitised scripts that characterise so much political speech.I’m not suggesting world leaders all suddenly disrespect the gravitas of their office. Can you imagine Keir Starmer being encouraged to swear? He’d sound like a headteacher attempting to rap. What I am saying is there’s power in judicious swearing.You want to appear more human to voters? Act more like one. YouGov polling reported in April revealed that just 8% of Britons never swear. Perhaps an occasional curse or two would allow politicians to ally themselves with the 92% of us who do.Linguistic norms are always changing. For six years, I wrote a regular column for the Guardian’s Mind your language section. During that time, I saw changes that would incense any purist. For instance, the BBC made even less use of those with received pronunciation accents and started broadcasting more voices that really sound like people across the country. Such “real” accents are supposed to make the institution seem less remote and more trustworthy. The same is true of the institution of politics. Sounding more like real people does nobody any real harm.If the stakes are literally life and death, and people aren’t listening, a well-placed, truly meant expletive will wake everyone up. At time of writing, the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Iran is holding. Maybe the F-bomb did the job after all.

      Gary Nunn is a freelance journalist and author More

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      The Donald laps it up as Nato leaders compete to shower him with sycophancy | John Crace

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      Sometimes it pays to be a narcissist. To bend reality to your own worldview. To live almost entirely in the present. Where contradicting yourself is not a problem because two opposing statements can both be true. On the way to Nato you can question article 5. On the way back you can give all the other Nato leaders a patronising pat on the head. And everyone is grateful for it.There again it also helps if you are the most powerful man in the world. Donald Trump is not just tolerated, he is actively indulged. Prime ministers from other countries go out of their way to compete with one another in outright sycophancy. Flattery that started off as contrived now sounds dangerously sincere. Almost as if they genuinely believe it. Thank you Agent Orange for all you have done. We don’t know where we would be without you.And The Donald just laps it up. Feeds on it. At the recent Nato summit he looked like a pig in shit. Living his best life. Whatever sunbed regime he’s on, it’s working for him. If he lost any sleep over his decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, it doesn’t show. Just repeat after Donald: The mission was a complete and utter success and Iran’s programme has been put back decades. If the Pentagon says otherwise, it’s just fake news. Yet again, reality can be what you want it to be.Even when Trump temporarily loses it, he wins. Swearing is generally a no-no for any leader. A sign that you’ve lost control. But when Donald said Israel and Iran didn’t know what the fuck they were doing, he came out of it smelling of roses. Praised for his authenticity. Applauded for saying what the rest of the world is thinking. The Donald can do no wrong. He looks relaxed. God stand up for narcissists.Keir Starmer is no narcissist. And breathe a sigh of relief for that. The UK tried the narcissist route with Boris Johnson and that didn’t end well. Maybe we just aren’t a powerful enough country to get away with a sociopath in charge. Or, heaven forbid, maybe it was a matter of timing. Boris was the right man at the wrong time. That’s a horrible thought. Most of us would quite happily settle for a period of fairly boring politics. Where the government is serving the country rather than the ego of the person in charge. Where even when they are getting things wrong, they are at least trying to do the right thing.But that level of decency comes with a cost. Your psyche does not reward itself with a free pass. You worry about the consequences of your actions. Your toadying to The Donald. You worry about the people dying in Ukraine, Gaza, Israel and Iran. You worry when your domestic policies look like they are falling apart. Wish you had spent more time reassuring backbenchers. Had explained better the trade-offs you were making. Had not been so quick to take a quick cash-saving win by removing benefits from people who can’t wash themselves before going to work.Keir has tried to keep a lid on all this as leaders always do. Pretend that he’s fully in charge of the situation. That everything is going according to plan. But always the tell-tale signs leak out. Starmer’s eyes betray him. They have a deadness to them, the life squeezed out. His face pasty and pallid. A man desperate for a breather, a moment to relax away from the treadmill.Yet always there is one thing more. Another summit, another speech, another bilat, another crisis at home. This wasn’t how he imagined his first year in Downing Street. The pressure and the pace is relentless. The treadmill going ever faster and there’s no getting off. He aches in the places where he used to play.Just hours after returning from The Hague, Keir was giving a keynote speech to the British Chambers of Commerce. It was one that he and they will quickly forget. A routine, box-ticking affair. An annual date, along with the CBI, in any prime minister’s diary. It wasn’t meant to be this way, mind. Starmer knows better than anyone that Labour has to work twice as hard to show that it is the party of business. But this time he couldn’t fake it to make it. He’s no visionary. He can’t access people’s hearts. Only their reason. And that only intermittently.Keir began by thanking the BCC for all it had done for the country. He knew it had been a tough year and he had asked a lot of business, but the good times were round the corner. Possibly. There was the new infrastructure strategy. Now there was also a new trade strategy which sounded very much like the old one. Which was to keep on doing the trade deals we can, as with the partial deals with the EU, US and India, and try to do some new smaller deals with other nations. The applause from the audience was barely audible. They didn’t sound desperately impressed. They can tell when a speaker is out on his feet and is phoning it in.Just over an hour later and Starmer was in the Commons for a statement on the G7 and Nato summits. Here he was much more like his chipper self. Not so much in his opening remarks about how the west was making a dangerous world safer, but in his reply to Kemi Badenoch.The Tory leader just gets worse and worse. Half-witted, sulky and tone deaf. Kemikaze seemed to think the UK should no longer bother to send its prime minister to these international meetings. That Keir had only gone for the craic and to avoid her at prime minister’s questions. As if. Facing Kemi over the dispatch box was his half an hour of R&R in the week.Starmer dismissed her with barely concealed contempt as neither serious nor credible. An am-dram politician. Even the Tories were aghast. Mark Pritchard openly criticised his leader. He spoke for many on his own benches.Kemi had achieved the seemingly impossible. She had revivified a tired prime minister and united both Labour and opposition MPs against her. There is only one politician who looks a genuine leader in the Commons and it is still Starmer. He may have his hands full with a rebellion over the welfare bill, but as long as Kemi remains the leader of the opposition, he has nothing to fear from the Tories. More

