Every mutli-billion commitment of financial and military assistance to Ukraine is another nail in Ukraine’s coffin.

At the Ankara Summit, NATO leaders should get behind peace in Ukraine, recognising that when the war ends, Ukraine will emerge much weaker than before the war started.

NATO leaders need to own their own failure, and yet I fear they won’t.

Rather, they will continue with more of the same, rendering Ukraine’s death even more painful.

There is a saying that wars are won by economies not armies.

According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Ukraine has received up to $470 billion in combined aid and lending since the war started.

In 2021, Ukraine’s gross domestic product, the total economic output produced in the country during that one year, was $200 billion.

So, over the course of four and a half years of war, Ukraine has received aid greater than twice the value of its GDP before the war started, and yet Ukraine’s GDP in 2025 was measured by the World Bank at $213 billion, a rise of just 6.5% since the war started.

The money provided by the west has largely been wasted.

The reason it has been wasted, is that had the war finished in April 2022 after the agreement of a framework peace deal in Istanbul, the vast majority of this money would not have been spent. If the war had ended, and just a proportion of that western funding been spent on developing Ukraine’s economy, the country would be in a far stronger position today.

$470 billion literally amounts to killing Ukraine with fake kindness.

Let’s take a moment to consider that.

Most of that money has been tipped into the coffers of Ukraine’s government and military rather than into the real economy.

Ukraine’s government spending in 2021 was $67.6 billion.

Ukraine’s government spending in 2025 was $134 billion, twice as high as in 2021.

Government spending is a major component of how GDP is calculated. It now accounts for 63% of GDP compared to just 33.8% in 2021.

What that means is that the rest of Ukraine’s economy has fallen into disrepair.

Where Ukraine imported $3.9 billion more than it exported in 2021 that figure rose to a whopping $34.2 billion in 2025. It is exporting less and importing more than before the war started.

Russia has so far pulled in a combined current account surplus of approximately $400 billion, by the way, twice the size of Ukraine’s pre-war GDP.

Ukraine’s industrial production is at 74% of its prewar level, in particular in heavy industry, especially basic chemicals (42.8% of pre-war levels), metals (44.5%), mining (39.1%) and refined products (21.8%). And it simply won’t get some of this back, as certain facilities and mines have fallen under Russian control in the Donbas.

Russia’s industrial production has continued to grow, and it 48-53% higher than in 2021 before the war started.

Ukraine invested $10bn less into its economy in 2025 compared to 2021, a drop of 38%.

Investment in Russia’s economy has grown from 23% to over 26% of GDP.

Ukraine’s economy has been hollowed out by war

Ukraine’s debt as a percentage of GDP has surged from 49% in 2021 to an estimated 110% this year.

Russia’s debt to GDP remains below 20%, a slight rise since the war started when it was 14% of GDP.

And the kicker is this, the vast amount of government spending is propped up by loans and donations from western nations which has consistently accounted for around half of all government spending.

And the problems extend beyond the economic.

The population inside of Ukraine has fallen by 25-30%, largely down to mass emigration, together with battlefield losses.

Russia’s population by contrast has seen a modest decline of 0.3-0.5% and is now almost five times larger than Ukraine’s population.

Ukraine’s birthrate has fallen by 38% - 105,000 fewer babies arrived in 2025 compared to 2021. The average birthrate per woman has now fallen to below 1.

Russia produced 1 million more babies in 2025 and it’s fertility rate, while low (1.378) is still significantly higher than in Ukraine.

I person in 3 inside of Ukraine today is a pensioner. For every employed worker there is one pensioner. In the UK, as a comparison, there are 2.6 workers per pensioner and in Russia 1.7-1.8.

When the war ends, there will be huge pressure in western nations to reduce their financial commitments.

That could see a brutal write down in the size of Ukraine’s GDP. If the Ukraine government reduced its spending to pre-war level, that would amount to a sudden drop of 30% in GDP.

Of course, that scale of drop won’t happen, as it will take some time to demobilise its army.

Ukraine will simply not be able to afford to pay for a military of 1 million personnel without further loans from the west. So will have to drive down military costs over time.

They will find that they have a disgruntled veteran class, resentful that a military success was offered by not delivered at a cost of 2.4 million killed and injured so far.

But, for the first time, Ukraine will have its economic fortunes in its hands.

If it chose to, it could do a massive debt restructuring and reopen itself to borrowing on the international markets, having been cut off of international borrowing since the war began.

It would almost certainly see a flood of foreign investment from western nations to rebuild its shattered cities and infrastructure.

It could start the process of weaning itself off of imports and reboot its exports, recognising that it has lost some of its valuable coal exports from the loss of territory.

However, it’s far from guaranteed that Ukraine would return to its prewar population, possibly ever, nor repair its catastrophic demographic crisis, as birthrates were already very low before the war started, at just 1.22 babies per woman.

So, the economic future for Ukraine looks bleak. It will have taken a permanent deadweight loss to its economic potential whenever the war ends.

An economy that is significantly smaller when the war ends compared to before it started. A population that is smaller and not reproducing itself.

However, what should be blindingly obvious is that the economic numbers will continue to get much worse for Ukraine for as long as the war continues.

Ukraine’s deficit of exports over imports will grow.

Industrial production will remain depressed and possibly fall further if Russia paints out Donetsk

Investment in Ukraine’s real economy will continue to slide

Ukraine’s massive debt burden will pile up further.

It is impossible to imagine that Ukraine will have cleaned up its grotesque levels of corruption if the war continues and billions of foreign money continues to pour in. That’s not to say that Russia doesn’t have a corruption problem too, of course. But the difference is, we are sending the billions to Ukraine for Zelensky’s cronies to pilfer.

Ukraine’s population will continue to decline

It will produce fewer babies and move to having more pensioners than workers.

There is no way to reverse any of these trends for as long as the war continues.

The $470 billion that western nations have tipped into Ukraine has been wasted.

And all for what?

What are the factors driving on NATO to keep Ukraine fighting?

The first, is the mistaken view that NATO can use a much smaller economically more fragile country like Ukraine as a battering ram to shatter Russia and inflict a strategic defeat that would topple the Putin government.

All of this is cloaked under the excuse that Ukraine should have the right to choose which military bloc is joins. However, in 2014 before the Ukraine crisis started, a majority of Ukrainians did not support joining NATO, as opposed to the EU, where attitudes were finely balanced in 2013 prior to the Vilnius Eastern Partnership Summit.

For those Ukrainians that did want to join the EU, their choice was soon labelled as a Euro-Atlantic, rather than a European choice after the unconstitutional removal of Viktor Yanukovych as President in February 2014.

The Ukraine crisis has always been about NATO membership.

Whenever efforts were made to broker peace, most notably after the Minsk II Agreement in February 2015 or the Istanbul talks in April 22 after the war started, those efforts were derailed by the Americans, with the help of the British.

And, as it turns out, even though the Europeans have become the major funders of the war in Ukraine since Trump came to power, it is now completely obvious that Ukrainian membership of the EU is further away than it has ever been, not least because of the boorish antics of Zelensky on the world stage, typified by his turning Poland into an irritant after his glorification of World War II Nazi collaborators. Zelensky has variously generated bad blood with other EU nations that he will rely on to obtain EU membership for his country, driven by his towering sense of entitlement and lack of self-awareness.

While I’ve always supported the theory of EU membership for Ukraine, the practice has become more complicated by the continuation of war. Important reforms in Ukraine have not been undertaken or have been held back.

So, the very point of the Maidan movement - if there was ever a point before it was hijacked by Ukrainian ultra-nationalists - has been betrayed by12 years of conflict and now war which has revealed that the true purpose of western sponsors has been to incorporate Ukraine into a military bloc, that not just Putin, but several esteemed western diplomats like Kennan and Matlock, has been saying for at least twenty years was a red line for Russia.

And yet, here was are, on the verge of another NATO summit in which cardboard cutouts like Mark Rutte will continue to insist that Ukraine is part of the NATO family. Further commitments will be made to funnel even more billions in aid into Ukraine to help Zelensky inflict a strategic defeat on Russia that will never happen.

NATO leaders won’t take the cue to end the war. There are just too many vested interests in the west to allow that to happen.

That Zelensky is attending the summit won’t help. He will persuade western leaders - who seem completely unable to say no to him - that they need to let him strike further and further into Russia to inflict pain on Russia’s economy.

And yet, every Ukrainian strike will self-evidently yield another massive retaliation from Russia that heaps suffering on ordinary Ukrainian people.

It won’t change the massive economic and demographic advantages that Russia has over Ukraine and will always have.

It will just prolong the war.

Western mainstream media and politicians are bitterly opposed to ending the war too.

They will trot out the usual tropes.

Russia’s economy is about to implode – it isn’t and I’ve been hearing this for 12 years including while I was in Moscow. Look at the numbers. Ukraine’s economy is in real trouble.

Russian people are turning against Putin because of gasoline shortages in some cities including Moscow. Yes, Russian people are tired of war and Putin has seen a reduction in his popularity, though at 67% it is far higher than anything western leaders enjoy. There is no evidence that Russian people are going to take to the streets to topple Putin. Indeed, Ukraine’s people have suffered far more from the destruction of energy and heating infrastructure during bitter winters. The inconvenience suffered by ordinary Russians is very small in comparison, although that doesn’t mean it isn’t impacting Russia’s domestic politics. The point is, it will never be enough to shift the dial, compared to the significantly greater cost Russia can impose on Ukraine.

Russia is finding it harder to recruit troops to the frontline. This is the worst misinformation of all. Yes, Russia has taken heavy casualties in the war although all the evidence points to Ukraine taking far higher casualties from a smaller population. Body swaps numbers are not a perfect comparator, but on every occasion Ukraine receives at least ten times more bodies than it returns to Russia. And, in any case, every body - Ukrainian or Russian - is a person whose life has been snuffed out by this pointless war.

Russia has avoided a general mobilisation whereas every day there are videos emerging of violent forced mobilisation – busification – of Ukrainian men to be sent to the meat grinder.

Zelensky is the leader of the free world. Utter claptrap. He is a corrupt dictator who absolutely refuses to listen to any advice and will carry on regardless, whatever injury he causes his own country, so long as the west keeps sending him money. Politicians are human and he is no different, I am sad to say. He will not be President of Ukraine after the war ends if fair elections are held. Everyone can see this except the western press. Zelensky biggest challenge when the war ends will be to stay alive, let along to stay inside of Ukraine.

Putin is going to die at any minute. Come on, I’ve been hearing this for twelve years.

Any attempt to get behind a peace settlement will be turned upon by the blob who cry that we are selling out Ukraine and are giving a gift to Putin.

But I am sick and tired of hearing this bullshit. The biggest gift to Putin is to keep the war going on and watch Europe disintegrate politically and economically.

But the only way to secure peace with Russia is through force. Utter nonsense.

Sure, Putin would probably prefer peace now. And, it has always been my impression, that Russia wants to have normal relations with Europe and, in fact, with Ukraine.

But he will not do that under the threat of NATO expansion and has been saying this for over two decades.

So, if NATO leaders want to keep helping Zelensky fight to the last Ukrainian it will be a disgraceful betrayal of the Ukrainian people and of the people of Europe who face a growing threat of general war and all the misery that would ensure, which ordinary Ukrainian people have suffered for four and a half years already.

Zelensky is killing his own country. NATO is helping him do it. We are led by idiots in the west. It’s time to end this nonsense now.

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Despite the apparent uplift in spending toward 2.7% of GDP by 2029, the UK will get no meaningful increase in front-line conventional capability or personnel.

Our armed forces are at their smallest size in two hundred years, and that situation is not going to change under this plan.

Spending on long-term nuclear capabilities — programmes that will not deliver anything usable until the 2030s and 2040s — is absorbing the great majority of the headline increase.

This comes at a time when the government claims Russia could be ready to use military force against NATO by the end of this decade.

At the heart of the problem is a foreign policy that wants to confront multiple adversaries while maintaining armed forces that simply do not have the mass or readiness to do so credibly.

Important to point out that I am the son of a former British soldier and I am incredibly proud of the armed forces and anyone who serves this country. I also served alongside the British Army in Helmand province in 2010 and worked with some truly remarkable people. I am not criticising the men and women who put on the uniform. I am criticising how badly led we are as a country.

Keir Starmer announced the UK’s long-awaited Defence Investment Plan yesterday, 30 June. To describe it as a damp squib would be generous. It is a document that confirms the continued stagnation of the UK armed forces and the deep sclerosis at the heart of defence procurement.

Do not believe the headlines and the spin.

This plan will not transform our hollowed-out forces.

The British Army is already at its smallest size since 1823. That will not change.

There are no new soldiers being recruited in any significant numbers. Money available for the day-to-day operation of the armed forces is not going up — in real terms it is under severe pressure.

Having crunched the numbers, it’s clear to me that yearly spending on the actual running of the armed forces has effectively declined by up to £11 billion per year under this plan, set against the government’s claim of a £15 billion per year increase by 2027.

The defence budget is split between Resource costs (RDEL) — the day-to-day running of the military, paying salaries, training, and maintaining what we already have — and Capital costs (CDEL), which cover the design and building of new equipment and facilities.

The UK armed forces’ day-to-day costs come out of the Resource budget. I have looked in detail at the Ministry of Defence’s budget allocations over the past five years. The numbers I cite come from official government sources.

In 2021/22, just before the war in Ukraine, the Resource Departmental Expenditure Limit for the Ministry of Defence was £42 billion. The figure indicated in the new Defence Investment Plan for this year is £41.7 billion i.e. slightly lower.

The Defence Investment Plan gives the military less in day-to-day funding this year than it had five years ago, before the war in Ukraine even started.

So why do I say we are effectively £11 billion worse off?

Because we are getting a lot less for the same — or slightly smaller — amount of money.

First, pay. I am strongly in favour of paying our service personnel properly, of course. They have received above-inflation pay rises for the past three years. In 2021/22 the armed forces pay bill was £12.3 billion. That figure now stands at £16 billion — an extra £3.7 billion per year. That money has to come from somewhere within a broadly flat Resource picture.

Second, support for Ukraine. The Ministry of Defence is now providing around £3 billion per year in military assistance to Ukraine – ‘for as long as it takes’ - and that cost has been baselined into the MoD budget. In 2025 the figure was higher — £4.5 billion — because of the UK’s contribution to the G7 Extraordinary Revenue Acceleration loan arrangement. At the start of the war these costs were covered by the Treasury Reserve. They have now been moved into the core MoD budget, so savings have to be found elsewhere to pay for them on an ongoing basis.

Third, munitions. The Defence Investment Plan allocates £11.1 billion over the next four years to rebuild stockpiles that have been run down by transfers to Ukraine. That is roughly £2.75 billion per year on average. We have given away Storm Shadow missiles, anti-tank weapons, artillery shells and other ammunition, and now need to replace them for our own defence.

Add those three pressures together — pay, Ukraine support, and munitions replenishment — and you have an extra annual burden of £9.5-£11 billion per year.

Yet the Resource budget today is no bigger than it was in 2021. The net effect is a very substantial squeeze on the money available to actually run and sustain the conventional armed forces.

When you read the opening section of the Investment Plan, it talks about President Putin’s aggression growing around our shores, in the High North, across Europe and in Ukraine. It says NATO is warning that Russia could be ready to use military force against the Alliance by the end of this decade. It mentions the UK’s commitment to deploy forces to Ukraine after any ceasefire and new missions in the Arctic and the Strait of Hormuz. It claims we need “a new era for Defence investment”.

We are apparently stepping up to meet these rising threats by spending less, in real terms, on the day-to-day running of our conventional forces.

Let’s look at the actual size of the UK armed forces. Since 2012 — two years before the crisis in Ukraine began — regular armed forces numbers have fallen by more than 42,500.

The Army has lost around 30,000 personnel, from 104,300 down to roughly 74,000 today.

The Royal Air Force has gone from 40,000 to 30,800.

The Royal Navy has gone from 35,500 to 32,400.

The only small increases have been in the Gurkhas and a modest rise in reserves.

In 2017 the Ministry of Defence published historical personnel figures going back to 1700. Those records show the British Army has not been this small since 1823 and the Royal Navy has not been this small since 1835.

For the avoidance of all doubt, the MoD didn’t publish Army statistics for 1861 through 1899, but as the Army strength was 236,000 in 1860 and 302,000 in 1900, I’m going to take a punt that numbers didn’t decline during the various wars we fought against the Sudanese, Indians, Boers, Abyssinians and even the Maori of New Zealand, to name but a few.

We are maintaining global ambitions and new commitments with forces smaller than at any time in the last two hundred years.

Yet, the same plan talks about sending troops to Ukraine after a ceasefire and confronting Russia in the High North and Arctic.

We simply do not have the numbers to do these things while also maintaining credible conventional forces for the defence of the United Kingdom itself.

The outgoing UK Prime Minister has declared a big increase in defence spending, yet we are getting no new troops and very little new conventional capability in the near term.

Why?

Because the great majority of the additional money is being directed into nuclear programmes and a procurement system that has repeatedly failed to deliver on time or on budget.

The most telling line in the Defence Investment Plan states that the government is investing over £20 billion more in the Defence Nuclear Enterprise over the next four years than in the previous four years.

That is a very large sum going into programmes that will not produce usable capability for many years.

The Ministry of Defence’s equipment acquisition system has been described by the Public Accounts Committee as broken. It repeatedly wastes taxpayers’ money and fails to learn from its mistakes.

The department stopped publishing its Equipment Plan after 2023 once it became clear the costs were spiralling out of control. The last published plan showed forecast costs exceeding the budget by £16.9 billion.

There are well-known examples of waste and grift.

The Ajax armoured vehicle programme has been over budget and late, with serious vibration problems.

The Type 45 destroyers have spent more time in dry dock being repaired than at sea.

As I write, I understand that all of the Astute-class submarines are operationally unavailable.

The replacement programme for the Red Arrows’ Hawk jets ran into serious difficulties because it was being led by a paper company that was a mash up of some ex MoD staffers, people from EADS and a chancer with no real capital nor production facilities. The Red Arrows now fly with seven aircraft… (Pausing to take a breath, before I swear…)

But the largest cost increases and overruns have been in the nuclear and naval programmes.

As the National Audit Office reported in 2023, the combined costs of nuclear and naval programmes rose by £54.6 billion between 2022 and 2023, with the nuclear element increasing by £38.2 billion.

The three biggest programmes are the SSN-AUKUS attack submarines, the Dreadnought ballistic missile submarines, and the new Astraea nuclear warhead.

The first UK-built AUKUS submarines are not expected until the late 2030s.

Dreadnought boats are now expected in the early to mid-2030s.

The Astraea warhead remains in its early concept phase and will not be available until the late 2030s at the earliest.

The Defence Investment Plan is primarily a vehicle for committing vast additional sums to these long-term nuclear programmes.

It offers very little that is new for conventional forces in the near term, beyond some additional investment in drones and the replenishment of munitions stocks.

We already have ballistic missile submarines maintaining Continuous At-Sea Deterrence.

We already have attack submarines, even if they cost too much, took too long to build, and don’t work.

We already have nuclear warheads. Do we really need a slightly flashier design folks? Serious question.

The plan is being presented as a response to current and near-term threats, while a war continues in Ukraine and with political leaders abandoning diplomacy.

The problem is not that Britain is spending too little overall.

The problem is that the money is being allocated in a way that does little to improve our conventional readiness or mass in the timeframe that actually matters, while a dysfunctional procurement system continues to absorb vast sums with poor results.

I have a clear alternative. We should cancel or significantly scale back the highest-risk and longest-lead nuclear programmes — particularly the new Astraea warhead and major elements of the SSN-AUKUS programme.

The savings should be redirected into fixing and sustaining the equipment we already possess, improving the availability of existing platforms, and beginning the serious work of rebuilding conventional force numbers and readiness for the core task of defending the United Kingdom and its immediate interests.

Britain does not need armed forces configured to take on every potential adversary at once. It needs forces that are properly equipped, properly manned, and capable of credible deterrence and defence closer to home.

It also doesn’t need yes men. Another proposal would be to sack the Chief of the Defence Staff who gleefully kissed the Chancellor Rachel Reeves on the cheek (facial cheek) as she stepped onto the pedestal to talk up our government’s magnificent achievements.

In a way, I almost needed the Democratic Republic of Congo to beat England tonight (glad they didn’t – but well played to them) as that somehow would have been less embarrassing.

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The trap every British leader seems to fall into right now, is to try to position themselves as a global statesman at to pursue frankly idiotic foreign policy that the country can’t afford and that ordinary people don’t want, at a time when our military couldn’t fight its way out of a paper bag and our diplomats have gone into hiding.

Britain is no longer a great power, and British people increasingly feel left behind. Funding a proxy war in Ukraine that cannot be won is just one of many reasons why voters quickly realised that Starmer was an idiot and that his predecessors were too.

If people want to end the constant churn of British Prime Ministers, they might think long and hard about focussing on domestic problems first, and advancing diplomacy, while putting globalist foreign policy in the garbage where it belongs.

Andy Burnham will have a very short honeymoon period if he carries on where Starmer, Truss and others left off.

Sir Keir Starmer bowed to the inevitable Monday and resigned from leadership of the Labour Party and, therefore, from his role as prime minister.

The resignation had been brewing for some time. While Starmer led the Labour Party to an astounding landslide election victory in July 2024, by September 2025, he was already being labeled the most unpopular prime minister since polling began; this followed a series of U-turns and poorly handled crises. After heavy losses of council seats in local elections in May, the Labour Party moved quickly to remove him.

Former Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham is expected to become prime minister after an internal Labour Party leadership contest. (Labour maintains a majority in parliament, so it maintains the right to form a government.) Burnham will quickly find that he doesn’t have the money to fix public services, double defense spending, and continue to fund an unwinnable war in Ukraine. He also faces an almighty struggle to convince his party that aligning with the Trump administration on peace in Europe is the right approach, both politically and fiscally.

Up until June 17, Burnham wasn’t a member of parliament. But after a sitting MP gave up their seat, he won the ensuing bi-election by a landslide. A cabinet minister under Tony Blair, he is by far the most popular Labour politician and the person viewed as most able to take on the surging right-wing Reform party. Having been out of frontline British politics for nine years in Manchester, Burnham has built up a reputation as someone who gets things done and is relatable, qualities Starmer appeared to lack.

To outfox Reform, Burnham will have to reinstall public confidence that the government is improving the lives of ordinary Britons in the face of an ongoing immigration surge, a cost of living crisis and a knife crime epidemic, typified by the at times violent street protests that followed the killing of Henry Nowak.

His biggest challenge? Finding the money to deliver real change with anemic growth and the national debt at 94% of GDP.

An obvious place to look would be the blank check approach Britain – under both Conservative and Labour governments – has taken to supporting the proxy war in Ukraine, which has so far cost $29 billion (£21.8 billion).

That might not sound like a huge proportion of government spending. But Starmer’s government faced stiff resistance and had to back away from making a much smaller cut of £5 billion to welfare spending. When your budget is so tight that you have to look at cutting winter fuel payments to the elderly, then it becomes harder to justify funneling billions towards a distant war.

