Article published in The Daily Express, 8 March 2026. © Richard Kemp

One word sums up the Labour Government’s policy on the war in the Middle East: fear. It’s not even fear of sending British troops into battle, and it’s certainly not fear among our forces, who will fight whenever and wherever they are sent.

Many have suggested a failure of strategic planning in the Ministry of Defence accounts for the absence of any British naval assets in the Middle East. I doubt that’s the case. The PM and Defence Secretary would have been given options long ago, as soon as potential hostilities appeared on the horizon, which goes back many weeks.

Those options would have been quite limited given the extent to which our army, navy and air force have been starved for decades.

There must have been a political veto on deploying warships to the region, otherwise how could it have taken so long for HMS Dragon to be readied for action?

If a green light had been given, she could have been fixed up and patrolling in the Mediterranean long before an Iranian-made Shahid drone exploded at RAF Akrotiri.

This whole episode does however illustrate the disgraceful state of the armed forces today.

More than seven days have passed since the drone strike on British sovereign territory. Remember that back in 1982, a naval task force of some 40 warships was bound from Britain to the South Atlantic just four days after the Falklands were invaded.

But Britain’s abject failure to join a just, defensive war against the Iranian terror regime, which threatens the world as well as its own people, is not about lack of military capability.

We even refused to allow the US use of British military bases that America has paid for for decades. It comes back to fear. Fear of losing even more political backing from the Muslim and hard left supporters on which Labour relies. The very idea of joining in or even facilitating a US-led attack on a Muslim country would have filled Starmer with horror.

He might just have mustered the stomach for that, but to take part in an offensive alongside the hated Israel? Impossible. He spent the last two years vilifying Israel, but even the partial arms embargo, sanctions on political leaders and recognition of ‘Palestine’ failed to satiate the anti Israel mobs, as we saw in Labour’s defeat at Gorton and Denton.

Not only that, but his own leadership of his party would be at even graver risk had he joined Operation Epic Fury. Don’t forget there are even greater opponents of Israel waiting to pounce.

Not least Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary. A decades long supporter of Labour Friends of Israel, he sensed the way the wind was blowing and recently published his erroneous view that Israel had been committing war crimes and the whole country should be sanctioned, not just political leaders.

The upshot of all this internal Labour politicking is that our national security has been sacrificed on the altar of party interests. The ‘special relationship’ with the US has been shot away, a long standing alliance which has strengthened our defences and given Britain greater authority on the world stage.

We have undermined whatever remnants remained of any ability to deter our foes.

In short, Britain is now a military laughing stock, standing by wringing our hands even while British sovereign territory is under attack. I have spoken to several US military officers in the last few days. They are all utterly bewildered by how far their once most dependable ally has descended into irrelevance.

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. Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 1 March 2026. © Richard Kemp

At a time when the misdemeanours of so many current and former politicians has dragged public esteem for British politics to record lows, it is gratifying to find a long-serving ex-MP putting his money where his mouth is by signing up for war service in Ukraine.

Jack Lopresti, who represented Filton and Bradley Stoke for the Conservatives from 2010 until he lost the seat in 2024, joined the International Legion – a formation of the Ukrainian armed forces – in November 2024. And more recently, just last month, it was announced he is serving with the Azov Brigade, a volunteer force that attracted controversy due to its far-Right origins, but is now understood to be fully integrated into Ukraine’s armed forces.

Lopresti, who was a reservist with the Royal Artillery, was vocal in parliament about defence spending, Nato commitments and the need to deter Russian aggression. He has been a strong advocate for supporting Kyiv in its fight against Putin since the full-scale invasion began four years ago this week.

The Ukrainian war has seen no shortage of statements of solidarity from European capitals; but comparatively few elected politicians have been prepared to share the burdens borne by soldiers on the frontline in that or any other war.

There are exceptions. Remarkably, Charles Goodson-Wickes, the former Conservative MP for Wimbledon, fought with the 7th Armoured Brigade in the 1991 Gulf War while still in office, the only MP to have done so since the Second World War.

Only a handful of current MPs, including Labour’s Mike Tapp and Dan Jarvis, saw regular military service before getting elected. That is hardly surprising given the minuscule size of the armed forces today.

But perhaps our national defences would be in a less parlous state if the number of veterans that reached the top end of government came somewhere close to the tally of human rights lawyers, life-long political groupies and financiers.

Of course, that was once the case. Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, Jim Callaghan and Edward Heath all saw combat. Margaret Thatcher did not, but by her side was a man who had: her husband Denis.

All of them maintained strong defences, which then began a long and disastrous downward spiral under John Major and his successors as prime ministers, none of whom served in the armed forces, and the same is true of most of their cabinet ministers, which may help account for the wilful neglect of our nation’s defences.