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      David Lammy refuses to say if UK supported US strikes on Iran nuclear facilities

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      The UK foreign secretary has repeatedly refused to say if the UK supported the US military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities on Saturday or whether they were legal.Interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday for the first time since the US launched airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities, David Lammy also sidestepped the question of whether he supported recent social media posts by Donald Trump that seemed to favour regime change in Tehran, saying that in all his discussions in the White House the sole focus had been on military targets.Lammy said western allies were waiting for battlefield assessments of the impact of the strikes, but it was possible Iran still had a stockpile of highly enriched uranium, although the strikes “may also have set back Iran’s nuclear programme by several years”.Ever since the US strikes, senior figures in the Labour government have tried to make their criticism of the action only implicit rather than explicit.Lammy tried to focus on urging Iran to return to the negotiating table, insisting that Iran was in breach of its obligations by enriching uranium at levels of purity as high as 60%.The UK Foreign Office has denied Iranian reports that in a phone call on Sunday with the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, Lammy had expressed regret about the US strikes.Asked if the airstrikes were legal, Lammy said three times it was for Washington to answer such questions.But in the course of a 15-minute interview on BBC Radio 4, he at no point backed the US airstrikes, saying he was not going to get into the issues of whether they conformed with either article 2 or article 51 of the UN charter, clauses that permit military action in self-defence.Saying “there is still an off-ramp for the Iranians”, he admitted discussions with Iran involving France, Germany and the UK last Friday in Geneva had been “very tough”.He said: “Everyone is urging the Iranians to get serious about the negotiations with the E3 and the US.” Iran is currently refusing to talk to the US or Israel while it is under military attack.Lammy said he still believed Iran was engaging in “deception and obfuscation” about its nuclear programme, but added “yes, they [the Iranians] can have a civil nuclear capability that is properly monitored that involves outsiders but they cannot continue to enrich to 60 %”.His remarks left open whether the UK supported the US negotiating position of insisting on zero uranium enrichment inside the country, or whether he was prepared to accept that Iran could enrich to 3.67% level of purity, the maximum allowed in the Iran nuclear deal signed in 2015 and from which the UK, unlike the US, has not withdrawn.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe also refused to say if he agreed with the latest US intelligence assessment that Iran was close to securing a nuclear weapon, saying instead he relied on the report from the UN nuclear inspectorate, the International Atomic Energy Agency. In its latest reporting, the IAEA said it had no evidence that Iran was seeking a nuclear bomb.He said: “You can only deal with the Iranian nuclear programme diplomatically. If Iran is able to enrich beyond 60%, is able to get a weapon, what we will see is nuclear proliferation across the Middle East.”Asked about Trump’s references to regime change he said: “I recognise there is a discussion about regime change but that is not what is under consideration at this time. The rhetoric is strong but I can tell you, having spoken to the secretary of state, having sat in the White House, that this targeted action is to deal with Iran’s nuclear capability.”When pressed to comment on a claim by Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, that by “being blind” on the issue of the legality of the US’s action, European leaders undermined their position on Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Russia, Lammy insisted there was no moral equivalence between the Russian invasion of a sovereign country and the actions the US had taken in Iran. More

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      No matter what Trump says, the US has gone to war – and there will be profound and lasting consequences | Simon Tisdall

