Starmer shackled by Labour’s Brownite legacy: Martin Ivens

Key topics:Starmer’s wavering over UK support for US-Israeli strikes on IranCabinet divisions driven by Brownite ministers limit PM’s authorityPublic and Trump criticise Starmer for perceived indecision.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Martin Ivens.“I am his highness’s dog at Kew; Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?” This was the epigram engraved on the collar of a puppy that the poet Alexander Pope gave to a Prince of Wales. In power structures, everyone is ultimately under the sway of someone else. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer insists he was his own man when he refused to sanction support for the US-Israeli assault on Iran on day one of Operation Epic Fury. Yet leaked accounts of a fraught cabinet discussion dispute it.An angry President Donald Trump accused his British ally of being “no Churchill” after the PM initially refused to let American planes set off from British airbases. Starmer’s friend and adviser on international law, the Attorney General Richard Hermer, and a majority of Trump-hostile Labour lawmakers, appeared to be yanking harder than the White House on Starmer’s leash.But later the PM seemed to change his mind, sanctioning limited support for strikes against the Islamic Republic in “defense” of the UK’s Gulf allies and British bases in Cyprus and Bahrain that came under drone attack. Iran had by that point let loose a barrage of missiles at its neighbors. But that could have been anticipated from the start of the US-Israeli attacks, when Starmer signalled that he would not give permission for the Americans to use Diego Garcia and a UK RAF base for support. .Read more:.UK leader Starmer is cursed with the reverse Midas touch: Martin Ivens.Starmer may console himself with the thought that only 8% of voters, according to pollsters YouGov, think the UK should join the assault on Iran. Some 46% believe its role should be purely defensive. Yet the public don’t think much of the PM’s performance in this crisis so far either — 47% disapprove. There’s a sense that something doesn’t quite add up in his uncertain presentation.Indeed, according to a leak to the Spectator magazine, Starmer originally wanted to approve the use of British bases. He has invested much diplomatic capital in cultivating Trump to secure better trade and security arrangements, so he could argue that the national interest dictated cooperation. There were precedents, too. Margaret Thatcher allowed President Ronald Reagan’s bombers to strike Libya from Britain, without the UK directly entering the fray.It appears Starmer may have backed down in the face of Cabinet opposition. At least three senior ministers — Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper and Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves — objected to tagging along behind the US. The prime minister hasn’t denied the report. Instead he has fallen back on a lawyerly evasion that the US never put in a formal request, as if it needed to put its demands on headed notepaper first.By no coincidence, those three cabinet ministers are protegees of the last Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown; friend, rival and eventual usurper of Tony Blair. As a student, Reeves admired Brown so much that she hung his photograph on the wall of her flat at Oxford University.Today the Chancellor is concerned about the impact of war and rising oil and gas prices on a fragile economy — and on her and her party’s prospects. Cooper, a former member of Brown’s cabinet, would have rather seen whether Omani brokered talks could have led to Iran abandoning its nuclear ambitions.Ed Miliband is perhaps the most intriguing figure in the Brownite troika. For five years after Labour won office in 1997, the young north London intellectual was Chancellor Brown’s special adviser, before rising to the rank of cabinet minister. Elected Labour leader in opposition, Miliband moved the party further left, abandoning its centrist Blairite legacy.After he lost the 2015 election Miliband became a mentor to Starmer and an inspiration to Labour’s soft-left faction, not least for his passionate advocacy of net-zero policies. Old feuds die hard. Blairites, who have attached themselves to Starmer’s Downing Street operation, regard Miliband as Enemy No. 1.Miliband, who carries an air of having nothing more to prove, acts as a relatively free agent. Last year he saw off Treasury attempts to curtail his green agenda. In media interviews he is one of the few cabinet ministers to exude confidence. As Starmer’s authority decays, Miliband is talked of as an alternative chancellor or even replacement PM.The energy secretary was the most forceful of the senior team opposing involvement in Trump’s war. This is no accident either. In 2013 Miliband whipped Labour MPs against British and US intervention in Syria when Bashar al-Assad crossed a red line by employing chemical weapons. A divided Tory-led government retreated and soon President Barack Obama backed off too. A longstanding Labour quarrel about the depth of the special relationship has come back to haunt Starmer. As chancellor, Brown slowly leveraged Blair’s full-throated support for President George W. Bush’s disastrous “war of choice” on Iraq to force him out.Brown’s backing for Britain’s Iraq entanglement was perfunctory. He knew many Labour MPs would have preferred Blair to follow an earlier Labour prime minister’s example: Harold Wilson faced down Lyndon Johnson’s wrath when he refused to commit troops to the Vietnam War. In his memoirs Brown wrote that he would not have backed the Iraq campaign had he known that US intelligence reports on the country’s possession of weapons of mass destruction were false.Starmer now finds himself insulted by Trump for being an unreliable ally and the Tory opposition accuses him of betraying the national interest to save his political skin. On the other side, he faces powerful Labour critics who think he is letting himself get dragged into “another Iraq” by a reckless American warmonger. His Brownite colleagues in Cabinet offer him cold comfort..Read more:. ‘Restless’ Keir Starmer and his new Labour cabinet.Not for the first time, the sense is of a leader who cannot forge his own path. Whichever way the war goes, someone will be the domestic beneficiary — and it is highly unlikely to be the man on Labour’s uncomfortable throne today..© 2026 Bloomberg L.P.

Starmer shackled by Labour’s Brownite legacy: Martin Ivens

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