The lawyers said no. The public said no. Fifty-six percent of the country said no. Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage said yes. You can guess what happened next. One has to keep pinching oneself.

A week ago, Keir Starmer’s own lawyers told him that the American and Israeli strikes on Iran did not constitute self-defence under the UN Charter.

The legal advice was clear. The position was defensible. Fifty-six percent of the British public supported it. And then Nigel Farage called him a coward, Kemi Badenoch said he was “catching arrows rather than stopping the archer,” and the Telegraph ran its customary leader about Winston Churchill, and that was that.

By what calculus does a former Director of Public Prosecutions, a man who built a career on the proposition that legality is not merely procedural but moral, reverse a position he knew to be correct because the Leader of the Opposition and a man who has never held office in his life called him weak?

Not because the law changed. Not because the strategic situation transformed overnight. Washington’s legal reasoning, as has been noted, remained identical. What changed was the room’s volume.

This is worth dwelling on. Starmer did not cave to reality. He caved to noise.

The noise had a character. It came from the right-wing press, which discovered its inner Palmerstonian the moment American bombers took off. It came from Badenoch, whose own party’s record in the Middle East is a graveyard of catastrophic certainties, telling Starmer he was too timid for a war her predecessors helped to make inevitable.

It came from Farage, whose political project consists entirely of performed aggression against whatever target presents itself, and who found in Iran the opportunity to accuse a Labour prime minister of insufficient bellicosity. The anti-immigration parties, as one observer drily noted, were cheering loudest for our involvement.

And Starmer listened. Not to his lawyers. Not to the fifty-six percent. Not to Ed Miliband and the Cabinet members who opposed participation. He listened to the people whose approval he would never receive and whose contempt he would never escape.

There is a word for this. It is not pragmatism, though Starmer would prefer that framing. It is not the calculation of a leader weighing competing national interests, though the language of Cobra meetings and “calm, level-headed leadership” was deployed with some enthusiasm. The word is cowardice: the specific cowardice of a man who understands what is right, can articulate it with precision, and then abandons it the moment the cost becomes visible.

He told Parliament on 1 March that his initial refusal was “deliberate.” He said he did not believe in “regime change from the skies.” He said the best path forward was a negotiated settlement. All of this was true. None of it survived the weekend.

What did survive was the base at Diego Garcia, now available to an air campaign that has killed more than thirteen hundred people in Iran, including at least a hundred and eighty children, the majority in a strike on a girls’ school in Minab that US military investigators now believe their own country carried out.

Pete Hegseth announced that the strikes would “surge dramatically” once Starmer gave his permission. This was not ambiguous. Starmer knew what he was enabling. He enabled it anyway and called it defensive.

The Commons last Monday had its own version of Jenkins’s Saturday in 1982: the manufactured gravity, the talk of national honour, the bipartisan resolve to demonstrate seriousness by supporting a course of action nobody had thought through. Badenoch said Britain was “

in this war whether Keir Starmer likes it or not.” This was intended as pressure. It functioned, in fact, as absolution. If we are already in it regardless, then no decision was made, no responsibility was taken, and no one needs to answer for anything.

Meanwhile, Trump, having extracted what he wanted, dismissed the British contribution as irrelevant. He does not need aircraft carriers from people who took too long to say yes. “We don’t need people who join wars after we’ve already won.”

This is the special relationship as farce: Britain agonises over its legal obligations, reverses its position under domestic political pressure, puts Diego Garcia at the disposal of an air campaign of questionable legality, and gets publicly humiliated by the man on whose behalf it capitulated.

The ghosts of Munich still haunt the British establishment, as Peter Jenkins noted forty-four years ago. Every crisis produces its Chamberlain comparison, its demand that someone demonstrate they have the stomach for it.

In 1982, the doctrine was applied to a Latin American dictator seizing islands the size of Wales. Now it is applied to a prime minister who briefly insisted that his own lawyers’ advice should mean something.

The pressure worked then. It has worked again now. A hundred and eighty children are dead in a girls’ school in southern Iran, and Keir Starmer is explaining to the House of Commons that the special relationship is “in operation right now.”

One struggles to know what to call this. Taking leave of our senses seems, if anything, understated

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