Name: Will Starmer help Trump in the war with Iran? | BBC Newscast
Uploaded: 2026-03-15T16:44:09.000Z
Duration: 28 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The comparative

So this morning we awake to more Iranian strikes across the Gulf.

We awake to more Israeli strikes on Iran and American strikes on Iran.

To-infinitive

And we awake also to President Trump's relatively late yesterday, well, the second half of yesterday, asking China, France, Japan, South Korea and the UK to send ships to the Straits of Hormuz in order to protect that vital waterway.

That's a bit like, you know, the sort of maritime motorway for the world where oil and gas and all sorts of goods make move through, currently clogged up because of the conflict, which is what has sent oil prices skyrocketing.

That's a contrast to last Saturday's posting.

Maybe the greatest of them all is finally giving serious thoughts.

Sending two aircraft carriers to the Middle East.

That's okay, Prime Minister, we don't need them any longer.

But we will remember, Henry, this is a reverse ferret from the leader of the free world.

Yeah, it certainly appears to be in the sense of whether he needs the UK's assistance or not.

Although let's be clear, they're different things that he's asking for now compared to when he was saying he didn't need a UK aircraft carrier's assistance.

But it does underscore the kind of whiplash that the UK government is feeling and so many allies of the United States are feeling in how to deal with President Trump.

That's not new, but it is in a new and perhaps more kind of high wire context than ever, which is this conflict with Iran, where it's not clear from public pronouncement to public pronouncement what exactly President Trump's endgame is and how soon or how long it might be until he declares it.

And it's something definitely picked up on by members of the public and newscasters like Pete.

Pete's got in touch to say hi to Trump, says he doesn't want help from those that join after he's won the war.

Today, he wants equipment sent to help him.

Well, you could imagine they probably feel that in Downing Street.

And they also, I imagine, raised their eyebrows at another one of Trump's pronouncements, not this time on social media, but in a phone interview with some of our broadcast colleagues in America, where he said, Iran wants a deal, but he's not ready to do a deal because the terms aren't good enough.

But, but he might carry on bombing Carg island, which our colleague Frank Gardner pronounced completely beautifully yesterday.

And I'm sure I've mangled it Then which is a vital oil hub in Iran, he might carry on bombing it and I quote, just for fun.

Now, that is not how Western leaders would traditionally conventionally talk about conflicts where lives are lost, lives are turned upside down and things are destroyed.

And I spoke to Admiral Lord west about this, who says that you have to send your battleships to the sound of gunfire.

He's saying, you know, none of us like war.

There are many listeners to our many newscasters who say it's another foreign war we're getting involved in, don't get involved.

But Lord west, who ran the navy as First Sea Lord, told me, if you don't join wars because you don't want to, you're going to end up joining them anyway.

You can't avoid wars sometimes, and trying to avoid them makes you more involved.

I think in this, for example, the case now where the Straits of Hormuz are closed, we should be looking at options to how could we join with the Americans if we want to keep these straits open over many months.

Henry, it's a dilemma for the government, isn't it, because they didn't get involved at first, which seems to be politically astute, say friends of Keir Starmer, the ones who left.

Yeah, I think Lord west gets to a conversation which is going on in government, which is, okay, the UK Took certain decisions in the run up to and in the immediate aftermath of this war being launched by the US And Israel.

But now the war has been launched, ought that to change the way in which the UK approaches it?

And actually you already saw very quickly, a couple of weekends ago, the UK switch its position to allow the US to carry out strikes from British bases.

But there are questions for sure going on in government, ricocheting around government about whether the UK Ought now to do more.

But I do think in general, the feeling I pick up from high levels of government, and I'm interested in what you guys are hearing, is that they feel vindicated.

They feel like Keir Starmer has made the right calls, especially in the run up to the war when he got the request from President Trump to help.

But in general throughout, they think that he adapted the position at the right time.

And there are people in government who are not generally over disposed to be flattering about Keir Starmer's performance, who are genuinely impressed and think that aside from the statecraft questions, as you mentioned, Paddy, he has managed an important feat politically, which hasn't generally been a hallmark of his government, which is that he appears to be on the right side of public opinion as well.

And I think they also in government think that their opponents have messed up their initial approaches to the war.

And Labour insiders would point to how they claim the Conservatives have sort of softened their approach.

It appeared that they were very gung ho at the beginning and they sort of walked back from that a little bit in the last fortnight.

