Keir Starmer has attacked Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage over their stance on the war in Iran, accusing both of U-turning on their support for Donald Trump.
At a raucous prime minister’s questions, Starmer accused the leader of the opposition of making the “mother of all U-turns” and furiously trying to backpedal after on Tuesday she denied calling for the UK to join the US president’s war on Iran, after previously saying Starmer should do more to “stop the people who are attacking us”.
Last week Badenoch repeatedly pressed Starmer on his decision not to launch offensive strikes to destroy missile bases, asking: “Why is he asking our allies to do what we should be doing ourselves?”
On Wednesday, Starmer said: “If I’d asked her last week, her position would be, we support the initial strikes and we want to join the war. This week, she says, we don’t want to join the war. That is the mother of all U-turns on the single most important decision a prime minister ever has to take, whether to commit the United Kingdom to war or not.”
To cheers from his own backbenchers, he added: “She has utterly disqualified herself from ever becoming prime minister, thankfully she never will.”
Starmer told MPs that the UK’s armed forces were “working day and night to protect British lives and British interests in the Middle East”, adding that the RAF had flown more than 230 hours of defensive operations over multiple countries and shot down multiple drones. “We thank them for their courage and for their professionalism,” he said.
He accused Badenoch of insulting the UK’s RAF personnel by saying they were “just hanging about” during an interview with BBC Breakfast on Friday. Speaking in the Commons, Starmer said: “Let me tell you what they’ve been doing: flying sorties in seven of the 10 countries in the region, day and night, taking out incoming strikes, protecting the lives of others whilst risking their own. If she had any decency, she’d get up and she would apologise.”
Badenoch said she had never criticised the armed forces, but had criticised Starmer.
Speaking after PMQs, Badenoch’s spokesperson accused Starmer of seeking to “completely misrepresent our position”, arguing that the Conservative leader had never argued that the UK should join the war.
Badenoch had, he said, called for the UK to allow the US to use British bases for the initial attacks on Iran, and she now supported UK action in response to the targeting of British bases in Cyprus.
Asked if this was not the same as joining the war, he said: “We are at war. The difference is, we’re not joining the war. We’re in the war.”
Asked if Badenoch understood the goals of the war, the spokesperson said she did not receive the same intelligence briefings as ministers. Questioned as to how she could back a conflict without knowing its aims, he added: “We support our allies.”
On Tuesday, Farage said the UK should “not get ourselves involved in another foreign war”, in contrast to his previous assertion that the “gloves need to come off” when dealing with Iran. After the start of the war, the Reform leader said he was in favour of “regime change” in Iran and told a press conference in Westminster: “We should do all we can to support the operation.”
Badenoch used her questions in the Commons to repeatedly ask Starmer about petrol prices and why he thought “now is the right time to increase the cost of petrol?”
Starmer denied that the government was increasing the cost of petrol, saying fuel duty would remain frozen until September.
The Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, said families were seeing petrol prices increase, mortgage rates go up and fixed energy deals get more expensive “all because of a war they did not start and do not support”.
Turning his criticism to the Tories and Reform, he said: “The leader of the Conservatives has been competing with [Nigel Farage] to be Donald Trump’s biggest cheerleader, and the prime minister was right to reject their costly warmongering.”
Starmer said Davey was right, adding of Badenoch and Farage: “Last week, they were urging us to join. If they had been leading the country, we’d be at war.”
Davey called on Starmer to guarantee energy bills “won’t rise by hundreds of pounds” in July when the next quarterly price cap takes effect in July. Ministers are understood to be thinking about how they might protect consumers, but analysts have said that household energy bills could climb by £160 a year from this summer after the war in Iran pushed the UK’s gas market to a three-year high.
Starmer said he wanted to “reassure households” that the cap was in place until July. “We are working with the sector and with others and with allies to do everything we can to make sure those energy bills don’t rise,” he said. “We’re working around the clock on that. The most important thing, the most effective thing we can do, is to work with our allies to find a way to de-escalate the situation.”