Aligning with the Trump administration to press for a peace settlement would be the rational and realist thing to do. But there’s a catch. The Labour Party and Burnham himself dislike Donald Trump. In 2025, for example, the putative prime minister accused Trump of “bringing instability to the world.”

Starmer had a troubled relationship with Trump throughout his mandate. The night before Starmer’s resignation, Trump had posted on Truth Social that Starmer was leaving after “failing badly on immigration and energy.” That was hopefully the last on a long list of snipes by the U.S. President. But Burnham will struggle to change the script in an anti-Trump Labour Party. Starmer’s cabinet was littered with ministers who had criticized Trump over the years, including one who called him an “odious, sad, little man.”

Further complicating relations was Starmer’s appointment of Lord Peter Mandelson as Britain’s Ambassador to Washington, which proved to be a catastrophic mistake after further revelations about the depths of his association with Jeffrey Epstein came to light.

To his credit, Starmer invested some effort into papering over the cracks. The visit of His Majesty the King to Washington in May offered a rare bright spot, focusing on the strong ties that bind the United States and the United Kingdom.

However, the flip-flopping of U.K. support for the U.S. war against Iran cast a shadow across the relationship. And it was on Ukraine policy where Starmer was most at odds with the U.S. President.

While Trump was and is able to surface some uncomfortable truths about the state of Ukraine — i.e. that it cannot win a war against Russia — Starmer remained a true believer in eventual victory.

Where Trump has met President Vladimir Putin in Alaska and spoken to him several times, Keir Starmer didn’t speak to the Russian President once during his two years in office.

Where Trump tried to orchestrate the skeleton of a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, Starmer rejected its key aspect, on the complex issue of territorial concessions, out of hand.

The list is long and not distinguished. Starmer made himself one of the biggest obstacles to Trump’s aspirations to bring the war in Ukraine to a close, aligning himself with the Europeans who hold to the same view.

And yet Burnham will quickly find that something’s got to give. He can’t fix decrepit public services in Britain, double defense spending, and continue to support an unwinnable war in Ukraine. The math will never add up.

He should be aware that Reform Party leader Nigel Farage is close to Trump and spends most of his time talking about domestic policy challenges, which is clearly resonating with ordinary voters.

For much of my diplomatic career, my European counterparts regularly sniped about the depth of the United Kingdom’s relationship with the United States, and how this eroded European solidarity. Yet, right now, the British and the American position on the Ukraine war could not be further apart.

With Britain having left the European Union, Burnham will arrive in power with a brief window of opportunity to realign with America in the interests of European peace. The tides of British domestic politics suggest that this may help him to rebuild Labour popularity against an onrushing Farage while also delivering much needed savings. I doubt, however, that the Labour party will like this idea at all. Burnham’s honeymoon period may prove to be as truncated as his rise to power.

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Andy, assuming that you become British Prime Minister, I have a message for you.

Unless you reengage Britain in diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine, you will not be able to deliver real change at home that British people are crying out for.

Because the war in Ukraine is pulling Britain towards spending money that ordinary hard pressed Britons believe should be spent on sorting out our country.

The war in Ukraine is making Britons poorer and less safe.

You won’t have the fiscal headroom to deliver real change in Britain, double defence spending and continue to funnel billions of pounds worth of financial and military assistance to Ukraine every year.

You will have to make difficult choices based on the realities of the situation the UK finds itself in.

Sir Keir Starmer spent too much time trying to position himself as a global statesman while ignoring the problems facing ordinary people in Britain.

While distancing himself from Trump’s war against Iran, Starmer refused to countenance any plan to end a war in Ukraine which has killed or injured over one million people so far.

That was a serious failure.

Like other European leaders, he refused to engage in diplomacy with Russia while also refusing to prosecute a general war with Russia.

He proved himself weak, while trying to act tough.

You can immediately make a difference as a British leader who wants to end wars not prolong them.

Caught between wanting neither war nor peace, Ukraine is being progressively shattered, depopulated and turned into an economically failed state on the borders of Europe.

The UK is not helping Ukraine.

Britain is standing by as Ukraine is gradually destroyed.

Yes, we all understand that Russia launched this war, but Keir Starmer, and his Conservative predecessors, bear some responsibility for not seeking its end.

Putting our heads in the sand and muttering that it’s all Russia’s fault will no longer do.

We will never agree on whether NATO expansion so antagonised Russia that Putin decided to roll the dice in a dangerous way.

What is absolutely clear, is that Ukraine, a proud vibrant country with a prewar population of 41 million, has seen that number drop dramatically through war deaths, mass emigration and demographic collapse.

The UK has no vision for helping Ukraine to regain its sovereignty, to repair the vast damage of war, amounting to hundreds of billions of pounds, to repopulate in the teeth of a demographic cliff edge, or to kick start its economy.

The UK has no strategy, only soundbites that we are right and Russia is wrong.

Tell that to the ordinary Ukrainians freezing in winter time and suffering bombardment because of a refusal to pursue peace by western leaders.

And, indeed, the EU has no strategy.

Our approach, which does not amount to a strategy, is to continue acting as we have for the past twelve years, ramping up the rhetoric and economic pressure against Russia in the hope that somehow the situation will turn in our favour.

The situation won’t turn in our favour.

For too long, UK foreign policy towards Russia and Ukraine has been driven by wishful thinking.

This should not come as a surprise. Given the complete failure of British military strategy in both Iraq and in Afghanistan during this century, you should not be surprised that His Majesty’s Government has no clear aims for Ukraine, or the means to deliver upon them.

It is incredible that after the United States has failed to deliver any of its objectives after a short and ill-thought-through war direct against Iran, that Britain and Europe can deliver its objectives after four years of proxy war in Ukraine.

Our aim for Ukraine should be obvious: to restore peace to Ukraine, to allow it to rebuild, repopulate and prosper in the future, and to do so in which Europe, Ukraine and Russia can live in peaceful coexistence without the threat of future war.

Ongoing war in Ukraine only delays the start of that process and makes the challenge harder with each passing day.

And yet, since 2014, Britain has been both unwilling to entertain the idea of peace in Ukraine, and unable to fight a war against Russia. Britain has fallen into the rhythm of speaking about Russia with a loud voice, while holding a small stick on the world stage.

You need to shatter this inertia, if you are to create the bandwidth to focus on pressing policy priorities at home.

That may be your toughest challenge.

Because practically everyone in Whitehall will try to convince you that we are winning against Russia, when we are not.

When you get your foreign policy briefings, a succession of senior officials may confidently tell you that our policy towards Russia is working.

Prime Minister, with more military aid, Ukraine can turn the tide against Russia. Prime Minister, we are giving multi-million pound contracts to small British businesses to help Ukraine develop new weapons. Prime Minister, with a few more economic sanctions, Russia’s economy will be brought to its knees. Prime Minister, Russian people will soon turn on Putin and a revolution will happen.

I am sad to say that I have been hearing slogans like this for fourteen years and they have never been credible. Yet the British mainstream media still churns them out on a daily basis.

No doubt academics from places like King’s College London, and experts from Chatham House and RUSI will be wheeled out to reassure you that this is correct. Don’t take them seriously.

Starmer is no worse than the Prime Ministers who preceded him. Sadly, he proved no better.

Starmer arrived as Prime Minister with a more-of-the-same approach to foreign policy and failed.

The Whitehall machine will see in you the seventh Prime Minister in ten years arrive and hope that you’ll do the same.

If you really want to help Ukraine, then I’d encourage you to pause for thought.

How credible is it, really, that Britain’s domestic policy is in such desperate need of repair, and yet Britain is punching above its weight on the world stage?

We have remarkably arrived at a situation in which we simply assume that Britain is doing a brilliant job. And yet we are not.

If you can help end the war in Ukraine you will have far more bandwidth to focus on tackling the enormous list of challenges our country faces.

The Whitehall system will tell you we have to keep supporting Ukraine for as long as it takes. And yet it is blindingly obvious that Ukraine cannot win a war against Russia and Britain is not militarily in a position to join the fight against Russia.

UK policy has progressively worsened Ukraine’s future, not improved it. Successive Prime Ministers have pursued a policy towards Russia and Ukraine that is driven by emotion and not reason.

In fact, Britain’s current Ambassador to Kyiv is the architect of this policy.

I am afraid that in our determination to make Russia pay for its aggressive acts we have completely lost sight of how bad the situation is for Ukraine, which will only get worse over time.

Every day, young Ukrainian men are dragged off the streets, forced into minibuses, and taken to the army against their will. I would invite you to watch some of the so-called busification videos which circulate on social media every day, but which the UK mainstream media doesn’t report.

Russia does not face challenges of the same severity. With a population three and a half times larger, it has avoided a general mobilisation.

Despite what the mainstream media will tell you, Ukraine has probably lost more soldiers killed or injured than Russia. Every time that there is a desperate swap of bodies of the fallen, Russia returns at least ten times more Ukrainian bodies than those of its own that it receives.

That is partly down to the fact that Russia has very slowly been advancing throughout the war. But Ukraine isn’t turning the tide and cannot turn the tide.

The Donetsk city of Kostiantynivka is now almost completely over-run, leaving only Sloviansk and Kramatorsk in Ukraine’s fortress belt.

The battle for those heavily fortified towns could take a very long time. Russia has the cheap energy, the industrial capability and the manpower to keep slugging it out. Ukraine does not.

The only certainty is that many more people will die.

The biggest mistake you can make right now would be to position yourself as a budget Churchill, as Starmer and before him Truss and Johnson tried to do. No one will take you seriously if you do.

I beg you not to put a camouflage jacket on and pose for press photographs next to some soldiers or a tank. You’ll just look like an out-of-touch fool, as Starmer and Johnson did before you.

Set the performative gestures and platitudes to one side.

Wars are won by industrial economies and not armies.

Russia has the population size, the industrial capacity, the cheap energy and the economic reserves to keep fighting.

Ukraine does not. Europe does not and Britain does not.

Despite being the most sanctioned country on the planet, Russia’s economy is in a far more resilient place than that of Ukraine or, indeed, of Britain and Europe.

The idea that the collective economic weight of western nations could bring Russia to its knees and force it to concede in Ukraine has proved a catastrophic self-delusion.

Ukraine is now functionally bankrupt and entirely dependent on financial aid which western nations are increasingly less able to afford.

Europe is deindustrialising at an alarming rate, with low growth and high debt. Britain is skint and our army and navy are decrepit.

While undoubtedly facing headwinds caused by vast fiscal spending on the war, Russia’s economy continues to prove remarkably resilient.

Russia’s current account surplus has remained above its historical average since the war began. Vast surpluses of foreign funds from oil sales help Russia to navigate the macroeconomic shocks.

Sanctions, now in place for twelve years, have never looked likely to work. There are many reasons for that. A major reason is that sanctions have induced in the Kremlin a hard-boiled determination not to bow to western pressure. That determination remains undimmed today.

The bottom line is that Russia can afford to keep fighting a low intensity war in Ukraine for years to come, and the collective of Britain and Europe cannot.

This is the point at which foreign policy intersects with domestic policy in the United Kingdom.

British people see the government funnelling billions of pounds to a war in Ukraine that is unwinnable, while our public services are struggling to deliver.

While young people are killed on the streets, the British police are either unable to police without fear or favour, or alternatively brutalise our citizens.

We lost our industrial base in the 1980s and now cannot build a hundred mile stretch of high-speed railway for less than £1 billion per mile.

In the 21st century China has built over 31,000 miles of high-speed railway.

Russia’s army is now almost twenty times larger than the British Army. My Dad was in the British Army and I served alongside the Army in Helmand province. I have been and will always be incredibly proud of the UK armed forces.

But we have to stop pretending that the UK is a global superpower when it is not. We are now a middle power, with a middleweight military at best.

You must confront an uncomfortable paradox. The domestic policy agenda will dominate your time in office, and yet it is in foreign policy where you can make most difference to the lives of ordinary Britons.

It is quite astounding, after the recent local election results, that so many Labour talking heads spoke of the brilliant job Starmer had done on the world stage, even though mistakes had been made at home.

And yet he represented a continuation of a foreign policy that is failing.

Even today, we refuse to engage with Russia in any diplomacy on the basis of the notion that diplomacy is a prize for good behaviour.

Starmer attended dozens of international summits of leaders who agreed with each other.

Diplomacy isn’t about talking to your friends. It is about talking to those with whom you most disagree and with whom you are in conflict.

Even during the cold war, the UK had more contact with the Soviet Union than Britain has with Russia today.

When you take up office, you should talk to Britain’s adversaries, and that starts with talking to Putin.

The European Union is completely ineffective here. Various leaders including Macron, De Wever and Stubb have spoken about the need to open up a diplomatic channel with Moscow for months and yet they are still squabbling among themselves.

You can bring a voice of realism to the European pack in support of mediation efforts that the Trump administration has been trying to advance.

Freezing the line of contact, taking NATO off the table, a clear plan for the reconstruction of Ukraine, a map for sanctions relief for Russia.

This won’t make you popular in Brussels. But I believe that if Britain moves, then more war-sceptical European nations may follow.

You need to advance a foreign policy rooted in realism and what the UK can deliver in concert with allies.

For too long, we have sub-contracted our foreign policy to Volodymyr Zelensky and are quite unable to move a single step without his approval.

And yet I am sorry to inform you that Zelensky oversees a government of almost unprecedented corruption in Ukraine. He was elected on a platform to restore peace with Russia and now sets terms for peace that are so maximalist that it is obvious Russia, which is resourced to keep fighting, will never agree.

Every time Zelensky comes to Britain he is treated like a hero and never asked to push forward with a diplomatic settlement. And I must tell you that all those back slapping and hug a Zelensky photos including with His Majesty the King, are not going to age well.

Russia is what it is. A vast, energy rich country, that operates a wholly different political system to Britain and Europe, possessed of an armed forces of 1.3 million and 6000 nuclear weapons.

It is a country that lost tens of millions of citizens during World War II and bears the scars of that loss still today. Buried deep in the Russian psyche is a consciousness of the threat of foreign conquest and a willingness to fight to the death in response.

I was horrified when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and authorised half of all UK sanctions against Russia at that time. I’ve spent time walking the streets of Moscow under the constant glare of Russian intelligence and rebuilt the Embassy after the expulsions that followed the Salisbury nerve agent attack.

And yet, I also know that Russia won’t back down in the face of western pressure. The only end to the war that Putin will accept is one that is negotiated with Ukraine.

That peace will be worse than the peace available to Ukraine in April 2022 which Boris Johnson scotched by encouraging Zelensky’s worst instincts in not taking it.

The conditions for peace will continue to worsen the longer the war drags on.

You must finally wake up and tell people how absurd this state of affairs is. The UK has actively avoided the possibility of dialogue while showing itself completely willing to fight Russia head on for Ukraine’s independence.

Sending money, weapons and intelligence to Ukraine will never be enough. And there is an uncomfortable truth to that. That the British public is desperate for change that improves their lives, yet a major reason they are fleeing to Reform in large numbers is that successive governments have prioritised foreign conflicts over local problems.

And believe it or not, Russia does want to have a normalised relationship with Europe, with Ukraine and with Britain. Diplomacy is not about friendship, it is about co-existence.

We should ditch the ridiculous notion that talking to Russia represents a prize for good behaviour. Russia is our adversary, and we must talk to them in the interests of ending this war and preventing a future war.

Britain’s foreign policy has been held hostage by the same consensus, group think and inertia that affects domestic policy. The reality is, as everyone acknowledges, that after decades of disinvestment the UK armed forces are at their weakest state in over two hundred years.

You won’t be able to fix that problem in the three remaining years of this parliament if this war continues.

What is clear, is that a lack of leadership at Ministerial level is at least as big a problem as a lack of money. At a time when the British public is clamouring for butter not guns, your Defence Secretary will have a job on their hands to impose a clear vision and plan.

Our diplomatic capabilities have also been hollowed out by decades of disinvestment and a revolving door of Foreign Secretaries with no clear vision for diplomacy.

If all you do is keep the same person as Foreign Secretary throughout your term in office, you will have brought a consistency to UK foreign policy and diplomacy that hasn’t existed for twelve years. On both sides of the road in Whitehall, Defence and foreign policy are captured by the same consensus and group think as domestic policy.

If you really want to deliver change at home, you will need to cut through the tangled mat of institutional resistance in Whitehall to the notion of diplomacy and play a positive role in bringing the Ukraine war to an end.

You will be hammered in the mainstream media. But I believe that ordinary working class voters will consider that, for the first time in well over a decade, a British prime minister is doing something that is genuinely in the best interests of the security and prosperity of our Great country.

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A live fire conflict between Russian armed forces and a NATO country is possible and could happen at any time. That will involve either the sinking of a British Royal Naval vessel or possibly the downing of a helicopter by the Russian side. NATO would fudge its response leaving the UK isolated.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that politicians grasp for stunts to improve their popularity at a time when they are facing a political crisis at home. Right now, in Britain, that politician is Prime Minister Keir Starmer. He is the most unpopular Prime Minister on record – although in fairness he faces stiff competition for that title - faces a leadership challenge is Andy Burnham wins the Makerfield bi-election this week, but is nevertheless clinging on to power.

It is another universal truth that politicians are inherently self-serving. Recent British Prime Ministers have shown a remarkable ability to cling on to the top job even when it became abundantly clear that they were sunk politically. Theresa May and Boris Johnson are prime examples of this.

The vast majority of commentators believe that Britain will have a new Prime Minister soon, and Wes Streeting has already said he is willing to trigger a leadership contest next week. So right now Keir Starmer is in a dogfight for survival.

That is very important context.

In the midst of all this, Starmer is stoking up military tension with Russia to distract attention from his failings in office on the basis that anything Russophobic plays well in foggy Albion.

One of the biggest stunts Starmer authorized this week was the seizure of a tanker loaded with Russian oil.

There is a context here too. Clamping down on so-called Russian shadow tankers has been a big drive by G7 nations. The idea is that seizing oil tankers loaded with Russian oil, it might put a big dent in Russia’s oil economy.

Against a backdrop of widespread criticism about the sorry state of the UK armed forces, Starmer wants to get in on the act, as the French and the Americans have both undertaken similar seizures in recent months.

So, the UK mounted a sophisticated military operation against the oil tanker Smyrtos with two naval vessels, helicopters and a Royal Marines boarding party which successfully seized the vessel, with its mix of unarmed Indian and Georgian crew members.

This was all the more bizarre by the fact that the boarding party had a professional video filming crew that took all sorts of footage, including marines fast roping onto the deck, or searching inside the ship, in such a manner that one would conclude that they had boarded the vessel before the Marines themselves.

Even some MPs have criticized this. Ben Obese-Jecty, Conservative MP for Huntingdon (former Prime Minister John’s Major’s constituency way back when) summed it up on X with the following:

There are serious and legitimate questions about the authenticity of the footage released by the MOD of the interdiction of the Russian Shadow Fleet vessel this morning. How is the cameraman ahead of the Marines clearing the stairwell to be able to film them coming towards him. How has the cameraman gone past the open doors of rooms that haven’t yet been cleared? How much of this has been staged for the cameras? I don’t doubt that a Russian tanker was seized and that the operation carried significant risk. I do question the PR and the desperate need for a win by the Government at the Royal Marines’ expense.

If you watched the video footage, it might remind you of the godawful self-promoting publicity TV shows the MoD stages through Channels 4 and 5 in Britain in which the UK pretends to be a modern military super power.

The British military is clearly desperate for good news at a time when it has been revealed to be strapped for cash, troops and kit that works.

The debacle over HMS Dragon’s deployment to Cyprus after the Iran war started has revealed a Royal Navy that has hardly any ships.

We have now learned that the UK currently has none of its 6 attack class submarines at sea as they are all in repair, some of them very long term.

A long awaited defence investment plan has been delayed principally, and as I have pointed out before, because it will contain only bad news.

It will simply confirm that the UK is wasting billions on procurement projects that never deliver on time and when they do deliver, provide equipment that is not fit for purpose.

It’s clear that the UK government has neither a plan nor the money to turn around the situation in which the British Army is at its smallest size since 1822 (that is based on historic data on British Army size issued by the UK Ministry of Defence – I’m not making it up).

So, boarding an unarmed oil tanker with Russian oil in the English channel attempts to demonstrate a British military prowess that hasn’t existed for many years.

But there is jeopardy here.

This is the first time the UK military has mounted such as operation against a tanker carrying Russian oil. There have been a handful of others, orchestrated by the French and the Americans. But we are talking single digit interdictions of a global oil trade in which well over one thousand vessels – by conservative estimates – transport Russian oil around the globe.

The value of the oil in this tanker Smyrtos is estimated to amount to around $30 – 36 million. To put that into context, that amounts to 0.008% of Russia’s total export earnings in 2025 of $422 billion. Think about that for a moment.

This year so far, with the full impact of the war in Iran yet to feed into the data, Russian exports are up 6.3% between January and April, although the current account surplus is largely the same at $20 billion.

The British media are going wild about denting Russia’s war economy and yet they have seized oil the value of which is literally a drop in the ocean of Russia’s export earnings.

Even if the Royal Navy deployed all of its tiny fleet to spend all of its time interdicting tankers loaded with Russian oil, it would still not scratch the surface of Russia’s export economy.

Though it would leave the UK at risk of other threats to our security at a time when we can’t even prevent large numbers of rubber dinghies crossing the channel from France loaded with Asylum seekers.

This, ladies and gentlemen, goes right to the heart of how rotten UK policy is towards Russia.

It is increasingly driven by domestic political theatre and the need to stand up to Russia,

Now, it is taking a more dangerous turn, as a Prime Minister who is holed beneath the water line himself, is trying to sink Britain through piracy on the high seas.

Russia has yet to issue a formal statement in response. We should assume that they will be furious in the Kremlin.

This year, for the first time, Russia has started to send Russian Navy escort vessels to accompany tankers through the English channel. That hasn’t happened this time around. The risk of a direct confrontation between Russian and Royal Naval assets on the high seas just grew larger.

This happens at a time when there is much discussion about how and when Russia and NATO will be forced into a war against each other. There is no evidence that Russia wants that, rather than wanting to secure its aims in Ukraine.

Yet, neither will it restrain itself forever against what it considers to be hostile acts against its economic interests by NATO military forces.

Some commentators recently have raised the risk of a Russian nuclear strike on a NATO facility. I noticed that Glenn Diesen discussed this recently with Sergei Karaganov and John Mearsheimer.

Karaganov asserts that that may be the only way to restore Russian deterrence against a gradually encroaching NATO.

And yet I discount this theory for the following reasons.

First, Russia has considerable escalation options within Ukraine itself including the use of a tactical nuclear strike against Kyiv or another major centre.

But it has conventional escalation options in Ukraine short of that too.

It could use a precision conventional strike to take out Zelensky for example using an Oreshnik.

It could use Oreshnik’s in more explicitly front line targets or to cripple Ukraine’s vital rail infrastructure.

Critically, Russia would do this in response to further and deeper Ukrainian strikes into Russian territory on the basis of the logic and law of warfare.

In their statecraft, they always try to put a legal justification on their actions. Now, western policy makers will contest the legal basis of their argument every time. However, Russia will nevertheless make the legal case for everything that it does and it would struggle to make the legal case right now or ever for a first strike nuclear attack even in Ukraine.

