Fundamentalist Islam is a threat both abroad and at home, but Keir Starmer does not appear to know how to react to either, so strong is the anti-Israel feeling in his own party and so well-entrenched the tradition of Labour courting the immigrant vote, regardless of its nature.
In Gorton and Denton, he was outflanked by the Greens, who went to enormous lengths to woo the Muslim vote, campaigning outside mosques, electioneering in Urdu and stressing their opposition to the war in Gaza.
It was a horribly sectarian approach, but it paid off, which will only encourage sections of the Labour Party to urge Starmer to take the same hardline attitude.
Starmer’s problem is that he cannot ignore them, and the next problem is that nobody knows what he himself really thinks.
One moment, he is praising Jeremy Corbyn and the next expelling him from the Labour Party. One minute, Trump cannot use our bases and the next he can.
Starmer’s failure to stand up to extremism both here and on the international stage stems from the same root: his own hard left and his fear of offending it.
If he had applauded Trump over Iran, they would have intensified their moves to get rid of him, moves which most of us would say will eventually be inevitable and by no means confined to the hard left.
Keir Starmer's cowardice on Iran makes sense once you realise who makes him blink and shiver - Ann Widdecombe
|Getty Images
As usual, the PM has managed to alienate all and sundry. The United States is angry not only at his initial refusal to use our bases but also at his subsequent prattle about international law.
Indeed, the one consistent feature of his approach has been his fear of challenging laws which work against our interests. He would, for example, rather see the country overrun with illegal entrants on small boats than withdraw us from the ECHR.
The spectres of Iraq and Syria loom large in his thinking more because of their questionable legality than because ultimately they did not achieve the desired end.
Trump has called upon the Iranians to rise up against their own government, but they have no revolutionary organisation and no ready cache of arms.
There is no King over the water, and without a visible alternative to the theocracy and its horrors, the end may well be chaos rather than real, lasting change.
The UK should be discussing this with Trump and impressing upon him the need for a clearly defined outcome, but instead has alienated itself from him and sacrificed its influence.
There is, Deo gratias, no current suggestion of boots on the ground, but the PM says he does not believe in “regime change from the skies”. So what does he believe in? Fighting terror or bowing to it? Maintaining the special relationship or imperilling it?
The answer appears to be that he will take whatever position his own left wing demands, which is to say whatever does not upset fundamentalist Islam.
Past Labour leaders have stood up to the hard left. Think Kinnock and Militant Tendency or Blair and Clause Four. Starmer, with a vast majority, shivers and blinks and dives behind his law books.
More From GB News