It was late into the night. The phone rang in the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem. Benjamin Netanyahu stretched out an arm to take the call.
“Yes.”
“Hi Bibi, it’s Ali.”
“Ali who?”
“Ayatollah Ali Khamenei … I just wondered whether you had heard the latest –Keir Starmerhas made an intervention.”
“Not THE Keir Starmer?”
“The very same. The prime minister of the United Kingdom. He has called on both of us to de-escalate hostilities. To look for a diplomatic solution. Not just that, but the British foreign secretary will be making a statement to the British parliament later on today to demand restraint. To bring the Middle East back from the edge.”
“Wow,” said Bibi. “That rather changes everything. When Keir speaks the world listens.”
Or maybe that’s not quite the way international diplomacy works in the Middle-East. Right now, it doesn’t appear that Israel or Iran are listening to anyone. Not even the US. Then again, it’s quite hard to follow what Donald Trump has to say about the conflict as he regularly contradicts himself.
Yet Starmer continues to call for de-escalation. Mainly to make himself feel better. We all know that the UK has no real influence, but Keir feels he has to say something and he can’t very well say he’s not that bothered. A prime minister has to be prime ministerial. A united front and all that.
Besides, if Israel and Iran do take a step back, he can always claim that his intervention was the one that made the difference. And maybe it might have been.
Still. One person to whom Netanyahu and Khamenei most definitely won’t be listening is Emma Reynolds, the economic secretary to the Treasury, who was sent out by the government on the morning media round.
Which is just as well for Emma and the UK because, fair to say, she took the word useless to dizzying new heights during her interview with Nick Ferrari onLBC. On this performance, you wouldn’t have trusted her to locate Israel or Iran on a map.
Emma’s solution to the conflict was to hope for the best. Which was the same approach she took to her own performance. Only it didn’t pay off. Ferrari appeared to confuse her by asking about the thing – strengthening 3,000 bridges – that she had been sent out to talk about. I guess she hadn’t seen that one coming. She began by talking about the Dartmouth Tunnel. Thereby locating the Thames somewhere on the south Devon coast.
Suspecting he might be dealing with a halfwit, Ferrari checked if she knew where the new crossing near Dartford might be. Emma hadn’t a clue. Nick filled her in: Gravesend and Tilbury.
OK, he said. Do you know how much this was going to cost? Still no clue. By now Emma was getting panicky – £3bn? Er, no, said Ferrari. It’s £10bn. It said so in her own department’s press release, which she hadn’t read. Let’s move on to Hammersmith Bridge. Let’s not, sobbed Emma. She didn’t know anything about that bridge either. Two down, 2,998 to go.
Over in the Commons, Yvette Cooper was giving a statement on the publication of Louise Casey’s report into grooming gangs. No one came out of it well. Not the Tories, not Labour, not the police, not the local authorities. The girls had been let down by everyone.
The home secretary at least tried to take some responsibility. Some. She laid out a clear trail of failure and neglect over the past 15 years. Abusers operating in plain sight. Seemingly given a free pass.
She made an apology on behalf of the British state to all the victims. What she couldn’t bring herself to do was to admit the government could have established a national statutory inquiry six months ago. Yet again, a minister failing to say sorry for something she could have done better. Instead she tried to claim that the new inquiry was just a seamless continuation of the last one.
Normally it would have been Chris Philp to reply for the opposition. Instead we gotKemi Badenoch. Whether the Philpster would have been any better is open to question, but he couldn’t have been any worse. Kemi’s response was one of the most shabby and ill-judged I can remember.
This was all about her, not the victims. Turning a national scandal into party politics. Claiming that everything had been just fine under the 14 years of the Tories and that the greatest injustice had been Labour’s failure to implement an inquiry sooner. Failing to acknowledge that she had been in a position to act as minister for children. Failing to pay attention to Casey’s comments that successive governments had failed to keep children safe for 15 years.
Failure even to say sorry on behalf of her party to the victims. She couldn’t even manage that. A grim afternoon in Westminster had just got a shade grimmer.