In an International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion of 1996, it suggested that the threat or use of nuclear weapons should be prohibited in broad terms, however, made the following point;

The Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defence, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.

Right now, with NATO not committing ground forces to Ukraine, with the battlefield together with the energy and economic realities of war tipped decisively in its favour. Russia would not be able to convince anyone that its very survival was at stake because of ever deeper Ukrainian strikes into its territory.

A tactical nuclear strike against a NATO country is a whole different ball game, jumping onto a wholly new escalation ladder and climbing straight towards the top.

NATO is absolutely involved in a proxy war against Russia, but Russia is striking back at NATO in other ways including through hybrid warfare and – to use a judo analogy – using the weight and force of the opponent against them.

It is clear, at least to me, having been studying the economics for some time, that one incentive to Russia in stringing out a low intensity attritional war against Europe, in Ukraine, is that the combined weight of sanctions against Russia are hurting Europe and having insufficient macro impact on Russia itself.

War is accelerating Europe’s decline, so why stop now?

Striking a European country with a nuclear weapon is unnecessary to the political goals of the campaign. Europe is killing itself, why try to hurt Russia in the process?

A nuclear strike option carries so many unknowns and too few upsides for Russia.

Russian statecraft towards Europe during the Ukraine conflict has been a game of chicken in which the risk of massive escalation acts as a deterrence. But once you roll the nuclear die, you immediately give away the biggest act of deterrence at your disposal and are less able to control what comes next.

The big gamble on the Russian side is that a tactical nuclear strike would force Europe to the negotiating table, but that is a huge IF on the basis that European nations have been singularly unwilling to talk to Russia since 2014.

Unwittingly, Russia may unleash a chain of events that it was not able to control, posing a far greater risk to its state survival that dragging things out in Ukraine and watching Europe slowly fall apart in the process.

I never say never with any risk, but I continue to judge that we are a very long way from Russia using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, let alone against a NATO state.

So where would that leave us?

That takes us right back to the high seas, and Keir Starmer’s gamble on boarding tankers loaded with Russian oil.

The UK will make the case that this is legally defensible, however, the Captain of the vessel will consider that he has the right of self-defence under international law including under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. It is this legal grey area in which Russia is most likely to justify the use of live fire weapons against NATO military capabilities.

A possible scenario is that Russian military security contractors accompany vessels with man portable air defence systems to down a helicopter attempting to effect a boarding exercise.

However, this carries the risk of the supporting Royal Naval vessels firing upon and disabling the tanker itself.

I think the more likely option is that a tanker carrying Russian oil will issue a distress signal summoning up a direct response from Russian military assets.

The frigates and missile corvettes that the Russian navy has used to escort some tankers through the English channel are far better armed that their Royal Navy equivalents and in an extreme scenario could potentially sink a Royal Navy vessel, of which there are already too few.

Russia would in parallel mount an international diplomatic campaign to justify its actions as legal on the basis that commercial vessels were coming under attack by the British in international waters.

Russia would seek to position this action as happening in international waters and not in the sovereign territory of any NATO state, fudging the Article 5 issue.

That would put European NATO allies in a difficult position in understanding how best to respond.

I suspect most would back down and insist on a negotiated solution to the dispute, positioning it as a UK-Russia matter.

NATO would condemn Russian actions as would the G7 and possibly impose even more sanctions on Russian shipping.

Britain would be unable to strike back against Russia militarily as it does not have the capabilities.

Russia would have established deterrence on the high seas, sending a clear warning shot against other NATO members.

I am absolutely sure that no one in 10 Downing Street will have even begun to think through these risks, nor the political consequences for the government of the day.

Seizing an oil tanker on the high seas was an act of the most idiotic political theatre, aimed only at pretending that the UK has a functioning and effective military, and at shoring up Starmer’s position at a time when he is facing imminent ejection from office.

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This book means so much to me as it is set against the backdrop of the 2004 tsunami. My experience, as the first British diplomat to deploy to the disaster zone has haunted me ever since. Searching is my quiet tribute to those who tragically died, the people they left behind and everyone who stepped up to help.

It would mean so much to me if you read my novel and left a review on Goodreads or Amazon.

Thank you so much.

Lots of people talk about there being a single peace deal for Ukraine, but in truth it will be far more complicated than that, requiring separate deals on an end to the hostilities, Ukraine’s EU future, NATO, and on the future EU/UK relationship with Russia after the war ends.

Meanwhile, Zelensky is already asking for another $20 billion in military aid, hot on the heels of the EU finally agreeing its 90 billion package after the Hungarian elections removed the final barrier to aid. Zelensky has absolutely no desire to see the cash cow of war end and I continue to be amazed (though not surprised) that European leaders continue to pander to his every ask, while forced mobilisation becomes ever more repressive on the streets of Ukraine, corruption remains rampant, and the neo-Nazis have an ever tighter grip on the Ukrainian military and intelligence apparatus.

We should stop sending money to Ukraine. That appears the only way to force Zelensky’s hand and bring real energy to the peace process. I suspect, however, Ursula von der Leyen and co will continue to stack up debt to keep the war rumbling on.

I hope you find my article interesting.

The time is ripe for European leaders to set aside the self-licking summits in European capitals and get in the room with the U.S., Ukraine, and Russia to orchestrate a modern-day Helsinki Conference.

A durable peace for Ukraine will require several interlocking agreements, each of which will be incredibly difficult to negotiate, but all of which will be vital if we are to avoid a general war in Europe.

In a recent post on X, former U.S. diplomat Dan Fried, commenting on the June 7 E3 Leaders’ Statement on peace in Ukraine, said, “If Russia wants to end the war it can, you know, end the war.”

It’s important to pause here and note that Fried was the State Department Coordinator for Sanctions Policy from 2013 until 2017. I know, because I was directly involved at the time, that Fried is the architect of the policy of making Russia sanctions permanent by linking them to the full implementation of the Minsk II agreement, which Russia and Ukraine interpreted in radically different ways. The main aim of sanctions conditionality was therefore to delay any possibility of peaceful settlement, and in that it succeeded.

Eleven years on, Fried’s remark echoes a common line of argument in pro-war Western circles: that Russia could simply end the war without a negotiated settlement. And yet an unconditional about-face by Russia is quite obviously never going to happen, and so the comment serves only to prolong the war.

The E3 statement flowed from the same logic. It offered nothing new or unexpected. Critically, it reiterated the line that roughly $300 billion of Russian assets will remain immobilized until Russia “ceases its war of aggression and compensates Ukraine for the damage caused by the war.”

The current World Bank estimate of the cost of reconstruction and recovery in Ukraine stands at $588 billion. So, the E3 position amounts to confirmation that Russia will never see its money again and moreover will still have $288 billion left to pay.

This, I fear, is another example of Fried’s logic — that peace in Ukraine is indeed possible, but only on terms that Russia would be unable or unwilling to accept. As Western mainstream media carpet bombs the world with news that Ukraine is turning the tide in the war and could still win, then the calculus may be among Western policy hawks that continuing the war is no bad thing.

It’s certainly clear that no one appears in a rush. The E3 statement follows a sixteen-month period of endless and repetitive meetings by European leaders and Zelensky in which everyone violently agrees, but to which the Russians are never invited.

Only in recent months, notably since President Donald Trump’s Alaska Summit with Putin, has the topic of a negotiated end to the Ukraine war slowly bubbled to the surface in Europe. President Alexander Stubb of Finland, President Emmanuel Macron of France, Prime Minister Bart de Wever of Belgium have at various times dipped their toes in the water of suggesting diplomatic talks with Russia.

Last week, Zelensky himself issued an open letter to Putin about a possible meeting.

But, being that the letter contained several pages of personal barbs and insults about Putin, it is hard to see this as anything more than a self-licking stunt, of the type Dan Fried would support. The Europeans and Zelensky appear dug in for the long haul.

A senior Russian contact remarked to me recently that the Europeans spend a lot of time talking about the possibility of talks, but not the substance of what might be on the agenda. In truth, a vast amount of work will be needed in preparatory negotiations to map out the shape of a future peace settlement, requiring a clarity of focus that has hitherto been missing.

A durable peace for Ukraine will require several interlocking deals, possibly negotiated separately with different signatories. Talk of a single ‘peace deal’ for Ukraine is a lazy over-simplification. The latest E3 statement bundles up separate issues in the same basket as does the now dormant US brokered plan. A peace settlement for Ukraine will require, inter alia, the following.

A bilateral peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, brokered by the U.S. and others. The existing U.S.-brokered draft is the right place to start, as that includes the most contentious issue of territory, and in particular the future status of the remaining territory in Donetsk which Russia has not conquered. It would also need to cover sensitive topics such as the size of Ukraine’s army, Ukrainian children who were removed to Russia, and minority languages in Ukraine.

A clear plan and timeline for Ukraine to join the European Union. This can only be negotiated bilaterally by the EU and Ukraine, without U.S. or British involvement. It is arguably as difficult as a bilateral peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia.

Zelensky has said he wants to see Ukrainian accession by 2027, but this is not going to happen, and not only because the war may still be ongoing. The Europeans aren’t over eager about Ukraine joining because Ukraine is nowhere near ready, and Europe can’t afford it. Chancellor Merz has recently resurfaced the idea of “associate membership,” in which Ukraine gets no voting rights or money. Every rational observer should be able to judge that many Ukrainians will want clarity on the glidepath towards EU membership as a condition for ending the war.

An agreement between Russia and Europe, including the United Kingdom, on the future shape of their relationship. The third issue is equally as complex. Should Ukraine eventually join the EU, then it would join existing former Soviet and Warsaw Pact members (the Balts and Poland) who frame Russia as an existential threat. Relations between Europe and Russia are more shuttered today than they were during the Soviet era.

Europe needs cheap energy to stem the tide of self-imposed deindustrialization; Russia would like European investment again and a more open people-to-people relationship. There will need to be a settlement on how sanctions against Russia are eased during a post-war period. Ignoring an EU-Russia deal risks pressing the pause button on a future general war at a time when Europe is rapidly rearming,

An agreement within NATO. A peace settlement for Ukraine will only land when its future NATO aspiration is taken decisively off of the table. Anyone who still believes that Russia will give up on this clearest of redlines is dangerously misguided.

Ukraine needs cast iron security guarantees that should involve a hard commitment to boots on the ground should Russia renege on its commitments.This will require Russia to have confidence that NATO isn’t stoking the fire in the background to reignite tensions as a pretext for intervention. These are incredibly complex issues and will require U.S. leadership to shift the Europeans into line. The NATO-Russia Council could have provided a forum for discussion and deconfliction but was formally disbanded in December 2025. Perhaps a NATO-Ukraine-Russia Council might emerge, to take its place, reopening a vital avenue for military dialogue and deconfliction.

Amid signs that the Trump Administration is tiring of the Ukraine peace process, the time is ripe for a serious push to bring the disastrous war in Ukraine to a close. Rather than the Europeans and Americans tussling over who should be in charge of the negotiations, the truth is that every Western nation will have a role to play, together with Ukraine and Russia, to hammer out the various agreements needed for peace. That may require a grand summit similar in scale to the Helsinki Conference of 1975. On the back of the E3 Statement, however, I am not holding my breath.

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If there is one way in which you can easily support my work, it would be to obtain a copy of my beloved work, read it and let me have your thoughts. Thank you so much.

The reason I am writing this today and not on the 4 June is that I am in Tblisi at the end of a great two-day conference that brought together a number of realists in one place, many of whom you will be familiar with. We have Lt Col Danial L Davis from the Deep Dive, Glenn Diesen, George Beebe from Quincy, Professor Richard Sakwa, Professor Nicolai Petro, not to mention two German MEPs, in Michael von der Schulenburg and Ruth Firmenich, plus others. I fly back to London tomorrow filled with ideas for many articles and more than one book.

On which, you will find below an article that will shortly appear in the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office Association’s summer magazine. It is very specific to my crisis experience while I worked at the Foreign Office, failures of the system, many of which pertain to this day, and how staff are often let down by the system when they suffer trauma. To be honest, when I sent it in, I thought it might prompt a sharp intake of breath and sucking of teeth, but to give them credit, they are publishing. I would be fascinated to hear your thoughts on it.

With my best wishes,

Ian

During my Foreign Office career, I found working on crises incredibly fulfilling, professionally; helping British people in their time of need, working under the most intense pressure, with amazing colleagues, who you trust and would do anything to help. And yet crisis work can also inflict a terrible mental health cost.

Boxing Day 2004 – the biggest natural disaster in living memory

The 2004 tsunami was the biggest crisis that I worked on. One hundred and forty nine Britons died, most of them in Thailand, and over two hundred and twenty-five thousand people worldwide.

I was Head of the Political Section in Bangkok at the time, and as soon as I heard about the tsunami, I suggested to the Ambassador David Fall that we get in a car and drive south immediately. The airports were closed to civilian traffic but waiting around in Bangkok wasn’t an option. The Office had been roundly criticised for its slow response to the 2002 Bali Bombing. So, we jumped in the Defence Attache’s four-wheel-drive and with the amazing Khun Amnat from the country-based staff and a driver, set off for the nine-hundred-kilometre journey.

By midnight on Boxing Day we had seven staff in Phuket, the four who had travelled by car, and three more who arrived late on a flight organised by the Foreign Ministry. Seven more people would arrive in the night. Twenty-four hours after the tsunami struck, the UK government had fourteen people on the ground to support thousands of British tourists in an area stretching across hundreds of miles of coastline and islands. By morning, the death toll in Thailand had passed two thousand and was rising all the time.

The destruction was colossal. Thousands of Brits were stranded, hundreds wounded, many missing and the first heartbreaking reports were coming in to confirm deaths, including a former DFID colleague and his three children.

The tsunami exposed weaknesses in Foreign Office crisis response

Worried relatives couldn’t contact the Foreign Office by telephone so called the Embassy in Bangkok. Some found their way through to me and others in the disaster zone, where we were overwhelmed. Very quickly the UK press got wind of the UK’s insufficient response and was reporting all sorts of unfair and ridiculous stories about diplomats sipping gin in Bangkok. At the Embassy, spouses and children were called into action in all sorts of ways because we had no staff. The UK expat community was magnificent and unstinting in its support.

I worked for the first forty hours without sleep and have never felt work pressure so intense or emotionally distressing, not least talking to relatives of the deceased. Several staff had nervous breakdowns, including a member of my team who took care of two children who had lost both parents. An American psychologist was deployed from Bangkok and he soon withdrew, having cracked under the strain.

Hard-pressed staff were let down by London

We had insufficient staff so begged and borrowed from regional posts. London could have mustered every available member of staff and loaded them on a plane to Thailand. That’s what the Australians did. Colleagues in London called in offering to travel to Thailand to help and weren’t called back.

Instead, the Foreign Office tried to spin failure as a job well done under difficult circumstances. London sent a press officer. An RDT wasn’t deployed to Thailand for two weeks. During the post-mortem of what went wrong, the Director of Comms announced that the press handling had been masterful. It took the PUS one year to write to the Times mounting a defence of Foreign Office staff.

Many staff suffered devastating mental health consequences

The legacy of that experience left me with post-traumatic stress disorder and the most obvious symptoms of that were alcoholism, nicotine abuse, self-isolation and a whole suite of self-sabotaging behaviours. It wasn’t the things I saw – the bodies and the biblical destruction - even though that aspect still haunts me. I could handle the press criticism even though it was unfair. I received a glowing appraisal for my performance as did others in that first cohort, yet the Office treated us like pariahs. I felt abandoned and PTSD fuelled a bunker mentality in which the Office became the enemy.

And yet the truth was that PTSD had made me my own worst enemy. The Office did learn from its mistakes – or at least it started to - while I remained stuck in the past and unable move forward. PTSD is like a cage that locks you into a pattern of negative and self-destructive routines and behaviours. In truth, I projected that negativity back into the Office far too often, and I regret that.

PTSD is like a cage that I chose to escape from

PTSD had induced feelings that everyone at work disliked me, which reinforced an embarrassment and a reluctance to ask for help. It took me over four years to access the Employee Assistance Scheme, in which staff can access counselling and other mental health support. Some colleagues were incredibly kind, like Simon Shercliff and Janet Rogan at a time when I might easily have left, and this made a huge difference.

These colleagues inspired me to put the effort back in and rebuild. A big part of healing with PTSD is rediscovering a sense of purpose and a passion for what you do. Through everything that happened, my commitment to public service never changed. People are attracted to the Foreign Office because the work really matters, especially in a crisis.

Foreign office staff will always step up, yet the system still isn’t robust

I gradually fell back in love with the Office and by 2011 was finding my feet again. I stepped up to help during the Arab Spring and worked with some superstars in the Emergency Response Teams, like Genevieve McCarthy. I recall a heavily pregnant Jill Morris directing operations in the Crisis Centre as we worked on the daredevil overnight rescue of oil workers stranded in the Libyan Desert. Meanwhile, my heavily pregnant wife was supportive as I worked non-stop to help Sarah MacIntosh and a flash team organise the London Conference on Libya in five days flat.

In my experience, Foreign Office staff will climb over mountains, if you asked them to, to step up in a crisis. Good crisis management involves doing the hard work in peacetime to create an ecosystem in which every member of staff is trained and ready to flip into crisis mode when things go badly wrong. When I retired in 2023, the Office was still some way off of that goal.

Surviving a crisis is also about more than having colleagues who’ve got your back, or backstop mental health provision at the office for when things go wrong. It’s about ensuring welfare is woven into the DNA of crisis through the basics of having enough staff with the skills that they need. And about ensuring that no one is working forty-hour shifts, so the operation can sustain itself over an extended period of time.

A systematic approach to crisis readiness is possible – I proved it in Moscow

If we could have predicted 9-11, the Bali Bombing or the 2004 tsunami, then they either wouldn’t have happened, or we could have spared thousands of lives through preventive measures. When I arrived in Moscow, I wanted to turn the Russia network into the most crisis-prepared post in the world ahead of the FIFA world cup of 2018 to be ready for any major event.

We hadn’t expected that to be the Salisbury nerve agent attack which stripped the Russia network of almost eighty staff in the space of one month in the diplomatic tit for tat that followed. Yet our extensive preparations meant that we could rebuild with the staff that we had and still lay on an 18-7 consular provision that the British police described as they best they had seen.

Stable loving relationships are vital for recovery from trauma and for resilience

A stable personal life is also vital for anyone healing from PTSD. Love, and the positive routines and rituals that it creates, is more healing that any counselling. Meeting my wife Katharine in 2009 and building a family together since that time, has undoubtedly made the biggest difference to my mental health.

Working on the tsunami had such a profound impact on my life that I have long wanted to write about it, partly for my healing and so as not to forget. When I first put pen to paper over eight years ago, my draft novel – originally called Disaster Victim - leaned too heavily on resurfacing grievances about what went wrong.

Writing a novel about the tsunami has offered me another route to healing

Now in print, Searching, a love story, is about something far more important; the power of loving relationships to offer hope and provide healing to those who have suffered heartbreak and loss. I also wanted to pay tribute to everyone who stepped up in Thailand, and around the world, to help in the most harrowing circumstances.

David Fall told me recently that some staff felt “kicked in the teeth” after the tsunami and told him they’d never volunteer again. There was a time when I thought volunteering for a crisis was a mug’s game, producing nothing but unwarranted criticism from the press and betrayal by Ministers and Senior Officials. But the truth is that if a similar disaster happened again, then I’d be the first to pack a bag and phone in to the Office, offering to deploy. Because when Brits abroad need our help, then it is our duty and our honour to step up.

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The predictable rabid response from the UK mainstream confirms, however, that the penchant for self-flagellation remains alive and well in Britain. There is no economic self-harm we won’t consider, not to impose a cost on Russia. Bizarre. I hope you find the article interesting.

In a major policy shift, the British government decided this week to lift sanctions on Russian energy products, in two ways.

First, a general trade license was issued allowing for the import of diesel and jet fuel from Russian oil that has been processed in third countries like India and Turkey. A second license provides for the importation of Russian liquefied natural gas from two terminals, Sakhalin 2, which supplies gas to Asia, and Yamal, which supplies gas to Europe.

U.K. mainstream media and opposition political parties have reacted furiously to this sanctions relief move as a concession to “dirty Russian oil“. A Ukrainian member of parliament pointed out that Keir Starmer made a commitment to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky not to remove sanctions against Russia. The Daily Telegraph labelled the Prime Minister “comrade Keir“ on the basis that he was making concessions to the “Soviets,” more than three decades after the Soviet Union collapsed. Such is the febrile nature of political discussion of Russia in the United Kingdom.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer justified his move as a response to rising energy prices and reiterated his longer-term plan to tighten sanctions against Russia. On May 19, the same day the United Kingdom’s measure came into force, U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent issued a 30-day extension to a license lifting any restriction on the export of Russian oil. It is hard to imagine that the timing of both the U.K. and U.S. measures was a coincidence.

Indeed, it is a sign that the U.K. is coming further into line with the U.S. on lifting energy restrictions to ease global supply concerns. In March, the U.S. Treasury also issued a general license which remains in force, to provide for the temporary lifting of sanctions on Iranian oil.

Under fire from the U.K. press, the government has insisted that this is a short-term measure. But there is reason to believe it could endure for a while.

The jet fuel and diesel license clearly states that it is of indefinite duration and that the license will be reviewed periodically. The idea of a periodic review might pacify potential critics although the statement is meaningless: with over three thousand U.K. sanctions against Russia there is no system in place for this and I know of no examples of the U.K. reviewing then repealing a Russia sanction unless subject to legal challenge. So, the move on diesel and jet fuel appears to represent a permanent lifting of sanctions on key products for the U.K. economy. There is an obvious reason for this.

The U.K. imports almost 70% of its jet fuel and 40% of its diesel. Lifting restrictions on plentiful Russian oil that is processed into diesel and jet fuel is an economically rational policy choice and therefore a sensible thing to do.

We have already seen flights being cancelled in the U.K. as fears about a jet fuel crisis mount. Russia is benefiting from an energy revenue windfall from the stand-off over Iran irrespective of any restrictive measures imposed by the West. Maintaining sanctions on Russian energy merely has a boomerang effect on the countries imposing those sanctions, including Britain itself.

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There is no sign yet that the EU plans to follow the U.S. and the U.K. in lifting restrictions on diesel and jet fuel There certainly appears to be less concern in Europe about a possible crisis in air travel.

While the U.K. measure to ease restrictions on diesel and jet fuel shows a commendable realism, its motive for softening sanctions on LNG are less directly related to core U.K. interests. Britain hasn’t imported any Russian LNG since the start of the war in Ukraine and even before the war started, imported negligible volumes of Russian gas.

Rather, and at least in part, the LNG exemption is intended to remain in line with the European Union at a time when Keir Starmer has been pushing the idea of the U.K. deepening economic ties with Europe. Three-quarters of the LNG from the Yamal field — one of the two covered by the U.K. license — goes to European customers, accounting for 7.2 billion Euros in 2025 alone.