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      Bombing will not make Iran go away. US bombs will not destroy the knowhow needed to build a nuclear weapon or the will do so, if that is what Tehran wants. The huge attack ordered by Donald Trump will not halt ongoing open warfare between Israel and Iran. It will not bring lasting peace to the Middle East, end the slaughter in Gaza, deliver justice to the Palestinians, or end more than half a century of bitter enmity between Tehran and Washington.More likely, Trump’s rash, reckless gamble will inflame and exacerbate all these problems. Depending on how Iran and its allies and supporters react, the region could plunge into an uncontrolled conflagration. US bases in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere in the region, home to about 40,000 American troops, must now be considered potential targets for retaliation – and possibly British and allied forces, too.Trump says he has not declared war on Iran. He claims the attack is not an opening salvo in a campaign aimed at triggering regime change in Tehran. But that’s not how Iran’s politicians and people will see it. Trump’s premature bragging about “spectacular” success, and threats of more and bigger bombs, sound like the words of a ruthless conqueror intent on total, crushing victory.Trump, the isolationist president who vowed to avoid foreign wars, has walked slap bang into a trap prepared by Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu – a trap his smarter predecessors avoided. Netanyahu has constantly exaggerated the immediacy of the Iranian nuclear threat. His alarmist speeches on this subject go back 30 years. Always, he claimed to know what UN nuclear inspectors, US and European intelligence agencies and even some of his own spy chiefs did not – namely, that Iran was on the verge of deploying a ready-to-use nuclear weapon aimed at Israel’s heart.This contention has never been proven. Iran has always denied seeking a nuclear bomb. Its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa banning any such programme. Netanyahu’s most recent claim that Iran was weaponising, made as he tried to justify last week’s unilateral, illegal Israeli attacks, was not supported by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) or US intelligence experts. But weak-minded Trump chose to believe it. Reading from Netanyahu’s script, he said on Saturday night that eliminating this incontrovertible nuclear threat was vital – and the sole aim of the US air assault.So, once again, the US has gone to war in the Middle East on the back of a lie, on disputed, probably faulty intelligence purposefully distorted for political reasons. Once again, as in Iraq in 2003, the overall objectives of the war are unclear, uncertain and open to interpretation by friend and foe alike. Once again, there appears to be no “exit strategy”, no guardrails against escalation and no plan for what happens next. Demanding that Iran capitulate or face “national tragedy” is not a policy. It’s a deadly dead-end.Iran will not go away, whatever Trump and Netanyahu may imagine in their fevered dreams. It will remain a force in the region. It will remain a country to be reckoned with, a country of 90 million people, and one with powerful allies in China, Russia and the global south. It is already insisting it will continue with its civil nuclear programme.These events are a reminder of how profound is official US ignorance of Iran. Unlike the UK, Washington has had no diplomatic presence there since the revolution. It has had few direct political contacts, and its swingeing economic sanctions have created even greater distance, further diminishing mutual understanding. Trump’s decision to renege on the 2015 nuclear accord (negotiated by Barack Obama, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China and the EU) was a product of this ignorance. Ten years later, he is trying to do with bombs what was largely, peacefully achieved through diplomacy by his wiser, less impulsive, less easily led predecessors.View image in fullscreenPeace seems more elusive than ever – and Netanyahu is celebrating. The US cannot walk away now. It’s committed. And, as Netanyahu sees it, he and Israel cannot lose. Except, except … Iran cannot somehow be imagined away. It still has to be dealt with. And the reckoning that now looms, short- and long-term, may be more terrible than any of Netanyahu’s scare stories.Iran previously warned that if the US attacked, it would hit back at US bases. There are many to choose from, in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan and elsewhere. The Houthis in Yemen say they will resume attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. The strait of Hormuz, so important a transit point for global energy supplies, may be mined, as happened in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war. The result could be a global oil shock and markets meltdown. And Iran is still reportedly firing missiles into Israel, despite claims in Jerusalem that most of its ballistic missiles bases have been destroyed.Reacting to Trump’s attack, Iranian officials say no options are off the table in terms of retaliation. And they say they will not negotiate under fire, despite a call to do so from the British prime minister, Keir Starmer. Rejecting Trump’s unverified claims about the total destruction of all nuclear facilities, they also insist Iran will reconstitute and continue its nuclear programme. The big question now is whether that programme really will be weaponised.Two radical longer-term consequences may flow from this watershed moment. One is that Khamenei’s unpopular regime, notorious for corruption, military incompetence and economic mismanagement, and deprived of support from Lebanese Hezbollah and Hamas in Gaza, may crack under the strain of this disaster. So far there has been little sign of an uprising or a change in government. That’s not surprising, given that Tehran and other cities are under bombardment. But regime collapse cannot be ruled out.The other is that, rather than surrender the cherished right to uranium enrichment and submit to the Trump-Netanyahu ultimatum, Iran’s rulers, whoever they are, will decide to follow North Korea and try to acquire a bomb as quickly as possible, to fend off future humiliations. That could entail withdrawal from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and rejection of the UN inspections regime. After years of trying to play by western rules, Iran could really finally go rogue.The supposed need to acquire nukes for self-defence is a grim lesson other countries around the world may draw from these events. The proliferation of nuclear weapons is the biggest immediate danger to the future of the planet. What Trump just did in recklessly and violently trying to eliminate an unproven threat may ensure the proven danger of a nuclear-armed world grows ever-more real.

      Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator More