PM ‘overruled by his own cabinet’ on Iran, says Claire Courtinho

SHADOW Energy Secretary Claire Courtinho has claimed that Sir Keir Starmer was overruled by his own cabinet on backing the US at the start of the war on Iran.

Questioned on her party’s stance on the war, she told the Camilla Tominey Show on GB News: “What has happened is our position is the same as Australia and Canada. So we support the US and Israel in their endeavours to stop Iran from gaining nuclear weapons, that’s something which would be very bad for this country.

“We know that Iran is hostile to our country. We never said we would join pre-emptive strikes, but we would have moved faster than the Labour government in making sure that our allies could use our bases, and that position has all stayed the same.

“I think what you’ve got here is Keir Starmer is trying to make hay out of what’s happening in a military conflict, and he’s trying to tell us that we should praise him for his judgement, but it wasn’t even his judgement in the first place.

“In fact, he thought we should do what Kemi’s position was, which was let the US use our bases earlier, and was overruled by his cabinet.

“We would have been quicker to let our allies use our bases. And I will say this is the first time in decades that we haven’t had a naval warship in the Middle East.

“We know that the Labour government has been very slow to deploy HMS Dragon. We don’t know why that delay took place, and I think that is a mistake, because you need to be able to protect your interests abroad.

“Our overall principle is this, though, where we take action, it should be in the national interest, and we should be able to defend our people abroad. That’s obviously very important for our own military interests, but also for our relationships with our allies as well.”

On the Conservatives’ track record on energy resilience, she said: “So I definitely think over the last 14 years, we didn’t get everything on energy right. That’s why, when I came in as energy secretary in that last year of the Conservative government, we made changes.

“We were pulling back on net zero. I was mandating to protect licenses in the North Sea. I signed off Rosebank, a very controversial decision. All of that is being reversed, and the problem that we’ve got is Ed Miliband is treating energy policy as if this was ten years ago, but the world has got more dangerous.

“We need to put energy resilience first, and that’s why we should be maximising the North Sea. At the moment, we’re importing more from abroad, rather than using our own resources at a time of global conflict. That’s simply mad. And we should also be looking at other resilience measures as well.

“When we started building nuclear, there was one nuclear welder in the country. I wish we’d gone faster, but we started two plants, and I signed off a third, Labour have now canceled that third power plant, so there is no future nuclear pipeline in this country for large scale nuclear. And I think that is a huge mistake when it comes to our resilience.”