While the EU has recently banned short-term purchases on the spot market, which had been subject to heavy profiteering, long-term contracts remain unsanctioned through to January 1, 2027. This is precisely when the U.K. license also expires, bringing the U.K. and the EU fully in lockstep. The license also indicates that the Minister may “‘vary, revoke or suspend”’ the license at any time, allowing flexibility should the EU policy change.

Britain’s temporary decision to lift the ban on LNG exports from Sakhalin 2 is more tangential to U.K. interests. That terminal is located in Asia, with most of its LNG going to Japan, China and South Korea, which are suffering a major energy shock from the war against Iran. Amid high global energy prices, the U.K. move appears to be driven by a mix of rational considerations and support for allied nations in both Europe and in Asia.

In a further attempt to spin the sanctions relief package, the U.K. government updated its Russia sanctions’ regulations claiming that this was a move to act tougher on Russia, while opening the door to diesel and jet fuel. The updated regulations tightened restrictions on everything from uranium imports to ship servicing contracts (including ships that transport LNG).

However, the updated sanctions regulation is at most a technical sharpening of rules that already have — as I have often pointed out — no obvious effect on Russia’s economy.

The inescapable reality is that this easing of sanctions is perhaps the first example of the U.K. putting its strategic interests – specifically the need to manage energy availability and price for British industry and consumers – above the bloviation that characterizes discourse on Russia policy.

The reaction has been so harsh that I do not expect further British innovations in foreign policy, such as a determined push to secure a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine, which would put a stop to the killing (and the West’s self-harming sanctions). For that, you see, would amount to another sell-out and unacceptable concession to Vladimir Putin.In a major policy shift, the British government decided this week to lift sanctions on Russian energy products, in two ways.

First, a general trade license was issued allowing for the import of diesel and jet fuel from Russian oil that has been processed in third countries like India and Turkey. A second license provides for the importation of Russian liquefied natural gas from two terminals, Sakhalin 2, which supplies gas to Asia, and Yamal, which supplies gas to Europe.

U.K. mainstream media and opposition political parties have reacted furiously to this sanctions relief move as a concession to “dirty Russian oil“. A Ukrainian member of parliament pointed out that Keir Starmer made a commitment to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky not to remove sanctions against Russia. The Daily Telegraph labelled the Prime Minister “comrade Keir“ on the basis that he was making concessions to the “Soviets,” more than three decades after the Soviet Union collapsed. Such is the febrile nature of political discussion of Russia in the United Kingdom.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer justified his move as a response to rising energy prices and reiterated his longer-term plan to tighten sanctions against Russia. On May 19, the same day the United Kingdom’s measure came into force, U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent issued a 30-day extension to a license lifting any restriction on the export of Russian oil. It is hard to imagine that the timing of both the U.K. and U.S. measures was a coincidence.

Indeed, it is a sign that the U.K. is coming further into line with the U.S. on lifting energy restrictions to ease global supply concerns. In March, the U.S. Treasury also issued a general license which remains in force, to provide for the temporary lifting of sanctions on Iranian oil.

Under fire from the U.K. press, the government has insisted that this is a short-term measure. But there is reason to believe it could endure for a while.

The jet fuel and diesel license clearly states that it is of indefinite duration and that the license will be reviewed periodically. The idea of a periodic review might pacify potential critics although the statement is meaningless: with over three thousand U.K. sanctions against Russia there is no system in place for this and I know of no examples of the U.K. reviewing then repealing a Russia sanction unless subject to legal challenge. So, the move on diesel and jet fuel appears to represent a permanent lifting of sanctions on key products for the U.K. economy. There is an obvious reason for this.

The U.K. imports almost 70% of its jet fuel and 40% of its diesel. Lifting restrictions on plentiful Russian oil that is processed into diesel and jet fuel is an economically rational policy choice and therefore a sensible thing to do.

We have already seen flights being cancelled in the U.K. as fears about a jet fuel crisis mount. Russia is benefiting from an energy revenue windfall from the stand-off over Iran irrespective of any restrictive measures imposed by the West. Maintaining sanctions on Russian energy merely has a boomerang effect on the countries imposing those sanctions, including Britain itself.

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There is no sign yet that the EU plans to follow the U.S. and the U.K. in lifting restrictions on diesel and jet fuel There certainly appears to be less concern in Europe about a possible crisis in air travel.

While the U.K. measure to ease restrictions on diesel and jet fuel shows a commendable realism, its motive for softening sanctions on LNG are less directly related to core U.K. interests. Britain hasn’t imported any Russian LNG since the start of the war in Ukraine and even before the war started, imported negligible volumes of Russian gas.

Rather, and at least in part, the LNG exemption is intended to remain in line with the European Union at a time when Keir Starmer has been pushing the idea of the U.K. deepening economic ties with Europe. Three-quarters of the LNG from the Yamal field — one of the two covered by the U.K. license — goes to European customers, accounting for 7.2 billion Euros in 2025 alone.

While the EU has recently banned short-term purchases on the spot market, which had been subject to heavy profiteering, long-term contracts remain unsanctioned through to January 1, 2027. This is precisely when the U.K. license also expires, bringing the U.K. and the EU fully in lockstep. The license also indicates that the Minister may “‘vary, revoke or suspend”’ the license at any time, allowing flexibility should the EU policy change.

Britain’s temporary decision to lift the ban on LNG exports from Sakhalin 2 is more tangential to U.K. interests. That terminal is located in Asia, with most of its LNG going to Japan, China and South Korea, which are suffering a major energy shock from the war against Iran. Amid high global energy prices, the U.K. move appears to be driven by a mix of rational considerations and support for allied nations in both Europe and in Asia.

In a further attempt to spin the sanctions relief package, the U.K. government updated its Russia sanctions’ regulations claiming that this was a move to act tougher on Russia, while opening the door to diesel and jet fuel. The updated regulations tightened restrictions on everything from uranium imports to ship servicing contracts (including ships that transport LNG).

However, the updated sanctions regulation is at most a technical sharpening of rules that already have — as I have often pointed out — no obvious effect on Russia’s economy.

The inescapable reality is that this easing of sanctions is perhaps the first example of the U.K. putting its strategic interests – specifically the need to manage energy availability and price for British industry and consumers – above the bloviation that characterizes discourse on Russia policy.

The reaction has been so harsh that I do not expect further British innovations in foreign policy, such as a determined push to secure a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine, which would put a stop to the killing (and the West’s self-harming sanctions). For that, you see, would amount to another sell-out and unacceptable concession to Vladimir Putin

.

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‘The future is coming and you’re not in it.’ Is a classic quote from the Top Gun Maverick movie, ironically about a brave US naval aviation mission to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme with 4 F-18 fighters. Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I call irony.

Actually, and judge me if you want, but I enjoyed the movie and its story of redemption for Maverick in his unresolved feelings of responsibility for Goose’s death and finding true love, but I digress.

Keir Starmer will have no political redemption. He is 63 years of age and his sell by date has fallen due. His time in 10 Downing Street appears to be racing to a close.

‘The future is coming and Keir is not in it.’

Tomorrow, Monday 11 May, a former Junior Minister, Catherine West will try to gain the 81 seats she needs to trigger a leadership contest. It remains unclear whether she will succeed or, indeed, if this is a systemic challenge that will fail and leave Starmer intact and able to stagger on until the next calamity.

The background, Labour’s drubbing in the local Council elections where they lost 60% of their seats to Reform, who started with 2 of the contested seats – yes that’s 2 – and ended up with 1453 seats, or a 15550% increase.

Starmer’s woes were added to by his response on the morning that results were trickling in. He was more wooden than the door to No.10, blank faced, dull, uninspiring, repeating the same preprepared press line four times in a row. Not answering questions directly, adding as much polish as he could to the turd of his policy failure. Possibly the most boring man in Britain also happens to be the Head of the UK government.

The other political leaders sat in stark contrast. Nigel Farage spoke to a pack of journalists and responded to their questions entirely off the cuff, looking, and sounding confident like a Prime Minister in waiting; we’ll see about that in 2029.

Zak Polanski was triumphantly hugging people after the greens increased their vote tally by 441 seats, again, a 400% increase and gained Mayoral seats in London. Kemi Badenoch remained upbeat and made the best of a bad job in Bexley where the Tories held on, focussing on the future. Ed Davey did something. I don’t think it involved budgie smugglers though.

Keir Starmer’s problem is that he speaks in soundbites. There is no substance underpinning anything that he says. Absolutely none at all. A barium meal contains more calories than a Starmer speech. You could say the same about everyone in their cabinet, except that they have more charisma. It’s all just so predictably vacuous.

Everything in the Labour party starts with ‘let me be clear’ yet no clarity is offered.

‘I’m not going to sugar coat it.’ He prefers his turd unsweetened. ‘Voters have sent a message about the pace of change’

He talks about the difficult inheritance he took from the Tories yet ignores the fact that labour has been in power now for almost two years and ordinary people feel that nothing has really changed. A major problem with anything the Labour government says is that it is living in the past. ‘If you think we are crap, well, it’s the Tories fault for passing this on to us.’

Another line that we have seen consistently uttered by the whipped in Labour loyalists and by Starmer himself that if he resigns, it will plunge the country into chaos. So he’s not going to walk away. That would be irresponsible.

Yet this is the worst form of nakedly self-serving nonsense ever. That if Keir Starmer resigns, suddenly the UK is going to be in all sorts of trouble. With no change in his pasty faced dull expression, he says this as if he truly believes it.

The country’s going to rats if I’m forced to leave. And yet, his party has suffered a devastating political defeat precisely because ordinary people think the UK is turning into a ship that even rats wouldn’t want to live in. Whatever his predecessors messed up, he has to take responsibility for what his government is doing in the here and now and he is not.

The cold truth is that if Keir Starmer is forced out of office, no one will notice. People struggle to notice him in office, the amount of time he spends overseas at international summits. Life will carry on completely as normal. He won’t be missed. He will be just the latest in a long ling of sub-par Prime Ministers that have governed the UK over recent decades.

Is he the worst? Does it really matter?

We are suffering a condition in the UK where mainstream parties are not serving the needs of ordinary working-class people.

What ordinary people might have preferred to hear in Starmer’s vacuous speech was some idea of the things he plans to do to turn Britain around from its current state as a stagnating relic of its colonial past, sold out to the City of London, unable to create genuinely new jobs, unable even to build more than a hundred miles of high speed rail track in 20 years. Twenty freaking years! 13 percent of people aged between 16 and 24 are not in employment education or training in the UK, that’s almost one million young people with nothing to do and no hope for the future. Rachel Reeves shucked out 800 million at the end of last year to help. We have given £15 billion to Ukraine to fight a war it isn’t going to win. I’m just saying. Fifteen billion pounds! What are our British priorities.

Keir Starmer has no strategy beyond increasing taxes and cutting welfare benefits and mincing around the world stage like he’s a statesman. He is nothing less than a preening nonentity completely oblivious to the needs of ordinary people.

The UK economy has never recovered from the double whammy of the global financial crisis and COVID and ordinary people are watching their living standards fall in the teeth of an unresolved cost of living crisis. We have a knife crime problem, rape victims wait over a year before their attackers go to court, yet a whole police assault team can deploy to a person’s house if they issue a hurty tweet.

The share price at Kwik Fit must surely have gone up from the number of wheel and tyre replacement jobs they get to do because no one fixes the sinkhole sized potholes in our road, like the tarmac has been subjected to constant shelling by a barrage of thermobaric No10 press releases. Our energy costs too much because we have embargoed cheap energy, to buy expensive American energy, while not investing in our own hydrocarbon energy, and investing in renewables with a huge upfront capital cost, even if longer term they might increase the overall supply mix (as they have in China). We haven’t gone quite as self-harming as ze Germans, but I fear we are not far behind.

Our farming sector is in crisis, unable to attract people into the industry and shrinking all the time as solar power companies gobble up large tranches of previously productive land. Watch Clarkson’s farm if you want an insight into how sweaty faced local planning officers in badly fitting suits can suck the life out of any efforts at innovation and diversification.

The mainstream media is a big part of the problem. Laura Kuennsberg this morning hosted Bridget Philipson who arrived with exactly the same script provided by Starmer’s speechwriters. Kuennsberg, offering limp resistance and could do nothing to stop the minister repeating the same rearward facing points again, and again, and again. That, ladies and gentlemen, right there explains the decay in British journalism. That kool aid Kuennsberg was completely unable to get Philippson to answer a question directly, with the minster brushing aside every attempted interjection, the BBC’s beloved presenter had basically given Philippson an open mic to say what the hell she wanted with no challenge at all.

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Philippson was ‘gutted’ for Labour councillors who lost their jobs. Everyone’s hurting right now she continued. Kuennsberg gave her the air time to lay out ad nauseum the context, and how it is all the Tories’ fault.

But the truth is that, yes, lots of people were hurting before the elections and that is why Labour lost, because they are only making people hurt more. A lot of people will be celebrating right now because they can sense that a big change is afoot. That even after sixty years of hurt, they never stopped believing.. See what I did there?

So stop telling us that people are hurting as if you care. For every labour councillor who lost their job, a councillor from a different political party has a job now. Net zero impact on employment right there. If you are looking for sympathy you’ll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.

The people hurting most right now will be members of the labour party, and Starmer himself.

It is unprecedented I think for local elections to gain so much national coverage.

Because the truth is that these local elections had truly massive national significance

Britain needs change.

Britain needs change because the Westminster system is broken.

On Sunday with Koolaid, Philippson said she knew the failings of the government but wouldn’t list what they are, but instead offered a long list of labour’s putative achievements.

I have said it many times. Working class people want their leaders to answer the problems they face. GFC and COVID have made life tougher and more uncertain for ordinary people.

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The Westminster bubble is filled by self-serving elitists whose first, second and third priorities are their own career prospects and opportunities to improve their own lives. They are not interested in ordinary folk who live outside of SW1A.

And here’s the kicker, Starmer says, ‘We haven’t done enough to convince people their lives will improve.’ A new big speech is promised tomorrow in which he will set out his plan to get the country back on track.

But here’s the thing, yet another dull and uninspiring Starmer speech prepared by a 10 Downing Street machinery that thought it was perfectly fine to send Peter Mandelson to Washington DC as Ambassador is not going to cut it.

This is not about convincing people. Ordinary people can no longer be convinced by Starmer. They want to see real improvements to their lives. You can’t airbrush failure with another dull speech.

You can’t govern by soundbite. A big speech only works if people believe that it marks a genuinely new agenda and that the Cabinet and the whole machinery of government is going to lumber into gear to deliver it at pace. No one believe this to be true.

We are also drowning in social media aimed to reinforce government by soundbite. The latest dreadful example was Keir Starmer’s video of him meeting with Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman who he has brought into to inject new life into his premiership with old bodies. Filmed in the Downing Street garden with designer chairs and soft music playing in the background, one can only assume that No10 has paid Kvartal 95 millions to produce this crap.

But the fact remains that no one believes that Starmer will miraculously lay out a radical new approach tomorrow.

And, in any case, political parties spend months developing new election portfolios. Does he really expect people to believe that he can knock up a magical plan over the space of a weekend? It’s nonsense.

Yet, many in the Cabinet, it seems, privately want Starmer to go. So even if Starmer was able to produce a miracle new curative, he’s already lost the room.

I’m not going to plunge the country into chaos by leaving office, Starmer says. But there won’t be chaos if he leaves, just more of the same.

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West wants the Cabinet to agree internally to a new leader, although that appears inconceivable for a number of reasons. It’s not inconceivable that senior figures in the party will encourage Starmer to step down as Ed Miliband apparently did, as the scale of the election defeat would become clear. Though it’s clear that Starmer wants to cling on regardless. It is inconceivable that all the ambitious faces around the Cabinet Table will politely agree who the new Prime Minister should be, like the college of Cardinals appointing a new pope. Don’t expect to see white smoke over Downing Street, just a whole lot of hot air.

I can’t deny that I am watching with great enthusiasm the intrigue unfold about whether there will be a leadership challenge against Starmer. I would certainly take a certain pleasure from seeing him lose his job, like an overconfident coiffured candidate in the Apprentice. I think he is incompetent but also dangerously so; I’ll come on to why shortly.

Yet the truth is that even if he is booted out, we will get someone just like him in return. Mandy’s mate Wes, tax dodger Ange, Rachel from accounts and John Healey, the only person who seriously contends to be even more boring and lacking in original thought than Starmer himself, or David Lammy, the most pompous.

Getting rid of Starmer won’t obviously answer the nation’s problems, but just provide us with a more of the same replacement.

One of the more amusing comments on Friday was Nigel Farage saying that he hoped Starmer stays in power, as he’s Reform’s greatest asset. This may well be true,

Farage offers a reminder of what is wrong with British politics. The elite clings to power through fearmongering about the hostile other who will come in and make life a whole lot worse.

Some of you may remember the New Labour New Danger poster that the Conservative party used to illustrate Tony Blair with demon eyes and suggest to voters that letting him into power may lead to all sorts of demonic consequences.

It didn’t work and the Tories suffered a massive electoral destruction that left them out of power for 13 years.

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Demonising Farage and Polanski is not going to help the Labour party this time either. It will just make them look increasingly out of touch with ordinary voters who are increasingly persuaded by what they have to say, or at least prepared to keep an open mind.

Fearmongering only works if people think you are doing a good job. Most people don’t think the Labour government or the preceding Conservative government did a good job. That’s why more people are giving people like Farage and Polanski some consideration.

I don’t support any political party, so I don’t have a strong view either way, but for what it’s worth, I sense that Farage is appealing to a domestic audience and talking about domestic policies, whereas Polanski has gained a lot of support on the back of outrage about the previous and current governments’ complicity in the genocide in Gaze and the complete inability to stand up to the US for its unconditional support to Netanyahu and his club. I don’t think the next general election will be won on Gaza issues, but time will surely tell.

And, in any case, stopping Farage or Polanksi from winning is not a legitimate political strategy as compared to, say, setting out a clear plan that voters like and believe will be implemented in full. The more time one spends talking about the terrible opposition who has to be stopped, the less time is spent talking about the problems that needs to be fixed, particularly when you are government and are supposed to be fixing those problems.

People believe that the Labour government isn’t fixing their problems as the conservative government didn’t before them and are voting with their feet.

What happened in the British local elections was a seismic political shift. Local elections never garner this much national media attention nor secure such a higher voter participation percentage.

And this is a political shift that we are seeing all across Europe for exactly the same reason.

Globalist governments cannot take responsibility for their own political failures and failings. There is always some internal and, indeed, external enemy that they have to blame.

In their vacuous speeches, they can never admit that the problems their citizens face are because of policy decay or the anti-democratic creep of the European Commission. If you are in France, the problems are ignored because le Pen is a bigger threat. In Hungary, pick Orban. In Poland the Law and Justice Party. In Germany it’s Alternativ fur Deutschland.

But everywhere, it is Putin’s fault. And it’s also China’s fault or it’s Iran’s fault and now, in some cases, it is Donald Trump’s fault.

Vladimir Putin offers the perennial get out of jail free card. Energy prices are high, well that’s Putin’s fault and his illegal war. Websites stop working at Jaguar, Putin’s fault. Elderly lady in Cleethorpes trips up in Aldi, damn that Putin.

Yet, it was a choice to impose an energy embargo on Russia that has massively increased the price of energy in the UK while having no impact on Russia’s economy. It was our choice to send over fifteen billion pounds in aid to Ukraine where much of it is stolen by Zelensky’s cronies. It has been our choice not to pursue a diplomatic settlement to the war in Ukraine which would allow us to wind down the pipeline of permanent financial aid to Ukraine. It has been our choice recently to support the EU’s 90 billion Euro loan to Ukraine to keep fighting to the last Ukrainian until 2027. It has been labour’s choice to explore ways to cut welfare benefits to spend more on our military with its epic mismanagement. Remember the winter fuel payment fiasco? It has been our choice to commit to a massive increase in military spending which we can’t afford and which will lead to tax rises and cuts.

These have all been acts of political choice. Even if you can pin blame on Putin for starting the war, you can’t really blame Putin for our willing it to continue with no end in sight.

And here’s the point. Ordinary people are asking, well, why can’t we spend money on our British problems?

That is the call that alternative political parties appear to be responding to at these latest elections. Because the Uniparty of Labour, the Conservatives and even the Lib Dems are all in favour of endless wars on the backs of British citizens.

This is precisely the challenge that all mainstream political parties face across Europe. They are looking at the evil outsider abroad and forgetting about their citizens at home.

Peace should not be about helping Putin. War shouldn’t be about making Zelensky richer and keeping him in his job free of elections. British political parties should focus on British citizens first. Same too for the Germans, French, Poles and even those warmongering Estonians.

Peace will allow the nations of Europe to focus on fixing their own internal problems while finding ways to live in peace and harmony with other countries, with the economic, social and cultural benefits that will flow from that.

There is a reason why the National Rally candidate has a good shot at become French President later this year or why Friedrich Merz, more unpopular in Germany, somehow, than Keir Starmer is in Britain, may even be replaced by an AfD Chancellor. This is the political change happening in Britain right now.

Don’t call it populism. Democracy is by definition populist, giving citizens the chance to choose the party portfolios they live the most. Don’t call it divisive, as elections involve the choice between one over another. That’s democracy bitches.

If you focus on helping your own citizens they will focus on you.

And herein another of Starmer’s failings. He spends far too much time at international meetings, trying to play the role of global statesman. He isn’t a global statesman and even if he wanted to be a global statesman he couldn’t because Britain today is in such a diminished state.

Bizarrely, some labour talking heads were talking about the great job Starmer had been doing on the international stage keeping Britain safer, yet everything this and the previous conservative government did put us all in greater peril, not to mention impoverishment. Starmer is trying to drag the UK back into the EU for economic reasons, even though the bloc is tipping into depression and in any case have become a largely military bloc aimed at fighting forever wars with Russia.

These international meetings serve no purpose to British people apart from to line the pockets of the tailors from whom Lord Alli buy’s Starmer’s clothes.

And they aren’t even diplomacy. Britain hasn’t been doing that for over twelve years.

They are just meetings of people who already agree with each other, wringing their hands about problems they helped cause, producing declarations that blame everybody but themselves, offering solutions that can never be delivered with money that doesn’t exist, that will instead be borrowed so it can be lent to people who will steal it and then shame us that it wasn’t enough anyway, all the while our pensioners are freezing in their homes, our kids are being knived, our girls are being raped, our hotels are closing to house asylum seekers, our youth have no hope of meaningful employment, our roads are going to the dogs, our northern cities are suffering a deeper entrenchment of the deindustrialisation that started in the 80s and our army couldn’t fight its way out of a paper bag.

If you want to know why the Labour party suffered a mullering at the local elections, just look right here, in our country, not in other people’s countries.

When the General election comes in 2029, it will almost certainly usher in the sort of change that we may well start to see in other European nations.

I’m a diplomat not a politician, so it’s not my place to say what the new government should do. But ending wars that we helped to prolong, spending British money on British problems, and listening to what ordinary, hard-working, salt of the earth British people want from their government, must be a good place to start.

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You can read the discussion below or just watch the video if you haven’t already. One of Professor Hudson’s comments really jumped out at me, was that when the Pentagon Papers were released towards the end of the Vietnam war, he was surprised to learn that they contained practically no consideration of the economic risks and consequences of the war.

