Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 8 March 2026. © Richard Kemp
The recent strike on the runway at RAF Akrotiri was delivered by an Iranian-made Shahed – the same type of suicide drone that has been supplied to Putin’s forces to strike military and civilian targets in Ukraine. It has been assessed that it was fired from Lebanon by Hezbollah, a key Iranian proxy, designated a terrorist organisation by the UK.
RAF Akrotiri is not just another military base on foreign soil. It is British sovereign territory, one of two areas retained by the UK under the 1960 Treaty of Establishment that created the independent Republic of Cyprus.
What was our response to a direct attack on British sovereign territory? Defence Secretary John Healey claimed that this was an ‘indiscriminate’ strike which it clearly was not. His apparent attempt to deny that British territory had been deliberately attacked by the Iranian axis was akin to Keir Starmer’s desperation to distance himself from the joint US-Israeli strikes against Iran when he plaintively insisted right at the start that Britain played absolutely no role.
He reinforced that stance by denying US use of British bases in the UK and Diego Garcia. Furthermore Starmer has done his best to avoid saying one way or the other whether his government supported the US-Israeli operation. He desperately clung to a threadbare cloak of international law even as left wing leaders in Australia and Canada came out backing Trump against a terrorist state that has brutally murdered thousands of its own people, perpetrated violence across the region for decades and is actively pursuing nuclear weapons.
While Britain stands idly by, Greece dispatched frigates to help defend Cyprus and even France has promised warships and air defence systems. The appalling state of our armed forces has been illustrated by the Royal Navy’s failure so far to get even one warship ready to sail to the Middle East. This, despite weeks of gathering war clouds as US forces steadily built up in the region. Contrast that with 1982, when a task force of 40 ships left Britain for the South Atlantic within just four days of the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands.
Meanwhile Israel is doing our fighting for us by going in against Hezbollah. Israel is defending its own citizens of course but it’s expanding assaults against the terrorists in Lebanon will also be protecting us. Can we expect to see a word of thanks to a country that is putting its own soldiers’ lives on the line and has consistently supported Britain with life saving intelligence and defence technology over many decades?
No of course not, quite the opposite. What we can expect as fighting intensifies in Lebanon is more hand-wringing about de-escalation, negotiation and compromise together with Starmer’s habitual finger-pointing at Prime Minister Netanyahu, one of only two world leaders today (the other being Trump) who has the courage to stand up in defence of his own country and of Western values.
There’s more to this than just a single drone hit on a British base. Hezbollah and Iran were directly responsible for murdering and maiming dozens of British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq during the conflicts there. And Hezbollah and Iran have been involved in at least 20 potentially lethal terrorist plots in the UK. These have all been orchestrated by Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Even the EU has belatedly proscribed this terror army while again, Britain stands idly by, feebly refusing to do so.
The devastating reality in all this is that Starmer and his government is putting party politics above national security. That’s why he imposed a partial arms embargo on our Israeli allies while they were fighting an existential war, why his government sanctioned Israeli ministers and why he recognised a non-existent ‘State of Palestine’. He is in a dreadfully weak position at home, underlined by his loss to a hard left-Islamic alliance at the Gorton and Denton by-election last month.
He is so reliant on anti-Israel MPs and voters that he daren’t do what is right in the Middle East, and indeed what is in his own country’s national interests. His refusal to openly support Trump over Iran is because he believes he can’t afford to be seen joining an attack on a Muslim country. I do however have a hunch that he might even have taken that risk if Jerusalem had not been involved. Instead, for fear of the anti-Israel lobby, he is sacrificing Britain’s special relationship with the US. And by watching as Israel does Britain’s fighting, he is undermining what remains of our deterrent capability on the world stage.