This is not just about starvation of funding and strategic ineptitude, but also the abject failure to protect serving soldiers and veterans from predatory lawyers who have repeatedly sought to hound them through the courts. Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 22 September 2025. © Richard Kemp

The Israeli offensive engulfing Gaza City has hurled Hamas into panic mode. The IDF is conducting the most intensive operations of this two-year campaign, building intensity by the day, with another combat division just committed to the fight. In the past couple of days they have killed dozens of Hamas terrorists, seized and destroyed munitions dumps and located and attacked numerous tunnel shafts. From ground and air, military facilities including fighting positions, command centres and observation posts located in civilian buildings, including tower blocks, have been struck and destroyed.

In line with their obligations under the laws of war, the IDF have repeatedly dropped leaflets warning Gazan civilians to leave the city and opened up corridors to allow them to move safely to the south. Current estimates suggest around 550,000 have departed so far and more are on the way out. Fearful of losing their human shields, Hamas have continued to threaten civilians against leaving and tried to block exit routes for vehicles. Meanwhile terrorist leaders have been trying to save their own skins, some by attempting not just to escape from Gaza City but right out of the Strip. Doing everything they can to halt the IDF onslaught, Hamas released photo-montages of Israeli hostages on Telegram, threatening to kill them all and to force them into the front lines directly under the guns of the advancing troops.

In an attempt to show strength but in fact demonstrating only weakness, terrorists fired two rockets from northern Gaza towards the city of Ashdod, neither of which got near its target. Another measure of Hamas’s desperation came to light at the weekend when they attacked UN teams working to establish a new aid corridor in the south to allow supplies to reach an Israeli-designated humanitarian zone where those getting out of Gaza City could take refuge. The attackers seized UN vehicles to try to create a barrier preventing the movement of aid trucks.

All of this shows just how unnerved Hamas has become as Israel’s advance on Gaza City unfolds. Already reeling from the assault on their sponsors in Iran, they had been hoping for at least a pause in hostilities with the latest stalling tactics from their negotiating team in Qatar. But that evaporated with the IDF strike on Doha which demonstrated that from now on the Hamas leadership were safe nowhere. This does not necessarily mean that Hamas’s collapse in Gaza is imminent, but even the most hardened jihadists are susceptible to the psychological as well as the physical effects of battle. As Napoleon himself said, in war ‘the moral is to the physical as three is to one’.

So, at Hamas’s moment of maximum stress, Starmer rides to their rescue with his formal recognition of a non-existent Palestinian state, a move that their leaders characterise as “victory”. Hamas are obviously not interested in Starmer’s two-state solution, any more than their fellow jihadists in the PLO and Palestinian Authority are: they want only the annihilation of the Jewish State. But Starmer’s recognition is nevertheless important for them, an indication that even at this stage there is still hope for international pressure to stop the Israeli offensive. According to senior Hamas terrorist Ghazi Hamad, recognition of a Palestinian state ‘is one of the fruits of October 7. We have proven that victory over Israel is not impossible, and our weapons are a symbol of Palestinian honour”. Hamas have not celebrated any event more since 7 October, and they have been joined in their revelry by jihadist networks globally.

Hamas needn’t count their chickens though. Starmer and his posse of ‘recognisers’ are not the cavalry and they won’t be saving them in the nick of time. But their support will at least help stiffen the terrorists’ resolve at a critical moment and may well cost Gazan civilians, IDF soldiers and hostages their lives in the process. On the other side of the ledger, however, Israel’s erstwhile allies have now shot their bolt. Recognition was their doomsday weapon. By publicly rewarding the butchers of 7 October, they have denied themselves even the small amount of influence they might have had over the progress of this war or the future of the Middle East. The leaders of Britain, France, Canada, Australia and the rest have nothing more to offer except words that will no longer be listened to, either in Jerusalem or Washington.

Hamas themselves ignored Starmer’s imperious edict that his future Palestinian state would not include a role for them. They know very well that he wouldn’t have any say in that. They would also have noted the inherent contradiction in his previous condition on Israel that it must stop attacking them if recognition were to be avoided. Nor is Hamas the only roadblock in the path of a two-state solution. Only this weekend, Israel uncovered and dismantled the first rocket production facility in the West Bank, at Ramallah, the presidential seat of PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas, a recent honoured guest in Downing Street. Even if Starmer doesn’t understand the PLO’s threat to peace and security Trump certainly does, which is why he banned them from coming to the UN this week to celebrate their much-feted recognition.

Paradoxically, Starmer’s appeasement of global jihadists by opposing Jerusalem’s defensive war in Gaza will make Britain even more dependent on Israel. Weakness of this type only ever provokes further violence and the threat to the UK will consequently increase. I know from my own experience how much Israel has assisted Britain and many other countries in combating terrorism and the need for that will now be even greater. While Britain may have failed Israel in this fight, I also know that Israel will not fail Britain, however great our betrayal.