This is something I witnessed firsthand in the unfolding policy catastrophe of the UK government’s (and the EU’s) approach towards Russia from 2014 onward - absolutely no thought given to whether we might be hurting ourselves more than we were hurting Russia indeed, in some ways, strengthening Russia at our expense.

This same economic blindness can be witnessed today in the wholly witless Trump war against Iran, in which Iran is now effectively sanctioning the US and its Allies.

Diplomats don’t do economics because it isn’t sexy enough. If you want to know why the UK is a rapidly declining global power, it’s because those who craft our foreign policy, both in the executive and at a political level, are economically illiterate.

I hope you find the interview interesting.

Professor Michael Hudson – in discussion with Ian Proud

IP – I was talking about the old adage that “wars are won by economies not armies”, and I think the war in Iran has slightly refined that phrase, that “wars are won by economics not military force”. What’s your view?

MH – my view is probably in agreement with what the military is said to have discussed with Donald Trump last night and for the last few days. They’ve all told him that the invasion cannot work without an enormous sacrifice, and the United States ever since the Vietnam War, that led to the ending of the draft, no longer has a landed army. It’s depended on the client armies for the middle East, Israel and Al Qaeda in Syria.

So, it’s not going to be able to invade, not even Kharg Island which Trump had talked about, and the air force also has expressed great worry about trying to repeat an air attack on Iran which is very well protected by missiles now, and Iran in the last few days has threatened to sink American ships [this may now have happened] so Trump was told by the military at least, “don’t attack, you’d better use other means such as continue the choke point of stopping oil trade through the strait of Hormuz and impose sanctions on Iran”. And given the fact that the stock market has been going up for the last few days, international markets, even in Asia have been going up, it’s obvious that most of the large institutional money across the world thinks that somehow all of this is going to be settled, that economic means, sanctions are going to lead to some sort of resolution of the fight instead of all out war which would lead to Iran responding by bombing much of the oil capacity of the Arab OPEC counties especially in the Emirates, and also heavy bombing of American military bases, especially Israel.

So, the money that’s being bet, is being bet on it all going to be economic policy not military policy.

IP – and yet, I’m not convinced that economic sanctions and the continuance of economic sanctions against Iran including through a blockade will work. Iran’s been sanctioned since 1979. It has built up some reserves of its own from its current account surpluses. The greater pressure surely will be on American consumers, European consumers, Chinese consumers, consumers round the world who face higher prices?

MH – well, it’s not only consumers, it’s governments, it’s debtors, it’s going to bring about what looks to me like a new grand depression if Trump continues this. The problem is that economic sanctions are causing immense problems for the rest of the world. You’re already seeing shortages in oil and especially in fertilizer which is going ro reduce crop yields, helium which is already said to be reducing the MRI machinery in hospitals that need it and especially in etching computer chips, you’re ending up the flow of naphtha into plastics, you’re having all of these major industries being reduced, and the initial economic view was, well, oil and power were only 10% of GDP.

But, if you don’t have oil and gas and an interconnected economy, then you are not only going to lose oil and gas consumption, you are going to lose all of the investment and the employment and the production industries that need oil to exist. So, the threat is that countries are going to look like what Germany looked like after 2022 when it stopped importing Russian gas, that’s the problem.

You’re also having the financial problems. Well, a few months ago Donald Trump came out and said, yes it’s true, that if we really blocked the oil trade and tried to starve Iran, by starving the whole rest of the world, the rest of the world’s going to suffer, but, the United States is going to suffer less than other countries, because our country is self-sufficient in oil and gas.

But the problem is that the United States is not just a gas station with atom bombs as they say about Russia, it’s a financialised economy and if other countries are not able to balance their payments as a result of having to pay much more money for their fuel imports and fertilizer imports and all the others, they can’t pay their foreign debts, that the global south countries have been running up and falling to, and the private sector industries cannot afford to pay their credit.

There’ll be defaults all along the financial system, and the United States is the most financially exposed economy in the world, as it was in 1929 with the stock market crash, and so there’ll be problems with the United States that will be just as serious as other countries are suffering. That’s what Donald Trump does not seem to have taken account of. And the Federal Reserve is not much help here. A lot of the financial community is saying that higher oil prices is going to be inflationary, but the effect of this price increase, that’s already occurring day after day, as long as the Strait of Hormuz is closed by the United States, this is causing deflation. Yes, oil prices are going up, but if the result is unemployment and production cutbacks in industry and agriculture, for the whole economy that’s going to be a huge deflation economy. That’s what depressions are. That’s what is really turning out to be the big threat, despite the fact of what stock markets and bond markets are saying.

IP – do you think that beyond the price of oil, the US is largely self-sufficient in oil, the price of all of its non-oil imports are going to go up because of the supply chain effect of what’s happening in Iran?

MH – that seems to be the case. What’s happening is that the US has been releasing oil from its oil reserves to keep down the price of gasoline also the price of airplane fuels, which has already reduced the volume of air traffic. Well, the problem with all this, is the oil that is being released by the government’s oil reserves finds its counterpart in a sharp increase in US LNG exports and oil exports in the last few months. So in effect, the oil the government is selling, claiming, or pretending that this is going to keep down prices, is flowing out of the country as the oil producers and gas producers, frackers, are making a killing as the foreign rise in energy prices is creating a price umbrella for US produced oil and gas.

IP – what’s the net effect on the serviceability of US debt over the medium term from the deflationary spiral that we might be starting to enter into at the moment?

MH – there’s no problem at all in servicing the US debt because, unlike a lot of other countries, the US debt is at least in its own currency and the US can simply keep printing the money to pay the debt and this is not necessarily inflationary of goods and service prices because when the money’s paid to bond holders and other creditors to the government these creditors and bond holders don’t spend their money on goods and services primarily, they spend it on making new loans and stocks and bonds, increasing the debt overhead.

So, the financial system is very insulated from the real economy of production and consumption and is autonomous from it, that is what mainstream economic theory doesn’t get. The mainstream theory is largely designed by public relations mythology by the financial sector, to depict it as playing a productive role in the real economy. But, finance is independent from production, and banks don’t really lend money for financing new industrial capital formation, if anything that is the job of the stock market through IPOs and public offerings.

The financial market makes money financially not through interacting with the real economy. And I say this despite the fact that in the last year, half of the growth in US consumption was accounted for by the wealthiest 10% of the population. But there was a discussion of this in the 17^th century by Malachy Postlethwayt and other writers that not many people read today. And Postlethwayt and other critics of foreign debt said well this foreign debt that we are paying to foreign creditors and domestic creditors is a drain on the economy, because these creditors don’t spend their money on domestic industry or agriculture they spend their money either on making new loans or luxury real estate either in London Paris and other financial centres and they buy imports.

So that most of this growth in US private sector consumption is largely luxury imports from Italy and England for cars and other countries and this is not recognised if you just make a simplistic assumption that what is paid to creditors is recycled into the real economy.

IP - In short, the bankers are just going to get richer by war again?

MH – yes and if you look at how they got richer so far this year, Chase Manhattan and other banks have got richer by trading, trading securities that are already in place manoeuvring bio deals, arranging mergers. They haven’t got rich in any way that is interacting with the industrial system itself, except to load the industrial system down with debt by private capital companies. The stock market just today (1 May) turned down because Spirit Airlines went broke because of the increasing interest rates that squeezed its ability to pay the debts that it took on to finance its expansion of budget airlines.

So, you are already seeing the result of the financial squeeze on domestic US industries that you are going to see throughout the world, much as you saw in Europe after 2022. You’re going to see this throughout the world if oil prices continue [to rise]. So, when Trump’s attempt to get back to your first question, when Trump tries to solve the fight with Iran by economic means this is a self-terminating means of winning success because it’s creating such a cost to other countries that are suffering from these sanctions and high interests rates and from the absence of oil, that they are looking around for how they manage to insulate their economies from the United States.

So, the result of this war, which Trump undertook without talking to his European allies, without talking to his middle eastern OPEC allies, the effect of this instead of isolating Iran, it looks as it its going to end up if it goes on a year or two, isolating the United States economy itself as other countries protect themselves from US actions.

IP – I 100% agree. My point about wars being won by economics and not military force, is not to say that US economic pressure on Iran will succeed, but, and has been the case in Russia and Ukraine, Russia being the most sanctioned country on the planet, Russia has inflicted more economic harm on Europe, or rather, Europe has inflicted more economic harm on itself.

MH – the word you use is succeed and that’s really the key. Conflicts are won by successful economic policy, and the result of sanctions over time is almost universal from Iran itself to Russia.

Sanctions force other countries to become self sufficient in what they can no longer import. So when NATO countries imposed sanctions against Russian trade in 2022, Russia had to begin growing its own fruits and vegetables and dairy, so what you had very quickly from 2023, 2024 a Russian dairy industry arose [in fact, this process started in 2014). Russian cheese production, Russian vegetable production, Russian grain exports greatly exceeded, so sanctions are almost always self-defeating over the long term.

They cause short term pain that other countries cope with by becoming independent of the ability of other countries to weaponise their foreign trade to impose sanctions and hurt other countries. The result is this leads to self sufficiency by other counties. So other counties now are discussing, the Financial Times has been discussing all week long, how can counties really get independent not only of Trump’s war against Iran but of oil and gas. Good news for the green parties, They will have to develop wind power, solar power and nuclear power.

How are they going to get independent of Trump’s attempt to freeze the accounts of Iranian deposits in western banks? The Treasury department sent lists of here are all the Iranian deposits in central banks, in foreign commercial banks. “You have to confiscate them.”

Well these banks are saying how do we insulate ourselves? How will the US punish us if we don’t comply with this? They say they’ll force us to not have access to the US western banking system. Well foreign central banks, foreign commercial banks say we are going to put a check on accounts, and if the US tells its depositors you are going to have to pull all your money out of these designated banks that makes loans to Iran, because they are helping Iran process its financial payments and even lending to it, well the banks can say we are going to put a freeze on any big accounts that threaten to be withdrawn in compliance to US demands. You’ll have a freezing up of the whole western financial system because of these demands. If they arm it there are going to cause a huge break in the financial chain of payments and it’s difficult to say right now how this can be solved without creating a whole alternative financial system to break free of US bank sanctions.

IP – the other irony is that Iran has been so successful in turning the economic pain back on the US and the wider economies of Europe that when any peace deal is agreed, one of the things that the Iranians are going to insist upon is sanctions removal.

MH – yes, they are a classic case, but Russia has already been a classic case. I think that the US intelligence agencies don’t like to acknowledge that the policies that the President has decided on aren’t going to work. Because they like to be team players, So you are really not getting much criticism or discussion of what you and I are discussing today.

IP -that’s the problem of group thinks. And it’s equally a problem in London as it is in Paris in Brussels as it is in Washington DC. It’s not just that people don’t want to call out failure, it’s that they can’t see it themselves, because they are in an organisational culture in which curiosity, critical thinking and the analysis of real evidence is actively discouraged because of the risk that that will throw up results that smash the Overton window.

MH – that seems to be the bureaucratic mentality certainly here but also in most governments probably.

IP – I was reading a really good piece that you wrote for Counterpunch about the guns or butter debate which is an important debate that doesn’t happen. We’ve recently had in the UK a former Labour government minister and Secretary general of NATO lord Robertson from the Labour party – the socialist party – I’m a centrist and don’t really support any political party – saying that the UK should be cutting welfare benefits to spend more on the military.

So, this was less butter and more guns, and this was a socialist saying this. There’s no real debate, at all, on the guns and butter issue, why do you think that is?

MH – that is what makes today’s war with Iran and this new cold war, so different to what it was in the Vietnam war. In the Vietnam war there was a huge response by students, very largely students who didn’t want to be drafted, and I think their wanting to avoid the draft, seems to have been even more important to their opposition to war itself.

But, there was a whole group of economists, I was part of a Columbia group, that were criticising and saying here are the costs of the Vietnam war. And I think in around 1971 or so, when McNamara and the Pentagon papers were all released for people to see, I was brought down to Washington for a discussion, before they were officially discussed, to make my comments on them.

And the interesting thing was that in all these Pentagon papers, there are no discussion of economics at all. No discussion of the balance of payments. And yet when I was working in the 1960s, I was the balance of payments economist for Chase Manhattan bank. Every Friday we would look at the Federal Reservice report on money and gold and watch the money supply going up and the gold draining out as General De Gaulle and the Germans also, cashing in all the dollars that American was throwing off in South East Asia, Vietnam, Laos Cambodia, which was largely in the Franc system as French colonies. All of the dollars were being sent to France to be cashed into Gold.

The whole economy there was an increase in military spending, that was essentially, as it is today, crowding out social spending, and essentially led to much of the opposition to the American war on economic grounds, because they said that, well, “what are we gaining from the war in Vietnam? Vietnam and Cambodia, why are we recuing the French Empire when after World War II we didn’t rescue the British Empire? Why don’t we just try to buy them all out and kill them with kindness and that would probably have worked all the better?”

Well, you are not having that discussion at all today. At that time, a lot of the anti-war movement came within the Democratic party itself people like Seymour Millman, was a Democrat, he was one of our group art Columbia, and he was going around, Terence McCarthy, myself, we were all going all around the country, giving lectures, writing in magazines.

There were newspapers that were voicing all of this economic critique, of the Vietnam war. New York had two daily papers, the New York Tribune in addition to the New York Times, and the Tribune ran most of our articles. So there was a whole discussion, of what are the costs going to be of the military build up and how are we going to pay them without cutting back other government spending, what do people really want?

Well, people wanted other [than] military spending and that is what defeated President Johnson, McNamara and others in 1968. Today there is no discussion of that, you have both the Democrats and the Republicans supporting the war against Iran, supporting the war against Russia, and preparing for the likelihood of a crazy war against China, What is the point of all this? And yet there is very little domestic opposition to this because the public media, the publishing companies, the newspapers, the TV stations have all become much more concentrated in very small hands that all support the war economy. So, that’s why the discussion of the economic costs of the war is largely on YouTube and the internet.

IP – it also shows a division between domestic policy and foreign policy. One of my beliefs is that governments spend far too much time on foreign policy and forget about their domestic voters, and that may help to explain the current rise in popularity in Europe at least, of so-called populist parties. But also Trump’s rise to power as somebody who was going to break that cycle of never-ending wars, only to repeat it. He seems to be going exactly against the manifesto upon which he was voted into power which is one of the remarkable things.

MH – this is remarkable from Europe to the United States. All of the public opinion polls show that the public is overwhelmingly against the war against Iran and the middle east, against the war in Russia, but that has not stopped Starmer in Britian, or Macron or France or Merz in Germany from supporting the war, and there is no election there for the next two or three years just as in the United States, just as there is no election for another two years. So, there’s an inability for the population as a whole to elect a government to represent what its opinion polls are saying. A democracy is not voting for what policies and how the economies going to be being structured, it’s about what influencers do you want to elect to support some policy you have no control over.

IP – I completely agree. All this justification on what is called military Keynesianism, spending more on the military can revive our economy, that’s such a common debate. However, I wonder about ordinary Keynesianism, in which we spend all that money but spend it on our own countries. Military Keynesianism appears to be quite a dominant press narrative of globalist governments in Europe and I’m less clear about whether that resonates in the US as well.

MH - Keynesianism evolved into post Keynesianism, largely because of modern monetary theory, which was centred in the University of Missouri at Kansas city, where I was one of the Professors during the whole take off. The whole emphasis of modern monetary theory has become part of American policy, that thought you had to use against government debt, and supported the debtors against the creditor interests, essentially wanted progressive taxation to be spent into the economy, to help it grow, to create the money, to service the debt. But the post Keynesians point out that the key really is “what is money?” And the fact is that governments don’t have to tax in order to finance wars and to run deficits. They can simply print the money, or rather the federal reserve bank can create the money, and this is what’s happened in the US since 2008 and 2009 when the junk mortgage crisis collapsed, threatened banks with negative equity especially, as City Corp and Bank of America and other big banks.

So, the result was that the Federal Reserve revived the financial sector, not only US banks but French banks and German banks, that were wrapped up in this, they simply had this zero interest rate policy, they flooded the market with inexpensive Federal Reserve credit to the banks enabling banks to lower the interest rates that increased the prices of real estate above the break even point and revived bank liquidity and created the stock and bond market boom, the biggest bond market boom in history.

All of this was purely money creation, in a purely financial way. Well by the time that you had George W Bush’s war in Iraq, Dick Cheney and Bush said, “well, there really is no limit on what we can spend, we can just spend whatever we want.”

In a way, you had the war party develop modern monetary theory in practice but not for the social purposes that the post-Keynesians and the modern monetary theorists were pressing. Well that’s what happening today, you have the central bank essentially flooding the market with money and now recently you’ve had Treasury Secretary Bessent offering to create huge new swap agreements with other countries to just provide dollars to other economies so that they won’t be interrupted and wrecked by rising oil prices. They can afford to essentially finance the rise in oil prices and the depressions through pure money creation, but on US terms.

IP – I suppose another bi-product for the US itself, is that not only are ordinary people getting poorer, but ordinary businesses are getting crowded out, as government funding is going into military Keynesianism i.e the very well protected defence industrial sector.

MH –There’s something ironic about that term military Keynesianism. What you’ve seen in the last year in Iran is that the arms really don’t work, you think of bombs and missiles and ships are military, but it turns out they don’t work very well at all. That Iran is able to just go right through the missile defence systems to shoot down the airplanes, these arms are not really for fighting, they are not for military purpose, they are just to provide money to the military industrial complex, essentially to make luxury products like Rolls Royce automobiles or fancy clothes. They are for show, they’re not really for fighting. So, you’ve had military Keynesianism become decreasingly military in character, it just doesn’t work, that’s what is so ironic about this.

IP – it’s a massive, massive irony. And again, back to the point at the start, wars are won by economics not military force, the Iranians and actually the Russians, appear to be winning, despite in theory at least, being economically much smaller than the collective might of the west, they are nevertheless winning, and economics is winning it for them, which is the big irony in all of this.

MH – indeed.

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IP – one of the things that gets spoken about a lot is the Gulf States, and their sustainability long term as the US presence in the middle east becomes under threat, as the whole petrodollar system starts to – very slowly – reduce in its global influence. Do you see any real world economic consequences for Gulf States from this shifting of power that is happening before our eyes right now through the war in Iran?

MH – a shift in power in many dimensions. Iran, there’s probably going to be some military attack on Iran, even if it’s only what Trumps intends to say this is a token attack, we’re going to send a bomb, you know “I have to tell my people I have some sort of victory”.

As soon as there’s a bomb or a plane, Iran is going to respond, by very heavily bombing, not only the US military bases, the problem is not only driving America out of west Asia, it’s about ending the whole US symbiosis with the OPEC countries. So, what we’re going to attack is not only the military bases in the Arab Emirates, we’re going to attack all the US companies that have invested there, the automatic [artificial] intelligence companies that have planned all these huge data processing centres, to use the inexpensive Emirates oil and in Saudi Arabia too, to run centres.

The only way to end the US control of OPEC countries, that is creating a political symbiosis that has led the Emirates to back the US military to back Israel, and to provide the main military basis. Right now, it’s reported there are four refuelling planes in the Emirates airport waiting to help in case Trump should follow a general air attack on Iran. You’re going to have a disconnecting of the US with the Arab OPEC countries and probably the other countries.

You mentioned the petrodollar. The petrodollar is a biproduct of the fact that a central element of US foreign policy for the last century has been the control of the oil trade in the world and it wants to control the world’s oil because this is a choke point, and it has been able to say to other countries, that if you don’t follow foreign policies that the US supports on national security grounds, we are going to cut you off from oil, this is a chokepoint.

Especially the last two administrations of the US have weaponised the oil trade, they are trying to isolate other oil producers that are not under US control. They have isolated Venezuela already years ago from Chavez onwards, and most recently by seizing its President. They’ve isolated Russia by imposing sanctions on it and they were isolating Iran since 1979, so the US is trying to isolate these other countries, basically it’s saying, if we can’t control your oil, Iran, we are going to destroy it. That’s what Trump has just said, He’s backed the seizure of Iraqi oil, saying, well we have to recover all the costs we spent going to Iraq.

Well, if the US is going to destroy non-US controlled oil, then it’s going to insist on its own terms of the oil trade. And back in 1974 this was done when the OPEC countries basically Saudia Arabia other countries, basically friendly to the US, negotiated with the US to quadruple the price of their oil after the US quadrupled the price of grain. So, the agreement between the US and these countries, I made a number of trips to the White House, met with the Treasury and the military to discuss all of this at the time, they said you can charge whatever you want with the oil, but whatever you do, you can make whatever you want, but the agreement is that you are going to invest your oil surpluses in American bonds, you can’t buy particular industries, you can’t buy control of any major industry, we are able to buy industries in Europe and other counties, but you’ll make your money in bonds and US stocks, you’ll recycle it.

You can charge whatever you want, but you have to keep your savings in dollars. So, the result is that over the last fifty years, the OPEC countries, especially the Arab OPEC countries, have made huge investments, bond holdings and loans to US banks, that now the Saudi national fund is a Trillion dollars. But even as the OPEC countries have recycled all this oil export earnings to the US, supporting the US balance of payments, these countries themselves have taken on huge amounts of debt, to finance their own domestic creation of a non-oil economy, that’s been their objective.

The result is that despite all of the money that they’ve been making on oil exports, they’ve saved it all, invested it abroad, they’ve been using this export proceeds to finance yet new real estate development, industrial development, refineries, chemical companies, that they need to move their economies beyond oil. Well, what’s happened, now that he war in Iran has interrupted all of this oil revenue, they are in a squeeze, and it’s obvious that the Arab Emirates for instance have told the US “we have a problem. We have to finance the money that many of our industries our government investments have, we have to finance it by selling some of the US securities that we’ve been building up for all these years.”

The problem is that many of these securities have been lent to many of these automatic (artificial) industries, the silicon valley magic 7 for instance, they’ve been investing in private capital, and right now, because the US economy is so heavily over debt leveraged, many funds like Blackrock have blocked the ability of investors to withdraw their funds. There is a market in these investments, but the market prices, if you sell the investments that you have made in these private capital funds, they’re now selling at heavy discounts to the original purchase.

Well, the Emirates don’t want to take a loss on this, hardly by surprise, and that’s what’s led to the swap agreements, that Secretary Bessent has agreed with them. You’re not going to have to sell the investments you’ve made in private capital firms, you’re not going to have to sell your bond holdings at a loss as our interest rates have gone up, we’ll make a swap agreement, we’ll lend you a few hundred million dollars you’ll give us your currency, and that way you can use these dollars that you’ve borrowed against issuing your own currency, for your spending and you won’t have to sell any us investments.

So, the whole purpose of these swaps is to keep the US financial market from all of a sudden suffering a crash. That’s right now the central concern of Bessent. He’s written a number of very good articles explaining well; the Federal Reserve under the Biden administration had acquired an enormous amount of federal debt from he banks, and it agreed to pay interest on the federal reserve accounts. So, the federal reserve has lent money to banks for many years at 0.1% they could invest it a 2% or more as deposits at the Federal Reserve, just recycling it, it’s all financial.