They make the same accusation at Nigel Farage's door.

They then point to the Greens on the other side and sort of say, well, their position is ludicrous because you can't just imagine that.

You can just have diplomacy and it'll all go away.

And you can sort of just say, all wars are terrible.

The Liberal Democrats, of course, they make the same kind of claim that, well, it's not really serious to be in this kind of position when there is a conflict in the war.

It is a bit against kind of expectations that you have right now.

You have people in the Labour Party going, actually, maybe we've played this quite well, which is unusual.

And I do think, and this is a tangent to the conversation we're having today, but I do think that from a month ago, when it was very, very hard to find anyone in the Labour Party who would say Keir Starmer would be definitely leading them into the next general election, the war for this time has shifted that and people instead will say to you, oh, my God.

Well, we couldn't possibly think about changing a leader now because it would look insane when there are bombs falling from the sky.

Now, that might shift, but the real politic of having a conflict in the Middle east has changed the calculus inside the Labour Party about what to do about their very unpopular with the public leader.

I thought the malaise had set in on that question, but you're telling me it's kinetic.

Well, I think the malaise is still there, right.

People aren't saying, oh, Keir Starmer's a hero and now we all like him.

But that question of timing and that question of what to do has become an awful lot less tempting for people who were thinking, planning, wondering about whether or not they would have a change of leader after the May elections.

I wonder, Henry, if you agree with that, because I don't want to overstate this.

It doesn't mean that they now suddenly think Keir Starmer is marvellous and all will be well.

I know you weren't saying that, but the picture has definitely changed in the conversations I've had this week.

And worth remembering in the vivid phrase of Ed Miliband, who, of course, has been giving an interview again this morning.

A month or so ago, the Labour Party looked over the precipice and decided not to change leader.

Now, they looked over the precipice then, and Labour MPs decided that the various candidates weren't quite right at that moment.

Now, the question is not just whether those same candidates are quite right a month or so on, it's also, can you see them navigating this moment of geopolitics?

And almost by definition, any candidate to replace Keir Starmer as prime minister hasn't done the diplomacy of dealing with Donald Trump and other world leaders because they haven't been prime minister.

So I do, I mean, I don't think it necessarily changes the serious doubts, to say the least, about whether Keir Starmer will lead the Labour Party in the next general election.

But assuming this war lasts for at least a little while longer, I think it certainly does change the dynamic around May.

And given that was the moment of massive jeopardy looming for Keir Starmer, I think that's very significant.

And let me add as a postscript, Lord west, who was, as Alan west appointed, a minister under Gordon Brown's administration, does also say Keir Starmer got the first stage of this war.

So earlier I was bringing you his views and Henry's reminded us there's another newsmaking interview which we must now digest, which is one Ed Miliband on the sofa of one Laura Kuenssberg.

So Ed Miliband was with us this morning, very timely because he's the Energy Secretary.

This conflict is, of course, about Iran, the Iranian regime and the balance of power in the Middle east, and Donald Trump.

But it is also about oil and energy and how that affects every single one of us.

And so it was very timely that we had the energy secretary on.

He made pretty clear, I think, two important things, that if the energy price continues to spike in the way it has for some months, that mean that there might be a big increase in energy bills in the months to come, that the government would step in in some way.

He didn't want to be drawn on the details, but that's a live conversation in government.

We know they talked to the big Six this week about what they might do.

The suggestions are that support would probably not Be universal as it was.

As you always remind us, Liz Truss paid everybody's energy bills with taxpayers money.

The other thing I think was very clear from talking to him is that if oil prices stay as high as they are at the moment, that the government will not put up fuel duty as they plan to do in September.

Those things are both predicated on a big if.

If the war continues and the oil price stays as high as it is.

I was interested in two parts of his interview particularly.

He did suggest that the UK government might consider sending some ships to that, to the Gulf and potentially to the Straits of Hormuz.

And I was slightly surprised by how open to that he sounded.

And second of all, though, when we asked him about whether the UK government thought it was clear what the Americans were trying to do, I thought he was distinctly hesitant, shall we say, to suggest that Donald Trump had a clear plan.

You've said plainly, as the Prime Minister did to the country in the House of Commons, that the aims of the war weren't clear to him at the beginning.

Are they clear to you now as a government?

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Will Starmer help Trump in the war with Iran? | BBC Newscast

sort

phrase

tough

period