He’s said we’ve got to wind down this debt leverage. Well it’s difficult to see how it can be wound down. The danger that Bessent saw to the war in Iran, the attempt of other countries to finance their oil deficits, and OPEC’s failure of oil income, and other countries need to pay higher oil prices, to get the oil to power their factories, heat their homes, all of that is going to lead to a sell off of US securities, and when there’s a sell of prices of stock and bonds go down.

That’s what this war is threatening to cause, the longer it goes on. If the military convinces Trump that you can’t win a military war, any attempt to stifle Iranian development to the point where, as Trump says, “they cry Uncle we give up”, they’re going to say “you’ve got to be kidding, we’ve been isolated since 1979. If we haven’t crashed yet, we’re not going to crash. We can outlast you.”

That’s the dynamic that we’re seeing right now that we’re going to be seeing unfolding all this year and next year.

IP – I completely agree. It is, you’re right, a total money recycling scheme, where, in the irony of ironies, because the US is so leveraged, it needs to lend more to other counties to prevent its financial collapse. It’s quite a remarkable state of affairs.

MH – that’s the irony, that military spending is not pulling the economy out of depression, it’s causing it.

IP – indeed. Military Keynesianism as opposed to just Keynesianism.

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I have said for a long time that the war in Ukraine will continue into 2027. Without a major rethink of policy on the European side, which currently appears extremely unlikely, or without a significant military escalation from the Russian side, which is possibly more likely, the war could in fact run on much longer than that.

I remain extremely pessimistic of there being any policy change on the European side under the current leadership of Von der Leyen with Merz in charge in Berlin, Macron in charge in Paris and Starmer in charge in London.

The main reason is that the European position towards the war has remained unchanged since its beginning. Arguably it has hardened with the plans to remilitarise Europe. The current posture rests on their being no negotiations and no concessions towards Russia, even in spite of US led efforts under Trump to broker peace, which the European side has sought to derail at every turn.

I call this approach ‘anti-diplomacy’ in which negotiations themselves are viewed as a prize and are withheld for fear of rewarding the adversary, in this case Russia.

As it relates to the Ukraine war there is an underlying and sometimes stated assumption here too, including in the mainstream media, that eventual war with Russia is inevitable, and that Ukraine is buying time for Europe to rearm.

At the frontline of Europe’s ‘anti-diplomacy’ is its arch ‘anti-diplomat’, Kaja Kallas, who appears to have no diplomatic skills, or at least not outside of the committee rooms of Brussels, where she appears remarkably effective in herding the cats.

Her most recent reassertion of ‘anti-diplomacy’ happened last week when she said that the EU shouldn’t “beg” to talk to the Russians.

“What we have seen so far is that Russia does not want to engage in any kind of dialogue,” Kallas said after a Nordic-Baltic ministerial meeting. “We should not humiliate ourselves by being the demanders — you know, we beg you to talk to us.” Instead, she said, the goal must be to push Russia “from pretending to negotiate to actually negotiate.”

This was the most bizarre statement for several reasons.

Firstly, Russia has shown itself willing to engage in dialogue. Immediately after the war started in March/April 2022 when a peace deal was almost reached in Istanbul, before it was scotched by Boris Johnson and Victoria Nuland. During talks in Istanbul in the summer of 2025 after Trump came to power. In Putin’s meeting with Trump in Alaska which led to some sort of understanding of what Russia’s demands were. In direct talks with between the Russian and Ukrainian side in late 2025 and early 2026.

Russia’s participation in negotiations was neither demanded nor begged for.

Objectively, European politicians, through ‘anti-diplomacy’, have been unwilling to enter into negotiations with Russia at any point since the war started. After the Alaska talks, Ursula von der Leyen said there was no intent in Moscow to engage in peace talks, even after Putin had held talks with Trump, which was bizarre but also familiar, given the frequency with which this line is trotted out in Brussels and elsewhere across Europe.

Ten months after the war started, Joe Biden said he would only talk to Putin if Russia showed real intent to end the war, in other words, the US would not enter into talks unless Russia agreed to every western demand without securing any concessions including on NATO membership.

In December, Macron said that Europe will need to engage with Putin though that offer went nowhere amid infighting in Brussels around who should be the European representative in Putative talks.

Keir Starmer has said several times that he has no plans to talk to Putin, indeed, the Uk said that it would not enter into talks with Russia even if Europe did.

So, this “anti-diplomacy”, pushed by Ukraine’s western sponsors in which not talking to Russia is the norm, is established and fairly set in stone. In fact, it was first initiated by the UK Foreign Office in the summer of 2014, after Philip Hammond became foreign secretary. Twelve years down the track, the Europeans have adopted this approach lock stock and smoking missile launcher, and now own it.

More recently, Belgian Prime Minister Bart de Wever has suggested talks with Russia and absolutely nothing has happened.

So, looking back at Kallas’ statement you can see how absurd it is.

Firstly, it is absurd in its suggestion that Europe might “beg” Russia for peace talks. Europe has done everything in it power to avoid talks. If von der Leyen, Merz, Macron, Starmer, or any combination suggested talks with Russia, I believe Putin would agree to that. All the evidence of the talks that have taken place so far, brokered by the US, suggest that is so.

Indeed, throughout the war, there have been ongoing Russia-Ukrainian talks about practical issues such as prisoner and body swaps, and also on the reunification of displaced children with their Ukrainian parents.

A key principle of talks is the need to discuss areas of disagreement and search for ways to find compromise that will be acceptable to both sides and which both sides can agree to. And when I say both sides, I mean just that, both the Russian side and the Ukrainian side. Any peace deal will have to leave both countries feeling safer than they did before the war, and confident that war won’t resume again.

A popular misinformation line in Europe’s “anti-diplomacy” has been that Ukraine must not be left out of talks. And yet, when has Ukraine ever been left out of talks since the war began?

The pathology of European diplomacy has descended into holding countless Summits and meetings about peace that Zelensky attends, but to which the other combatant in the conflict – Russia – is not included.

This summitry serves not to resolve differences between Russia and Ukraine and search for common ground, but rather to reinforce the Ukrainian position as the only right and just position that should not be resiled from.

These summits are intended to avoid any possibility of compromise on Ukraine’s side and to insist on total compromise from the Russian side. As I’ve said before, Zelensky’s permanent star billing at these events allows him to own the narrative that Russia isn’t interested in peace and that only by supporting Ukraine with more funding and weapons, can peace be achieved.

One meeting between Putin and Trump, however, provoked a cacophony about Zelensky being excluded, yet this, too, is nonsense, as Trump has met him on several occasions.

Diplomatic negotiations aren’t about friendship they are about dispute resolution. They are not about favouring one side over another side. A single meeting does not confer legitimacy. It just confirms that there are important things to be discussed.

Europe’s “anti-diplomacy” has created a vacuum which, until Trump came to power, US leaders and now, European and British leaders filled with money and weapons. They didn’t fill it, by the way, with troops, preferring to let Zelensky fight to the last Ukrainian, so the Poles, Germans, French, Italians and sparse ranks of Tommies could be spared.

This is what I have described many times as the neither war nor peace posture of the British and Europeans. They don’t want a direct war with Russia, neither do they want peace with Russia, and so proxy war has become the preferred policy fudge whatever the cost in Ukrainian lives and livelihoods, not to mention Ukraine’s catastrophic depopulation and demographic cliff edge.

What is absolutely clear, is that funding Ukraine and giving it more weapons isn’t intended at resolving Ukraine’s dispute with Russia.

Many will say, of course, that if we don’t give Ukraine weapons, then Russia will take over the whole country. But no evidence is ever provided that Russia’s goal in entering this was really to conquer the whole of Ukraine, rather than to prevent the possibility of Ukraine being used as another NATO client state on Russia’s border.

Right at the start of the war, the first round of peace talks in Istanbul seemed to reach a point where Russia and Ukraine could agree to the conditions for the war to be brought to a close. That included Ukrainian neutrality and non-membership of NATO and an acceptance that Ukraine could join the EU.

So, having captured much less land than Russia occupies today, the Russian side was willing to sue for peace and pull its troops back from the north of Kyiv as a confidence building measure.

Organisations such as the Institute for the Study of War in DC, run by Victoria Nuland, has since claimed that the agreement was a surrender of Ukrainian sovereignty.

Yet, I don’t believe the first Istanbul deal would have been a surrender of Ukrainian sovereignty, but rather a guarantee of its future neutrality a neutrality, by the way, which would have allowed for a slow – and let’s be honest it may take a generation if it ever happens – normalisation of relations with Russia.

We now know, of course, that Victoria Nuland encouraged Zelensky not to take the deal. But the point is that both the Ukrainian and Russian negotiation teams believed that it was a deal that both countries could live with in the interests of ending the war.

That is how diplomacy works. Two sides with vastly opposing positions undertake tough negotiations to hammer out a framework that both can live with recognising that, absent a decisive military victory by one side, some compromise will have to be made.

Here we bring in the second aspect of “anti-diplomat” Kallas’ statement.

The goal must be to push Russia “from pretending to negotiate to actually negotiate.”

If you consider this statement carefully, I don’t understand what is meant by “pretending” to negotiate. Russia has been negotiating and a whole host of prisoner swaps, body swaps and children reunifications have happened at different times.

It also raises the question, actually, to negotiate with whom? Because Russia has been negotiating with Ukraine in circumstances where European leaders refused to engage with Russia in negotiations. There has been no pretence on the European side, they have not wanted either to pretend to, or, actually to negotiate.

And it is clear from Kallas’s rhetoric that pushing Russia to actually negotiate means insisting that Russia simply accepts Europe’s demands for how peace should be restored to Ukraine, with no Russian conditions being met in any settlement.

This, again, is clearly absurd, because Russia occupies 20% of Ukraine’s land – whatever the rights and wrongs of that situation - and has the funds to sustain the war for the foreseeable future, a position that Europe does not occupy. If the intention is to pressure Russia to end the war then that itself implies a negotiation that has not been offered by Europe and does not appear to be wanted by Europe.

Because any negotiation will inevitably lead to some concessions being offered to Russia that will allow Putin to settle and be able to show to his people that the four years of devastation was worth it in some way.

Kaja Kallas on the other hand has over the past year made wild demands that peace in Ukraine will only be possible if Russia fully withdraws from Ukraine back to the 1991 borders, pays full war reparations for all the damage caused to Ukraine, while leaving the door open to Ukraine joining NATO.

It may seem obvious to point this out, but Russia will never agree to this. If Russia was losing badly, then the situation might be different. If Russia was losing badly, perhaps Europe might prefer to maintain the war to inflict a much talked about strategic defeat on Russia. But neither of these scenarios have ever appeared even remotely likely.

So, the cold reality boils down to Europe doing everything in their power to avoid the possibility of such diplomatic negotiations that might result in an agreement between Russia and Ukraine that was markedly weaker than the maximalist calls they have been making since the war began.

And, unfortunately, the longer the war continues, the more solidified this position is becoming in Brussels.

Why? Because a peace deal with Russia will amount to a PR disaster for Europe.

Why? Because since the start of the war, European leaders to a person have been saying that Ukraine will win, and that the situation isn’t as bad as portrayed.

That position is relentlessly reinforced by the western mainstream media who insist that Russia is collapsing and that, ultimately, Ukraine will prevail.

This has never looked remotely true to any independent observer who looks at evidence of economic collapse, troops losses and territorial gains. Yet it is an unshakeable narrative punctuated just occasionally, by the odd voice who raises a hand only to be slapped down immediately, like the Punch and Judy crocodile.

Ukraine not winning will make citizens across Europe ask why they were lied to for all this time.

Since the war has started, citizens have been sanctioned, and in some cases had their citizenship revoked, naysayers are summarily detained at British airports and interrogated if they disagree, elections are rigged in Central European nations, lawfare is used in France against the political party with the largest share of public support, all because they disagree with this narrative.

And you need to understand something here too.

When the anti-diplomat Kaja Kallas holds another presser in yet another expensive designer dress or coat, she isn’t doing so to impart truth, she is doing so to gain attention.

She is safe and democratically uncontested – or rather, undemocratically uncontested - in her job at least until 2029 so she can say what she wants with the mainstream media hanging on her every word and reporting it verbatim as if it is truth.

I don’t know how many politicians in the foreign policy space you’ve met, but I’ve met a lot and I can tell you one thing, they love to cut a dash on the world stage. Starmer is another terrible example but then, in fairness, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss were dreadful examples too.

Being right is entirely incidental to being right in front of the camera particularly, in Boris’ case, if the reporter is a bit of a filly.

So, the point is, it is far harder to bullshit when it comes to domestic policy. If the NHS is crap, if rats are taking over Birmingham, if innocent kids are being killed with zombie knives in London because the police are too timid to stop and searching sketchy looking youngsters, if young girls are being gang raped, then these are political stories that a British politician can’t ignore.

When it comes to foreign policy, they have a greater free reign to say what they want because most citizens are first and foremost concerned with basic survival and raising their kids and couldn’t really care that much about the situation in Ukraine. Except when it hits their bank balances, in which case the mainstream media will tell them it is Putin’s fault and we have to defeat him and we will defeat him because Ukraine is winning.

What happens, though, when he isn’t defeated? Suddenly, Ukraine becomes like a giant rat clambering over an uncollected bin bag in Birmingham or a yobbo walking away from a crime scene with a parent in tears over their murdered schoolchild. People will ask, hold on a minute, you said this wasn’t going to happen and that you were going to sort things out. You lied to us.

So, “anti-diplomacy” is held aloft by those like Kallas who are trapped by a dread fear of being revealed as bare faced liars and narcissists who kept a war going because they wanted more time in front of the cameras to shake their booty on the world stage and show how tough they were.

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Because, you see the problem isn’t just that Ukraine isn’t winning and isn’t going to win, the problem is that Europe’s leaders are now making increasingly poverty stricken European citizens pay for Ukraine not to win. All the while Zelensky’s corrupt cronies steal hundreds of millions of dollars in western aid provided, and while ever more brutal tactics are used to drag unwilling young Ukrainian men to the front line – almost never reported by the mainstream media.

While the situation gets ever more dire for Ukraine, European leaders still insist that Ukraine is winning and just a few more weapons and a few more tens of billions will do the trick. Except that it won’t. It will just make us poorer and less safe.

And when I say poorer, peace will be devastating politically to European leaders who have merrily watched their economies tip into deindustrialisation, even before Trump’s war against Iran started. The cost of supporting Ukraine may just as likely go up after the war ends. And the self-harming, de-industrialisation inducing sanctions against Russia will probably remain.

Why have European economies tipped into deindustrialisation? Because, and I have said more times than I care to remember, Europe has chosen as an article to policy to absorb high energy costs to cut off hundreds of billions of Euros which in the past would have been paid to Russia, as a major supplier of oil and gas.

Again, that gamble may have been worthwhile had it worked. Europe’s leaders haven’t explained the cause of their cost of living crises to their citizens as yet. But had Russia buckled economically, pulled out of Ukraine, paid full war reparations to Ukraine then Europe’s leaders would have been able to sell the line to their voters that this was a necessary pain to defeat Russia in Ukraine.

Except that manifestly hasn’t happened. Russia has earned more from oil and gas in the four years since war started than in the four years before war commenced. It has simply sold it to China and India instead.

Yes, economic growth slowed to 1% in 2025 in Russia as the Central Bank sought to bear down on high inflation. But at the same time, growth in Germany was 0.2%, in Italy, 0.5% and in France 0.8%. German debt 63.5% of GDP, France 115% of GDP and Italy 137% of GDP. Russian debt is less than 20% of GDP. Unemployment in Germany 6.3%, in France 7.9% and in Italy 5.5% compared to 2.2% in Russia.

Russia has had to spend more to fund the war in Ukraine, yet its fiscal deficit is still lower than Germany, France and Italy. Europe can only fund the war in Ukraine by borrowing money to lend it to Ukraine. Russia has vast and growing reserve funds from its yearly current account surpluses that it can largely fund the war with little recourse to borrowing.

Russia is the most sanctioned economy on the planet and yet no one seems able to ask why it appears to be performing better than all of Europe’s biggest economies on key economic variables. These are observable facts, taken from data provided by the governments of each country. And before you say it, Russia maintains as high quality statistical standards as Europe.

The point is that Europe’s self-inflicted economic plight has been justified on the basis that it is in the interests of weakening Russia and helping Ukraine to win.

Yet that hasn’t happened. Which raises the question, why not revisit foreign policy towards Russia? Which takes us back to the start of this discussion. Europe has absolutely no interest in a diplomatic settlement with Russia, despite the harm it causes to itself by the war’s continuance in Ukraine. Because Europe is locked in “anti-diplomacy”.

This is hairbrained and yet, as no one in Brussels has been elected to office and as they live off the power trip of being putatively in charge of Europe, it comes as no surprise. What comes as a greater surprise is that the Germans, the French, the Italians and also, of course, the Brits, continue along this fruitless avenue.

The obvious solution, especially since Trump launched his war against Iran, should be to import cheap Russian energy to boost Europe’s economies.

If the war against Iran ended, a more diversified European import mix that included Russian energy would undoubtedly drive down energy prices across Europe.

If the war against Iran continues, Europe’s economic woes will get much worse if they maintain the embargo against Russia, at a time when Russia will profit massively from hugely inflated global energy prices. Lifting the embargo on Russian energy would at least help to moderate the economic damage caused by Trump’s war. Yet that, predictably, seems unlikely.

In fact, I see zero chance of this change in policy position taking place. Anti-diplomats like Kallas are too invested in the status quo and their political futures depend on the war’s continuance, given the devastating impact on their reputations if it ends.

That means Ukraine has been given another 90 billion Euro loan, which the Eurocrats themselves had to borrow to give to them. If the war continues beyond 2027, then a further multibillion loan will follow.

But just imagine if, instead of putting those billions into war, European countries got behind peace in Ukraine and also offered billions to rebuild their country and their economy? How much better off would Ukraine be today if, since 2014, Europe had got behind the Minsk II agreement, told the USA and Victoria Nuland to go away, and settled on peaceable relations with Russia?

How much easier would it be for European citizens to thrive in their countries if their governments were spending money on public services and not war?

How many factories in Europe might survive closure if Europe started buying lower cost Russian energy again?

How many lives would be saved in Ukraine and in Russia if the war ended tomorrow?

How many cities would be able to start to rebuild if the missile and drones stopped flying?

You know the answers to these rhetorical questions, of course.

Yet the anti-diplomats in charge do not or, if they do, are too focussed on clinging on to power prestige and status to admit it.

Europe desperately needs diplomats and states people who put the needs of their citizens first. Right now, you will not find them in Brussels, London, Paris or Berlin. Anyone who votes for globalist liberals in elections coming up over the coming three years is voting for a war with Russia in the future. It’s time for everyone to vote these warmongers out of power at every opportunity and to protest where they can, and to join a growing community of peacemongers worldwide.

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My novel, Searching, a love story, which I have worked on for several years, finally publishes on 4 June 2026.

Many of you will already know that I was Head of Political Section at the British Embassy in Bangkok when the Boxing Day tsunami struck in 2004. I was the first to leave the embassy with the Ambassador on a 900 km drive to the disaster zone and remained there initially for thirteen days before taking my first break.

As part of my diplomatic role in Thailand I found myself overseeing the on-the-ground response to the tsunami, supporting British nationals who had been injured and the relatives of those who had died. I didn’t have any training for something of that magnitude, it was unprecedented. The work was relentless, the pressure unlike anything I’d experienced, either before or since, and the emotional toll brutal. The experience haunts me and I still have to grapple with the residual effects of PTSD.

Searching is a novel that I needed to write for my own healing. Everyone who experienced the tsunami had a life before and after that tragic event. For most, I suspect, life after has been lesser in some way. But I wanted to create an old-fashioned love story about two people who loved each other so much that they had the strength to endure the very worst.

Most of all, I wrote Searching to commemorate the victims of this terrible tragedy and to pay tribute to all those who did their bit to help in the most harrowing of circumstances.

The book blurb is below.

Fate has always conspired to drive Hatty and Monty apart.

High-flier Hatty has been hurt before and hopes that career success in New York is a safer bet than opening her heart. But when she distances herself from Monty, she realises he might be her soul mate.

Monty has loved Hatty from the start and yearns for a life with her. When he finds himself spiralling in the aftermath of the devastating tsunami, he is consumed by the search for his missing father and pushes her away.

When they find their way back to each other, they must confront the question; can true love endure the worst and still bloom, or is some hurt too deep to heal?

Searching pays homage to the healing power of loving relationships.

You can pre-order your copies via Amazon and Waterstones and you can also order a personalised signed copy via my website.

You can also see how advance readers have rated Searching on Goodreads.

Thank you for your support.

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Both Russia and Iran illustrate that wars with oil-rich countries cause oil prices to surge. By using actual warfare alongside economic warfare, the Trump Administration has increased Iran’s economic advantages at America’s expense.

With Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner no-showing in Islamabad for peace talks, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi continued his shuttle diplomacy to Oman and Moscow on Monday. It is without question that Iran and Russia are two countries who have in many ways shocked the world community with their resilience in the face of sanctions and embargoes. They have plenty to talk about as the U.S. remains more committed than ever to shutting their “shadow fleets down.”

Both have as a source of their strength considerable natural resources from which they can generate cash flow to sustain themselves during stand-offs with the West. Russia and Iran have over many years run consistent current account surpluses by virtue of selling their natural resources and importing fewer goods in return.

As I have pointed out countless times, Russia saw bumper export earnings in the first year of the Ukraine war, with a record current account surplus. Likewise, Iran is now “making a mint” from the current war. Indeed, the energy squeeze unleashed by the war has been so harsh that U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was forced early on to issue a sanctions general license to allow the sale of Iranian oil already loaded on vessels, to help ease global supply concerns. That was before Iran announced the tollbooth system it wants to put in place to charge tankers for Hormuz transit.

Despite all of that, both Russia and Iran have already secured a significant financial advantage. Iran describes its approach as a “resistance economy” which has leaned heavily on oil revenue in the face of stiff challenges, such as rampant inflation, and has built up gold and currency reserves to manage short-term shocks. Clearly, the more recent U.S. move to counter-blockade the Strait of Hormuz, including seizing Iranian vessels, is an attempt to choke the revenue spigot. It will have an effect, but it is not clear how much Iran has in reserves, and for how long it can hold out during a dramatic revenue drop.

Likewise, Russia’s “fortress economy” model has endured 12 years of sanctions, leaning on surpluses from oil sales which are used to meet fiscal needs without a significant requirement to grow debt, which still stands at less than 20% of GDP. And as I pointed out recently, clamping down on oil shipping delivers mixed results, at best.

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Iran has now been subject to economic sanctions for 47 years, and yet has been able to record economic growth in the years since COVID. That’s not to say the country is in great shape. Its economic headaches are far more acute than those faced by Russia, without a doubt. Iranians are getting poorer and the financial system is in zombie territory, in a more extreme version of the dysfunction that now characterizes Ukraine’s financial system.

But as mentioned before, there are reserves and more importantly, rather than the war producing the hoped-for coup d’etat and regime change, many Iranians have rallied around the flag on the back of an upsurge in nationalist sentiment.

As with Russia, the Western mainstream media continually reports on the likely implosion of Iran’s economy as sanctions and global isolation intensify as a way to legitimize the war’s continuance. But, if Iran wasn’t going to buckle economically in the years before the war when its oil exports and earnings were sagging, it isn’t going to do so now, with the oil market booming in its favor.

Inevitably, the calculus in Tehran, as it has been in Moscow, will be that they have a higher pain threshold on the back of decades of hardship, and that they can inflict greater pain on their Western opponents.

In any economic warfare, the attacker has to be prepared to accept economic pain to secure ultimate victory. Speaking from personal experience, one of the reasons Europeans sanctions against Russia were never as tough as they could have been was a reluctance among EU member states to accept the domestic economic pain of a more hardline approach.

Americans have now seen prices surge since the war started, with gas prices rising by 30% in the space of a month and other household necessities costing more. Some are questioning the impact of the Iran war for Republicans in the mid-term elections in November. Neither Iran nor Russia face the same democratic crunch point.

Moreover, Iran does not face the same debt servicing pressure as America as its official national external debt stands at a mere 27% of GDP, having been cut off of the western financial system for so long. Instead, it can keep printing money, borrowing from domestic banksm and living with the inflationary consequences at a time of war. Iran’s economy has been cauterised from exposure to the global economy, meaning that any new sanctions will have limited effect.

None of this is wizardry. Any country hit by sanctions seeks every possible means to circumvent them, including smuggling, trans-shipment, the use of intermediaries, and alternative currencies. New methods of evading sanctions crop up all the time in Iran, not the least the receipt of payments in crypto-currencies.

Herein we see the danger of comparing like for like. Manifestly, America has nominally, the largest economy in the world; the Pentagon alone spends at least three times more each year than Iran’s total yearly economic output. So, slamming Iran with US missiles and sanctions, not to mention assassinating its leaders should, in theory at least, bring the country to its knees and precipitate revolution. And yet it still hasn’t.

As in real warfare, in the economic battlespace, if President Donald Trump wanted to defeat Iran, he needed to go in a lot harder and a lot faster than he did. That he didn’t suggests his gamble has already failed.

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I was pleased to meet Alexander Vassiliev, who now lives in the UK, but was formerly a KGB Intelligence Officer in the American Department of First Chief Directorate. He provides a fascinating and unique picture of the Russian mindset in espionage and foreign policy.

We discussed Russophobia in the UK and how it dates back at least two centuries, and how it remains a guiding principle of British foreign policy. The war in Ukraine offers a good illustration of this. NATO has long been a stated redline for Russia although one can debate the wisdom of Putin’s decision to launch an invasion, which shocked Alexander at the time.

Boris Johnson’s role in encouraging Zelensky to reject the Istanbul Peace Deal and turn himself into a modern-day Churchill makes sense in the context of British Russophobia.

And yet for centuries, UK soft power through literature and music has been a powerful force in Russia, including during Soviet times.

Nevertheless, Britain is never far from being viewed in Moscow as bent on its defeat, a feeling reinforced by the 1998 publication of information about ‘Operation Unthinkable’ a UK war game scenario in which Britain and America would attack Soviet forces in Europe after the end of World War II.

Britain today doesn’t understand what drives Russian foreign policy thinking and yet understanding a country is vital to effective espionage and, in turn, foreign policy development.

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Alexander spoke about how this was a mindset reinforced in KGB spy school which he joined as Vladimir Putin was graduating. All of the KGB spies in Britain were anglophiles, including Alexander Lebedev. He speaks about his joining KGB spy school as Vladimir Putin was graduating.

KGB agents didn’t spent their time talking about ideology – it was all about business. The KGB wasn’t bent on regime change – it was about understanding motives and intentions in foreign policy domain and obtaining access to scientific and technological secrets.

The failure to understand what drives Soviet and later Russian thinking helps to explain the foreign policy failure that is the war in Ukraine. A good chance to normalise Soviet-Western relations was missed during 70s following agreement of the Helsinki Accords.

A key failure in western understanding is that Putin is a moderate within the Russian system, however he is caricatured in the western mainstream media. Putin as an ex- KGB intelligence officer tries to maintain relations with everyone, if only to influence them.

Alexander argues that Putin is in fact the most pro-western Russian leader since Lenin and yet the UK and America have managed to ‘screw it up’. Putin’s future replacement may well be more hardline.

In the context of the Ukraine war, the collective west won by turning two previously close Slavic nations against each other. However, Russia’s game now is to bleed Europe dry and sow political division which is precisely what is happening. The Ukraine war is horrible but NATO membership unacceptable.

He suggests that the Idea of independent Ukraine was always an anti-Russian concept advanced by the CIA and MI6. Even Zelensky’s modern Ukrainian identity is confected. What is clear that a Ukraine that can’t be friendly with Russia spells doom for Europe as a whole. Yet London’s secret warriors are bent on the defeat of Russia at any cost.

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I was delighted to talk to Ambassador Chas Freeman again, formerly US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and US Assistant Secretary of Defense.

We discussed Pakistan's shuttle diplomacy and how is appears doomed to fail. Indeed, after we had spoken, news broke that Trump had cancelled Witkoff and Kushner's planned visit to Islamabad, following on from Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi's earlier talks with Pakistan's Prime Minister. Iran now appears to be on the front foot diplomatically, with follow on visits by Araghchi to Oman, and a return trip to Islamabad before Moscow.

The US, on the other hand, appears in no-mans land, dragged into this war by Netanyahu and the zionist lobby in the US. Don't expect any major break through soon.

In the meantime, Netanyahu has gone on the rampage in Lebanon with the so-called Israel-Lebanon peace talks appearing meaningless given the absence of Hezbollah. Israel appears to want to create in Lebanon a client state to allow settler expansion, though doesn't have the military means to achieve that in a decisive way.

Meanwhile, Trump is becoming increasingly erratic, threatening Spain with eviction from NATO and threatening Britain about US support for the status of the Falkland Islands. We discussed NATO and whether the US really would pull out given the huge profits American defence firms secure from the alliance. Chas rightly pointed out that EU countries in any case are looking to buy fewer American weapons as they push for more strategic autonomy. And US bases on European soil may increasingly become a difficult issue if they are used to support American military operations against Iran or any other country in the middle east.

We spoke about the upcoming Trump meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing and whether to expect any breakthroughs there. In this regard, the Trump administration, behind the hot air, appears slowly to be shifting to a more realistic position on Taiwan and potential future reunification with China, not least after the recent overtures by the Head of the KMT to China. Let's see. It remains baffling that the Trump administration appears to have a fairly realistic stance on the Ukraine war and on Taiwan, and yet is pursuing a war in Iran that appears to serve no strategic objective at all!

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I also recently spoke to my friend Alexander Mercouris of the Duran podcast about the Peter Mandelson scandal, in respect of Keir Starmer’s appointing him to the role of UK Ambassador to Washington DC, despite his known connections to paedophile sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

This was a shocking error of judgement for which the Prime Minister still refuses to take responsibility. Instead, he has sacked all of his closests advisers and, now, the Head of the Diplomatic Service, Sir Olly Robbins, who himself was a Starmer appointee.

We take a forensic deep dive into the so-called due diligence and developed vetting processes that preceded Mandelson's deployment to Washington DC as Ambassador.

The key judgement is that Starmer simply did not care about the need to ensure that his Ambassador to Washington DC was of sufficiently reliable character to be entrusted with Top Secret intelligence material and to know the identities of UK intelligence operatives.

The process of clearance was rushed because Starmer had dithered for four months before making a decision, by which time Donald Trump's inauguration was a mere 40 days away and he was forced to hammer through the Mandelson appointment whatever the risks.

On 29 January, when Mandelson was wrongly given Top Secret Security clearance, Donald Trump was already in office, and to refuse security clearance would have introduced a big delay in a new British Ambassador arriving in Washington, for the simple reason that a replacement for Mandelson would have needed Agrément from the US government.

So, I put forward the argument that, faced with a huge embarrassment for the UK if Mandelson's appointment is cancelled at the last minute, Sir Olly Robbins has side stepped the recommendation from UK Security Vetting not to award him security clearance, and has lied in his testimony to the Foreign Affairs Committee to cover this up. As I have asserted all along, Robbins will have spoken with a representative in No10 because of the huge consequences of the decision he was forced to take, just a few days into his job.

Alexander rightly points out that not appointing Mandelson would have been hugely embarrassing to Starmer but would have been survivable politically. This scandal, in which Starmer has sacked official after official to evade personal responsibility for appointing Mandelson, knowing of his links to Jeffrey Epstein, is not survivable politically. The question is now not if but when Starmer is forced out of office by the Labour party.

We discuss what this all means for UK politics more broadly. Has the Prime Minister role become too Presidential? This trend, of the office of Prime Minister side-stepping Parliament is nothing new and, arguably, accelerated during Tony Blair premiership and under the conservatives.

The mainstream media play their role too, hopelessly addicted to the government narrative through the rationing of privileged access to insider briefings.

Prime Ministers increasingly have sought to cling on to power as their authority has faded, including Theresa May and Boris Johnson (Liz Truss - a disastrous PM - wasn't around for long enough for the term clinging on to be applied).

So the bigger consequence of this latest Prime Ministerial scandal is that UK democracy is in a state of flux. Prime Ministers seemingly powerful but unable to cling on to power, parliament not playing an effective role as a check and balance on the executive, the media complicit and compliant, and lying becoming the new normal in Whitehall and Westminster.

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I woke on 19 April to a blizzard of misinformation and gaslighting from the government and affiliated talking heads in the mainstream media, including Laura Kuennsberg and others, about the issue of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s choice of Peter Mandelson as British Ambassador to Washington DC.

That same day, Sunday 19 April, the Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy, who was Foreign Secretary when Mandelson was appointed, has been wheeled out to say that that Keir Starmer would not have given Mandelson the job of British Ambassador to Washington had he known that he’d failed his developed vetting. This was a point Keir Starmer repeated in his statement to the Commons on 20 April.

And yet this is blatant misinformation. To channel my inner David Lammy for a moment,

It is blatant misinformation because there is no possibility for us to test this premise yet is presented to us as fact.

It is blatant misinformation, because we simply have to believe its inference that there was no possibility that Keir Starmer could have known that Mandelson had failed his developed vetting although, now, there is no way to prove this point either way.

It is blatant misinformation, because it is a matter of public record, that Keir Starmer gave Peter Mandelson the job of British Ambassador to Washington knowing at least some of the details of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, including that Mandelson had stayed at Epstein’s home while he was a Cabinet Minister and while Epstein was in jail for sexual abuse crimes.

It is blatant misinformation, because Keir Starmer should have known, or at least suspected, that these links may preclude Mandelson from obtaining the required security clearances to obtain Britain’s top diplomatic role.

In truth, having lived inside the ‘system’ for 24 years, the process was pre-cooked to do anything possible to give Mandelson the job in a hurry with the specifics of the security process entirely incidental.

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The first thing to point out is that I do not support any mainstream political party as, given my focus largely on foreign affairs, I consider all the traditional parties to be disastrously attached to warmongering.

So I am not saying this to score party political points. In the contest about who is the worst British Prime Minister in living memory, I accept that Keir Starmer faces stiff competition from Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

Likewise, I have no reason to be a fan of Olly Robbins who was a political appointee who according to my sources at the Foreign Office wasn’t particularly popular and hasn’t done a great job since he arrived, creating a toxic atmosphere in which very experienced diplomats have been sidelined for diversity appointments.

I frankly couldn’t care less than he’s been sacked although it does appear, at least on the surface, to have been more than slightly unfair.

Before diving into the detail, let’s take a step back to remind ourselves of why this issue is important.

Keir Starmer chose Peter Mandelson to be the most senior and most important British diplomatic overseas role knowing there to be a number of serious questions about his personal honesty, integrity and reliability, but dismissing these issues as insufficient to prevent the appointment because he didn’t think the issues were serious enough.

So, the issue of security clearance is frankly secondary. Starmer clearly believed the security clearance process to be a formality and his political appointee in Olly Robbins made it so.

It is entirely possible that no one told Keir Starmer when Mandelson was awarded DV clearance against the recommendation from UKSV to refuse it. What is not credible, is that no one in 10 Downing Street knew about this.

The widespread misinformation that the officials have taken control of the system in Whitehall is convenient for Starmer because it creates the impression that officials were making decisions that Starmer wouldn’t have agreed with. But that is deeply dishonest.

Mandelson’s appointment was pushed by Starmer’s top aide Morgan McSweeney and agreed by Starmer with minimal scrutiny or consideration of the risks.

11 November was the first time, on record, that Keir Starmer was asked for his advice regarding options for filling HMA Washington

This note was leaked to the mainstream media by 10 Downing Street to the press to raise the temperature of interest. The Independent had a big mug shot of Mandelson in the middle of other lesser candidates for the role.

In fact, there had been speculation that Peter Mandelson and David Miliband were in the frame for the job since July 2024 shortly after news broke that Sir Tim Barrow’s appointment was being put on ice.

As I have said before, No 10 then dithered for 4 months, not taking a decision until it was too late to put in place the proper procedure and security checks, then leaning on the foreign office to pick up the mess.

A big part of that mess was the utter unsuitability of Mandelson to the role.

The final appointment advice of 11 December to the PM said:

We have sought a due diligence review from PET (enclosed) and your Chief of Staff has discussed Peter’s relations with Jeffrey Epstein which we will go through with you, but your Director of Communications is satisfied with his responses to questions about contact.

On the basis of this advice, a paper copy of which Starmer will have received and on which he will have been briefed by Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister nevertheless chose to appoint Mandelson, knowing significant detail about the extent of his relationship with Epstein.

And just pausing for a moment, Keir Starmer’s Director of Communications was Matthew Doyle, who we know campaigned in a local council election for a Scottish paedophile called Sean Morton who received a conviction in 2018 for possessing indecent images of children, an allegation that Doyle appears to have known about at the time.

So, Downing Street Due diligence which underpinned Starmer’s decision to appoint Mandelson, consisted of a paedophile’s friend, Matthew Doyle reassuring the Prime Minister that Peter Mandelson’s links to a known paedophile should not raise cause for concern.

Not only that, but that it is later revealed in the 11 March document dump under the Humble Address process that Matthew Doyle was spoken to by the Government’s General Counsel on 12 September 2025 as part of a fact finding process following Mandelson’s sacking. In this meeting it is established firstly that

- Matthew Doyle of a personal friend of Peter Mandelson and that he would have seen him at social events in December 2024. Quelle surprise!

- Also, and I quote, “MD (Matthew Doyle) said that he would not have had a unilateral meeting with LM (Lord Mandelson) to discuss the appointment.

So Mandelson’s paedophile advocating friend Doyle had seen him at parties around the time of the appointment, had nodded through the due diligence process, but had not actually discussed the due diligence process with Mandelson. Let that sink in for am moment.

The due diligence process, that the media use interchangeably with the term vetting- which it was not – was a complete sham.

It was a sham because the decision had already been taken to appoint Starmer and officials were merely ticking boxes by trixying up a pretend process to make the appointment look legitimate.

It was a sham, because officials were confecting an audit trail to give the process a veneer of respectability despite the very real risks and concerns that Starmer should have taken more seriously.

Starmer’s decision to choose Mandelson and to ignore the severity of the associated security risks, has proved to be a catastrophic error of judgement. The fact that Mandelson, as I predicted on 5 February, failed his DV security clearance simply confirms this fact.

It doesn’t change Keir Starmer’s responsibility for making the most ill-considered diplomatic appointments in living memory to the UK’s most important ally.

The Prime Minister has apologised for that. And yet he does not consider the error so significant, nor Epstein’s crimes with which Mandelson was indirectly associated, to be so grave that he should resign.

Keir Starmer has consistently been evasive verging on dishonest in how he has spoken about Mandelson’s appointment as further embarrassing facts have been revealed. That is before we come to the issue of whether he has lied about the process around Mandelson’s security clearance. That is almost now a secondary issue.

Keir Starmer is refusing to take responsibility for his terrible error of judgement and will do anything to cling on to his job.

Let’s dive into the details.

In his Hastings speech of 5 February Starmer said:

“But none of us knew the depth and the darkness of that relationship.”

It is a fact, and a matter of public record that Keir Starmer did know about Mandelson’s close former links with paedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein when making the appointment, and before security clearance processes had been completed. Information, or at least some, information, about Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein had been disclosed during the so-called due diligence process.

The due diligence report said among other things that:

After Epstein was first convicted of procuring an underage girl in 2008, their relationship continued across 2009-2011, beginning when Lord Mandelson was Business Minister and continuing after the end of the Labour government (which was 2010). Mandelson reportedly stayed in Epstein’s House while he was in jail in June 2009.

Starmer lied through his teeth on 5 February like he is lying now.

Setting aside wider links, such as Mandelson’s extensive commercial links to China, the Jeffrey Epstein case alone was so high profile as to raise doubts in the Prime Minister’s mind about the wisdom of appointing peter Mandelson, who was a known friend and associate.

In the context of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, the Epstein story was never far from the front pages with new revelations emerging all the time.

Virginia Giuffre had sued Andrew Mountbatten Windsor in August 2021 for being forced to have sexual encounters with him aged 17, a case that was settled out of court in February 2022. The Epstein case remained headline grabbing news almost three years later when Keir Starmer decided, anyway, to give Mandelson the job, knowing of his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.

The due diligence report points out that

Epstein appeared to “maintain a particularly close relationship with Prince Andrew the Duke of York and Lord Peter Mandelson, a senior member of the British government”.

The 5 February speech happened after photo emerged of Mandelson at Epstein’s home dressed in underpants with a young woman, and a separate photo of Andrew climbing on another young woman, both, we assume, victims of Epstein’s sex trafficking.

In the same 5 February speech Keir Starmer said, and I quote,

“He (Mandelson) was asked whether he accepted gifts or hospitality.”

Yet it was absolutely clear from the information Starmer had seen that he had accepted hospitality by staying at Epstein’s home while the billionaire was in jail.

A photo would emerge in early March of Mandelson, Epstein and Andrew together and this is key.

Keir Starmer did know about the Mandelson Epstein relationship and should have had concerns that there may be further revelations and information about the Epstein relationship that might come to light that would cast further doubt on the wisdom of the Mandelson appointment.

He should have had concerns that there may be facts and information that Mandelson had not shared that might expose the labour grandee to risk of being compromised in the future by hostile foreign intelligence agencies.

He might also have judged, at the very least because of the Epstein connection, that Peter Mandelson was not of so sound a character to be trusted with top secret British intelligence material or to know the names and identities of members of the UK Intelligence community.

Nevertheless he chose to ignore the risks and appoint Peter Mandelson to the role of British Ambassador to Washington.

He did this without allowing sufficient time for appropriate security checks to be made.

Mandelson’s recruitment was rushed to say the least.

The King’s approval was sought in a 2 days.

The information sent to the King said nothing about the risks around Mandelson’s background which was a shocking omission as I have pointed out before.

Mandelson’s appointment was confirmed on 20 December and he was soon told about need for clearance invited to meetings on highly classified channels from 6 Jan before his security clearance was issued.

In late January sources in DC were suggesting that Trump might block Mandelson’s appointment because of his links to China. It has now been learned that Mandelson’s biggest client has been a Chinese company with links to the government.

We do know Robbins was copying No 10 in given 27 Jan email copied to Ailsa Terry about audience of the king, so communication was happening between the PUS at the Foreign Office and Number 10 staffers, as should be expected.

Mandelson’s contract says

The minimum required level of security clearance for employees working in the FCDO is DV

Security clearance was confirmed by the Foreign Office Vetting Unit on 29 January in a 30 January email to Mandelson. THIS WAS AFTER THE DATE OF DONALD TRUMP’S INAUGURATION WHEN PRESSURE TO SEND THE AMBASSADOR TO WASHINGTON AS SOON AS POSSIBLE WILL HAVE BEEN CONSIDERABLE.

It is fair to assume that Robbins has signed off on Mandelson’s DV around this time upon getting all clear from the US that they have no objections. A recommendation that Mandelson should not receive DV clearance would have been a bombshell moment when it landed on his desk, already a novel situation, as the PUS wouldn’t normally expect to sign off individual DV’s which in most cases are straightforward.

Let’s remember the reason we have a DV process. British diplomats are expected to be of the soundest character to hold and maintain privileged access to top secret information from intelligence sources or from highly placed sources in foreign governments that normal persons would never have access to.

Diplomats are expected to keep this information secret, both to protect the sources from whom the information is gathered, particularly if it is gathered covertly, and to prevent disruption in the relationship with the host government. To assure the UK government that a person is so sound of character, detailed security clearance processes is undertaken to ensure that everything is known about them and that there are not secrets or conflicts of interest that might be used against them by a hostile intelligence service in the future.

What people don’t understand about DV is that the process is extremely thorough.

It is unusual but not impossible for this to be done in the space of forty days. Mandelson will have been subject to an intrusive interview - Keir Starmer has now said that Mandelson was subject to two interviews, which shows the gravity of ths issues discussed - of at least two hours during which he is effectively under oath and he is answering questions from the Vetting Officer who has already done detailed research about him.

The recommendation not to award him DV is not necessarily because of the fact of his association with Epstein or his business interests in China or other places. It will have been because the vetting officer wasn’t satisfied that Mandelson was telling the truth under questioning casting severe doubt on his reliability. In fact, the Vetting Officer likely concluded that Mandelson was lying, which should come as no surprise.

We shall never see the details of the report which rightly remain confidential. But here too has been another strand of government misinformation, that Ministers are not entitled to see details of security vetting reports.

That may be true strictly speaking, though there is no bar on Ministers being made aware that there has been a problem with the vetting without providing any confidential information discussed, even though Starmer seemed to know about Mandelson’s Epstein relationship very well anyway.

It is not unreasonable in fact I would argue that it was absolutely essential for Robbins to transmit to Number 10 that there had been a problem with Mandelson’s vetting and I believe he will have done that even if only orally, given the explosive nature of the revelation.

Mandelson not getting vetting is first and foremost a massive embarrassment for Keir Starmer who has gone public before security clearance has been undertaken, against the advice of Simon Case.

Mandelson not getting the job is not an embarrassment at all for the FCDO or the Olly Robbins. Facing a bombshell report that Mandelson should not get security clearance, Robbins will have tipped off No10 that this is a huge problem and chosen, wrongly, to award DV anyway.

That is on him, but let’s be clear that he was doing Starmer a favour out of his feeling of loyalty and patronage to Team Starmer who had given him his cushy job.

This whole affair has been about saving Starmer’s skin, and all this nonsense that Starmer would not have given Mandelson the job if he had known he’d failed his DV clearance is also such utter nonsense that it beggars belief.

He knew Mandelson’s dirty secrets and refused to see them as a problem as he didn’t think the rules applied to him and his friends.

Well, Starmer has been caught with his pants down on this and he has to take responsibility.

He waffled and deflected in Parliament on 20 April tomorrow and today we will hear what Robbins says to the Foreign Affairs Committee. Though as Robbins has reportedly been paid £100,000 in severance, I am not clear that he will offer anything decisive.

And yet there remains another possibly even bigger and as yet unresolved question.

On 4 February, Mandelson received an email from the FCDO saying,

“Please note that as this role requires DV+STRAP, a new STRAP application form will need to be submitted as STRAP clearance is role specific.”

Mandelson was being invited by the FCDO to submit an application which would have been considered by UK intelligence about having access to specific Top Secret Intelligence material.

No one has answered the question about whether Mandelson was awarded Strap security clearance and I’m asking that question now.

MI6 have been doing their bit to say they had issued warnings about Mandelson’s access to secrets. But did they award him STRAP clearance or not?

If they have, then Starmer really will be toast.

But either way, I continue to stand by my demand from 5 February that Keir Starmer should resign.

I was pleased to meet Laith Marouf, a War Correspondent and Executive Director of Free Palestine TV for the first time.

As Laith is based in Lebanon, we discussed the recently announced 10 day ceasefire with Israel, and whether it might endure. This ceasefire had clearly been imposed on Netanyahu by Trump, but what was the prevent Israel from returning to position normal after any putative peace deal over Iran? Laith laid out the historical and religious reasons why Iran would never abandon Lebanon purely to obtain a peace deal with the USA. Other people I have spoken to talk about the muti-confessional nature of Lebanon but that, come what may, Hezbollah remains a powerful force in politics, that won’t be eradicated by air strikes.

So, Israeli conquest of Lebanon will likely never be possible for as long as Iran remains a powerful force in the region.

We therefore discussed the US and Israel's inability to inflict a defeat on Iran. There is no evidence that the US has the capability or the political capital at home to endure an extended military engagement with a country, thousands of miles from the US, geographically and by population size far bigger than any adversary confronted in the twenty first century, and with the support of the two big regional military and economic powers, Russia and China.

The only way that the US can impose a defeat on Iran is to precipitate regime change and despite Trump’s ramblings about regime change equating to a change of leader (sic!) the proposition that a modern-day Shah can be returned to the throne in Tehran have never looked possible or remotely likely.

That leaves the US militarily stuck in a conflict that is causing global economic shocks that are mobilising both the developing world and parts of the western world against American hegemony. Iran may be to US colonialism what Suez was to the British and French.

Laith situated this latest war in the context of what he describes as the 100 years of humiliation for the Muslim world.

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Iran differs from the Arab world in having civilisational integrity and history that will endure this latest attempt at subjugation by western powers. War in the other hand is putting significant pressure on the smaller more fragmented governments across the Arab world which are reliant for survival on the umbrella of US hegemony which is collapsing.

We briefly considered the risk of nuclear escalation in Iran and the likelihood that this, ultimately, would backfire spectacularly on the west with a potentially enormous flood of refugees heading west, not to mention the intense ecological damage and the impact that would have on the global economy. Lots of people pontificate about Israel using tactical nukes, which, while I consider Netanyahu desperate to cling to power, I consider unlikely if only because it would likely sever the hitherto ironclad relationship with the US and lead to more immediate and existential risks to the functioning and integrity of Israel as a state.

We discussed Israel's nuclear capability and how it can coexist in a more peaceable way with other countries in the region. Laith drew on the example of Apartheid South Africa which was also nuclear armed but which gave up its nuclear programme and completely shifted its model of governance to abandon the rule of white supremacists.

In the completely hypothetical scenario of Israel doing the same - which looks wholly unlikely anytime soon - I asked about the position of Jewish people in Israel under theoretical Palestinian rule. We considered the outlier role of the Jewish community in Iran which is the only major subset of Judaism that isn't hardwired into the ecosystem of Zionism as a potential model.

In the final analysis, whenever the war against Iran ends, however it ends, Iran appears likely to emerge in a stronger position as a regional superpower than it held before the war started, indeed, before Donald Trump abandoned the JCPOA deal. US power and influence, on the other hand, continues to shatter, ushering in a multipolar world with greater clarity.

A genuinely thought-provoking discussion which I’d encourage you to watch via the link below. I had a microphone problem so my audio is terrible, though still audible.

Although, in fact, the decay of the UK armed forces has been spreading for many years, including under the 14 years of Conservative rule. And, indeed, the problem is not simply one of money; at heart, the UK armed forces are in a mess because of incompetence in the MoD and the contracting out of responsibility for procurement which puts the UK exchequer at the mercy of grasping defence industrial fat-cats who promise the world, charge astronomical prices (which they keep increasing) only for projects to get lost in a big black hole of disappointment and delay.

That Robertson - a Labour grandee - is pushing for cuts to welfare to pay for defence tells you all you need to know about the sorry state the UK has fallen into. And it isn’t just a matter of guns and butter. I worry about who is holding the gun and frankly wouldn’t trust Keir Starmer or any of his recent predecessors with a butter knife.. :-) The fact that the Tories are trying to score points off of this abysmal state of affairs is a bit of a disgrace as the MoD stopped producing updates on the dismal state of their procurement programme under Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, errr Rishi Sunak’s government in 2022 (sorry, forget which one was exactly in charge when the MoD cut off all transparency over procurement)…

As my article landed a day before Robertson’s lament, I was immediately trolled by an academic at RUSI which, you guessed it, gets some of its funding from the MOD. He pushed back hard against my claim that the Royal Navy had effectively rendered UK armed forces unable to defend themselves against better armed Russian naval vessels in the English channel, somehow claiming this was misinformation.

Yet, as Robertson was getting ready to speak, he posted this comment on X in response to someone else. “The reason we can’t project force isn’t shortage of soldiers but lack of weapons, systems, platforms and logistics to send, sustain, and protect them.” LOL.

Whitehall thinktanks eh? Different day, different opinion, depending on who’s paying the bill. I hope you find the article interesting.

Few things provoke British politicians into fits of rage more than mention of Russia’s “shadow fleet.” Yet last week’s impotent tracking of Russian tankers in the English Channel illustrates that Britain doesn’t have the means to do much about it.

On 9 April, two Russian “shadow” oil tankers were escorted through the channel by a Russian navy frigate armed with all manner of weapons, including anti-ship missiles. In response, the Royal Navy could only muster an auxiliary fuel tanker to follow it helplessly. The Daily Telegraph reported on this heroic operation from the deck of a 40-foot fishing boat following in the tanker’s wake.

A regular pattern is forming in which the Royal Navy deploys vessels that are overmatched by better armed Russian naval escorts.

The inability of the Royal Navy to challenge Russian tankers has drawn howls of protest from opposition politicians, including former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The United Kingdom’s attorney general has now ruled that U.K. forces cannot likely board Russian vessels to seize them anyway, as this may be contrary to international law. Yet the policy message is clear. Even if Britain sent troops to board escorted Russian tankers, they might be fired upon with no effective military means to push back the Russian navy. The Royal Navy has been rendered unable to project force, even close to British shores.

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A British frigate and helicopter seeing off Russian submarines apparently lingering over undersea cables provided much-needed relief to the embattled Defense Secretary John Healey, who took to the 10 Downing Street press room to brief the media on the operation. But that won’t be enough to quell the growing sense of national embarrassment and anger at the parlous state of the British armed forces.

An already much delayed Defence Investment Plan is quite obviously being held back until after the upcoming May local elections, because it will likely list more projects that Britain can’t afford or should shelve, rather than anything genuinely new and revolutionary; when published, I predict, it will be politically humiliating for the Labour government, which is suffering disastrous polling numbers, with just one fifth of the population inclined to vote for them, a historic low for a governing party.

The case of HMS Dragon has become illustrative of UK naval decay; the single air defense destroyer that Britain rushed out of maintenance and belatedly deployed to the Mediterranean to support defensive operations against Iran, was bedeviled by technical difficulties and has been forced to dock again for repairs.

Russia, meanwhile, has been emboldened. Having significantly increased the size of its fleet in recent years, Moscow is now increasingly able to dominate the high seas off Europe and hold British and European vessels at risk. In May of 2025, a Russian jet warned off an Estonian vessel looking to interdict a Russian tanker. Following the seizure by U.S. forces of a Russian tanker bound for Cuba in January and the boarding by the French of a shadow tanker on March 20, they have clearly decided “enough is enough” and are sending heavily armed Russian naval vessels to escort oil tankers.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, western allies have sought to bear down on Russia’s war economy by limiting the revenue it gains from oil and gas sales, which make up around two thirds of its exports. With some estimates suggesting 80% of Russian oil exported is transported on ships, attacking the network of so-called “shadow tankers’’— aging Russian tankers that sail under murky insurance and flag arrangements — might appear on the surface a sensible approach, or at least it did in 2022. But four years on, the endeavor has proved utterly meaningless. Now it appears self-defeating.

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Let’s be clear: the export of Russian oil has never been sanctioned in absolute terms. Rather, in December 2022, G7 countries imposed a price cap of $60 per barrel of oil sold to minimize the revenue Russia generates from its exports. In July 2025, Europe further lowered the cap to $47.60, though the U.S. stuck at $60.

Despite their protestations, Europe has nevertheless continued to import billions of euros worth of Russian oil throughout the war in Ukraine. Russia’s biggest customers, China and India, have bought at discounted rates below the level of the G7 price cap. Russia’s third largest customer, Turkey, has seen its imports of oil practically unchanged, walking a narrow tightrope on price restrictions.

The bottom line is that Russia’s export revenue hasn’t obviously suffered since 2022. In the first year of the Ukraine war, Russia pulled in its biggest ever current account surplus of $238 billion. Exports have remained above their historical average since that time.

The Iran war has now rendered the G7 price cap irrelevant. Global customers, faced with fuel rationing, will pay any price to get hold of oil. It is therefore clear that Russia will gain another windfall from oil exports in 2026. Indeed, preliminary analysis suggests Russia will see its tax revenue from oil sales double in April.

Since the war in Iran started, Russia has upped the ante by refusing to sell oil to countries that back the G7 price cap. That policy guarantees that developing countries will get preferred status and won’t want to enforce any price cap at a time of supply constraints. It also puts pressure on supplies to Europe and Japan in particular, who are struggling under the weight of soaring prices and tightened supply.

At a time when the U.S. has temporarily lifted sanctions on Russian oil shipments, this is a further sign of the untethering of American and European policy towards Russia. The festering and as yet unresolved stand-off between Ukraine and Hungary about the supply of oil via the damaged Druzhba pipeline might excite those Eurocrats who stridently believe we should continue to resist Russian energy supplies at all costs. The British hullabaloo about our inability to stop Russian tankers in the English Channel further proves our politicians have lost sight of our strategic objectives towards Russia, and whether our policies hurt Putin more than they hurt us.

Right now, it is crystal clear that our economies are suffering under the weight of energy shortages, as the coffers in the Kremlin are ringing, and Russia’s navy is ruling Britannia’s waves.

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This was a week of national disgrace for the United Kingdom.

It was the week in which Great Britain and Northern Ireland was revealed to have non-existent diplomacy and a completely toothless military, not even able to guard UK shores.

Our posture on Iran has been symptomatic of a much deeper mailaise.

We have talked big on the Iran war, in a parody of Yes Minister.

We have said this is America’s war not ours, precisely because the UK has no leverage over Donald Trump to influence his warmongering behaviour. So, rather than taking a more principled public position, that the US and Israel must back down, we have blamed Iran for being attacked, like a Metropolitan police officer, blaming a rape victim for looking too attractive and tempting their attacker.

We have tried to position Britain as a country with magnificent military capabilities to bring stability to the region, while being singularly unable to deploy even one warship, revealing ourselves as militarily toothless and irrelevant. HMS Dragon’s deployment to the Mediterranean has been such a ridiculous catalogue of errors, ending with that ship being hospitalised because its toilets didn’t work, or maybe because it was hit by a Hezbollah missile.

We have tried to position Britain as a credible diplomatic player to resolve the conflict, Yvette Cooper holding pointless zoom meetings in which, with no hint of irony or self-reflection, she calls on Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz from a position of having no leverage over Iran to make this happen. And yet the truth is that Cooper is just yet another in a long line of clueless cardboard cutout Foreign Secretary’s who have rotated rapidly in and out of King Charles Street over the past twelve years, barely spending enough time to warm the seat or, critically, develop their own ideas.

So instead, foreign policy is decided by the Whitehall expert class, when it is entirely clear that that the term ‘expert’ and ‘Whitehall’ are mutually exclusive terms. For the truth is that we have not understood or tried to understand Iran at all since the downfall of the Shah, since which time we have colluded ham-fistedly with the Americans to see a downfall of the Iranian theorcracy with progressively less and less ability to do so.

We haven’t needed to understand Iran, because to understand Iran might have drawn us inexorably into talking to the Iranian government, and engaging in actual diplomacy. Much like Russia, Iran has simply because the enemy other that we needed to defeat, rendering diplomacy completely redundant and subordinate to this task.

Rather, our expert class reassures our moronic ministers that there’s always ‘more we can do’ to achieve success. That a bit more pressure, a few more sanctions, an extra demand or two, will make Iran backdown eventually and that America’s, and by implication, Israel’s, actions are completely unimpeachable. Except that Iran never does back down but instead tightens its grip on the world economy through the simply expedient of shutting a shipping lane. Yet the walls of the Whitehall echo chamber are so thick and impenetrable that our officials and ministers continue to reassure themselves that the Iranians surely one day will see things our way and do as they are told.

And our sold out mainstream journalists go along with the charade that success is assured with no challenge to this narrative brooked in the slightest way. And this has reduced Britain – in fact long ago - to the role of talking with a loud and assertive voice on the world stage.

And when the Iran war finally ends, as it surely will, with a peace deal that is likely better than the JCPOA deal that Donald Trump trashed in his first term in office, Britain’s diplomatic role in the world will have been reduced to that of a the fat and stupid kid in the playground, who through bombast and bullying tries to give the impression of being in charge, while in fact being completely ignored by the other smarter and better looking kids.

I say stupid purposefully, because Britain stopped training its diplomats in diplomacy or understanding the countries in which we operate – most countries of the world in fact – a very long time ago. Why should we try to understand other countries when our role is simply to tell them what to do? Understanding other countries would simply mean that we had to talk to the people in those countries. Talking to foreigners summons up the terrifying prospect of negotiating with them to agree some modus vivendi over those areas where we disagree, in circumstances where we cannot strong arm them to follow our directed path.

Because, for as much as we talk about diversity, equality and inclusion, the British elites hate foreigners. Foreigners are people that we used to dominate and steal from during the days of empire. Foreigners have different coloured skin and speak in unintelligible languages. We occupy Foreigners’ countries, we don’t want them coming to our green and pleasant land.

So, through Brexit, we have discouraged foreigners from studying in our world class universities, shattering a £42 billion per year revenue stream because we don’t like darkies and yellow skins, tipping our world class universities into financial crisis that the government is completely clueless in finding a way out of. When quite obviously, the only way out is to embrace foreigners and not worry whether Ahmed brings his wife and kids when he studies or Liu brings her mother, so long as they leave the country when their student visas expire.

No, instead, we have put a big sign over British Universities saying FUCK OFF FOREIGNERS

And having broken our Universities financially, we can no longer afford to run degree courses for young people to understand foreign languages or how foreign people think and act. Which has created a vicious cycle in which our expert class in Whitehall is topped up each year with clueless young people out of Universities who understand that the only way to get on in their careers is to crowd around the ever shrinking Overton window that the experts already in the system have created.

Britain has become a joke on the world stage, and the cruel truth is that we don’t realise how utterly stupid we look and in fact, think we are brilliant. In the global foreign policy Olympics, our Ministers and officials truly believe Britain is Usain Bolt, when in reality, we make Eddie the Eagle look like a gold medallist.

Yet, that is not what makes the week the most embarrassing. I feel ashamed that at this time of national irrelevance, our Prime Minister Keir Starmer is parading around the Middle East like some sort of conqueror, posting heavily produced videos trying to suggest that he is a global statesman, which he is not. Had the video been from Rochdale or Glasgow, visiting cities in a bid to improve their hospitals, schools and roads, I might mind less.

Yet relentless government propaganda appears aimed solely at confecting and underpinning a misguided belief that somehow the UK is a mover and shaker on the global stage, when we are not. Because of decisions taken by both the previous conservative government and the current labour government, the UK has plunged itself into obscurity. Wrapped up in a strat comms comfort blanket knitted from our own hubris and complete inability to see how we have weakened ourselves.

Firing out at an accelerating rate, meaningless publicity videos to convince our increasingly sceptical voters that Britain is important in the world when, increasingly, it isn’t because of decisions successive governments have taken. Our obsession with spin, dating right back to Alistair Campbell’s time in 10 Down Street is killing us. Until now, it has killed us figuratively and metaphorically. But what is now clear is that our self-congratulating suffocating propaganda may actually and literally kill us.

And the most shameful thing is that, despite our having fallen to such a low state the Ministry of Defence has shifted seamlessly into an information campaign to suggest that Britain needs to ready itself for war. This is both manifestly absurd, morally repugnant and, most of all, dangerous.

The Chief of the Defence Staff, who looks and sounds like a duty manager at Asda, was talking about a radical new version of a plan to give Britain the resilience for eventual war. Sky News interviewed a pseudo academic and former MoD civil servant working at an Oxford University think thank which receives funding from the MoD speaking gravely about Russia having 95-97% of the capabilities ready to launch an attack on a European NATO country. This is wet dream territory for mainstream media hacks who love the lie of Russia’s imminent attack, while crowing about Russia having only occupied 2% of Ukrainian territory in the past two years.

This is just a shaping operation to soften up the public for a big increase in defence spending, which they will have to fund through more tax and less public services.

I’m not necessarily against spending more on defence if that money is well spent. Because Britain right now couldn’t fight its way out of a paper bag. Our army at its smallest since 1823, when our population was four times smaller, our navy as small as it was at the end of the English civil war in the seventeenth century.

When so called Russian shadow tankers sailed through the English channel this past week, our magnificent royal navy could only deploy an auxiliary tanker to follow it, along with a forty-foot fishing vessel manned by a Daily Telegraph journalist. If you saw this in Monty Python you might laugh, and yet it was very real.

So, the argument goes, we need to spend the next decade spending billions to renew our armed forces against the threat of a Russian invasion next week. I say a decade, because many of the weapons systems we are building today won’t be ready until the thirties, including the Challenger 3 tank, which isn’t even a new tank, the AUKUS submarines, to replace Astute class attack submarines that we haven’t finished building. A new nuclear warhead, because the 250 we already have clearly aren’t enough.

In ten years from now, all these projects will be complete and new ones will be well underway, no doubt. Because, aha, a new Defence Investment Plan is on its way to fix all our problems. And yet, hold on a minute, the government is refusing to publish the Defence Investment Plan and the MoD hasn’t reported on its military project spending since 2022.

Yet the obvious truth is that, we can and most likely have already produced a defence investment plan. That plan, I venture, building on the last published Defence Equipment Report of 2022, will tell us that many of the projects we already have, like Ajax armoured vehicles and AUKUS, are so off track that we might need to think about abandoning them. That our other zombie projects cost much more than they did the last time the MoD reported that they were costing too much. That we’ll need to prioritise if we want to do anything genuinely new and innovative, like a sixth generation fighter or a twenty first century type 83 destroyer.

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And that, when it comes down to it, we just have too many ideas, too many contractors clamouring to suck on the massive bloated tit of defence procurement, but not nearly enough money to pay for it all, especially if the government seriously wants to fix its creaking public services and maybe build something new, like a railway that travels further than Birmingham, or another runway at Heathrow, for example. That in any case low cost technology has rewritten the modern day battlespace.

But notwithstanding all this, it is crystal clear that the Defence Investment Plan will offer more bad news than good news, and that, because of that, best not to publish it before the May local elections where the labour party is already looking to get a seriously humping, because it is even more shit as a government than the also shit conservative governments that came before them.

So, to distract people from the fact that we can’t even send Captain Pugwash to interdict Russian tankers in the English channel and that it would be quicker to resurrect the Mary Rose and sail her to Cyprus than using HMS Dragon, and to deflect attention from the gaping hole in the debate caused by the worst kept secret of the Defence Investment Plan, we need to create a big idea.

That big idea is we should prepare for a war, with an enemy that doesn’t obviously want to attack us, with equipment and troops we don’t possess and which we cannot in any case afford without pouring misery on our own citizens, who should hope to be forced into military uniforms to help them feel better about our country’s decline. As, let’s face it, the number of meaningful jobs in the British economy is on the decline because we are so desperate to sustain a forever proxy war in Ukraine and embrace the chubby loveliness of super high energy costs, ordinary British people will be almost grateful to put on a military uniform, as at least they’ll be able to earn a wage from doing something, even dying, if they are a woman and get felt up by their superiors.

We need to spend the next decade preparing for the fight against Russia in the hopes that Russia will reduce its armed forces after the Ukraine war concludes, whenever it concludes. Rather than continuing to militarise against an ever more hostile British and European threat and keeping the fight in Ukraine dribbling along to continue the bleed British and Europeans dry of funds and sow internal political chaos.

Never mind the complete absence of evidence that Russia has any intention of attacking up and that the war in Ukraine is and has always been about reasserting its sovereignty against the ever eastward expansion of NATO.

Nor the abundant evidence that Russia is willing to enter into diplomatic dialogue, so long as that is on the basis of sovereign equality rather than zero sum demands. Yet, diplomacy with Russia is a term you will almost never hear in the mainstream media and, if you do, it will be to reassure readers that we should absolutely not pursue it with the dastardly Putin.

And yet, and as we know, Britain has turned its back on diplomatic dialogue for well over a decade. Having disinvested in diplomatic skills in our country. Having stripped our Universities of programmes that help a new generation of students to understand the world better and become diplomats.

We have failed to build a military that can even defend our shores despite having wasted billions and billions of pounds that never deliver what we want, when we want it, at a cost that was agreed. The British government has completely lost control of its armed forces, such that we can’t even produce a defence investment plan.

Britain today has its smallest army for two hundred years, according to data published by the Ministry of Defence. That isn’t spin – it’s a fact. We can’t defend ourselves, so let’s wheel our Dad’s army and put our kids in uniform to fight for Keir Starmer. What a complete and utter buffoon that man is.

But, there is an alternative.

Rather than trying to save the world one war at a time, we need to focus our national energies on restoring our greatness at home, rebuilding our industries, fixing our transport infrastructure, regenerating our hospitals, schools and universities, yes, aided by money that foreigners spend by studying here.

We need to ditch aspirations of military greatness, throwing out our zombie defence projects, building a bigger army and navy perhaps to protect our shores.

The United Kingdom needs to reinvest in its diplomacy again and step back from trying to play a role as a foreign policy titan which it is not. We need to reestablish a culture of diplomacy in which we seek to understand the countries with which we engage across the world, not as a neo-imperial power, but as equal partners, pursuing peaceful co-existence rather than confrontation and conflict.

Britain is an island, albeit a great one, yet leaders from the main political parties have reduced us to a pitiful state today. The challenge of rebuilding our stature as a nation state is immense, and the work to do so must start today. Not through scaremongering, but through hard work and a relentless focus on the needs of ordinary working class people who have been ignored and patronised by the mainstream for far too long. Keir Starmer is not the person to lead that charge. Indeed, there appears no serious political leaders in Britain today able to do so.

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