UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been wringing his hands over Trump’s assault on Iran for days, desperately trying to sell the idea of “defending” places thousands of miles away. However, protecting UK interests is way down the list of priorities in what is now escalating into a global conflict. Instead, UK jets are being sent into the air, as they have been for two years, to defend an apartheid, settler state.
War as distraction
Starmer has a long history of promoting the interests of the Israel Lobby in the UK. Now, he wants to divert the public’s attention from the paedophile and corruption crises engulfing the Labour Party at home. Starmer and Netanyahu are not sending their own children to war, but they are willing to sacrifice the children of others.
Within half an hour of Starmer’s initial speech on the evening of Monday 2 March, prostituting British air bases to the whims of an increasingly deranged Donald Trump, RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus had been targeted with drone strikes. When Starmer visited Akrotiri in December 2024, he said:
We can’t tell the world what you’re doing here.
From December 2023 to March 2025, the RAF conducted over 500 spy flights from Akrotiri. It has been posited that the British government could have been using the flights to gather intelligence for Israeli genocidaires. Now, with Iran closing the Straits of Hormuz and global economies set to descend into chaos, the “dead duck” prime minister is dragging us into a war on their behalf.
Trump’s war is about protecting the Epstein class. Starmer, too, is desperate to divert attention from the Labour paedophile crisis. His promotions of Epstein-informant Peter Mandelson and paedophile promoter Matthew Doyle have brought the Labour Party into disrepute. Starmer appointed Epstein’s best pal “Petie” as US Ambassador in order to get closer to Trump. Now, we are following him to war.
On Saturday 28 February, another new Starmer peer, Joe Docherty, was suspended for “exchanging sexual messages” whilst working for a sixth-form college. By Tuesday morning, Labour were polling at their lowest ever level of public support, languishing behind Reform and the Greens. No better time for entering an economy-crippling conflict according to Keir.
Starmer’s support for Zionism
The Starmers have been described as “the first practicing Jewish family” to occupy No. 10 Downing Street. Although Starmer is an atheist, he venerates Shabbat as a “rock in the week”. His wife, Victoria, has worked in the past for Henry Hodge, the husband of Labour peer and “committed Zionist” Margaret.
Starmer has previously stated:
Half of the family are Jewish, they’re either here or in Israel.
In another interview, the now prime minister said:
I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.
This is a war on behalf of the Israeli state, and Starmer’s judgement is compromised.
The US-Israeli assault on Iran is also a chance for Starmer to emulate his political mentor — invader-of-Iraq Tony Blair. War criminal Blair was bankrolled by Michael Levy, who was once described as his “one-man cashpoint”. The two first met at a gathering hosted by Gideon Meir, a “senior Israeli diplomat in London”.
In October 2023, Starmer said that Israel “had the right” to cut off food and electricity to the entire population of Gaza. Now, with Benjamin Netanyahu’s office being targeted by missile strikes, Starmer is willing to sacrifice British soldiers to defend the Israeli state.
Before becoming an MP, Keir Starmer was director of public prosecutions. In June 2011, there is a record of a “meet and greet” with the only foreign state attorney Starmer convened with whilst leading the Crown Prosecution Service: the Israeli state prosecutor, Moshe Lador. Lador gave Starmer a “book on places & history in Israel”, but in response to a subsequent Freedom of Information request, the CPS claimed not to have any records of:
planning documents, briefing notes, communications relating to the meeting, and minutes from the meeting.
Three months after meeting with Lador, Starmer blocked an arrest warrant for former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni, who was visiting the UK. Starmer’s e-mails on the Livni case have been redacted, but the UK government changed the law to ensure that a repeat would not occur.
Labour Together
Starmer’s Labour leadership campaign received £50,000 from Trevor Chinn. In November 2024, Chinn was awarded the Israeli Presidential Medal of Honour for:
skills and work to the benefit of the State of Israel.
The Labour Friends of Israel lobby group was one of the organisations that nominated him for the award.
In 2013, Chinn told a Labour Friends of Israel meeting:
I’ve spent my entire life working for Israel, for a better image for Israel, for success for Israel.
Current Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy opened the event by mentioning a “fantastic few days in Israel” he had spent with Chinn and other Labour MPs.
Chinn was a director and key funder of Morgan McSweeney’s corrupt Labour Together operation, and McSweeney reportedly concealed donations of over £700,000 to Labour Together with “protect[ing] Trevor” in mind. Josh Simons, who was forced to resign from Starmer’s cabinet on 28 February, also failed to declare personal donations from Chinn properly.
Starmer was also funded by Clive Hollick, another bankroller of McSweeney’s Labour Together who previously served as a special adviser to his “close friend” Mandelson. He and his wife gave Starmer’s campaign £50,000, although a 1999 article describes such figures as:
not much more than a pocketful of loose change to Lord Hollick.
Hollick is also a director of Honeywell International, a US conglomerate which claims that its software products are used:
in virtually every commercial and defense aircraft platform worldwide.
Mishcon De Reya
In the past, Starmer has earned tens of thousands working for Mishcon De Reya, a law firm which has previously represented former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and the Israeli embassy in London. Whilst a director of Labour Together, now MP Simons hired the same firm to smear journalists investigating Morgan McSweeney.
Mishcon de Reya is now representing Epstein-associate Mandelson, who was arrested last week on suspicion of misconduct in public office. Mandelson allegedly leaked sensitive government information to the notorious paedophile. And let’s not forget that, despite protests against his appointment as US Ambassador, Starmer said: “To us, he’s just Peter”.
Leaked messages from 2017 revealed that Starmer had been planning to take a consulting position with Mishcon de Reya before being blocked by then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. But this was not the only time Starmer kept Corbyn in the dark about his extra-parliamentary activities.
At some point between March 2017 and October 2018, Starmer joined the Trilateral Commission, first set up by US billionaire David Rockefeller in the 1970s as a way of combating an “excess of democracy”.
Starmer has since left the Commission and we do not know who originally recommended his invitation, but Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Mandelson have both served as members.
Reeves and Rayner
The Trilateral Commission also includes Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, who has been wooed by several members of the Starmer administration, including Rachel Reeves and Angela Rayner. Reeves, Starmer’s pick for chancellor of the Exchequer, has received thousands of pounds from Chinn in the form of “in kind” donations towards “research and writing services”, as well as multiple £25,000 payments from Victor Blank, a governor of Tel Aviv University, to pay her staff.
In December, Reeves gave the keynote speech at the Labour Friends of Israel annual conference, where she both rallied against:
dark conspiracies about the supposed power of the ‘Zionist lobby’.
and thanked LFI for:
the privilege to make four visits to Israel – the first in 2005, before I entered parliament.
Rayner, a likely replacement for the ailing Starmer, received £25,000 from Chinn for her 2021 deputy leadership campaign, and has continued to register donations from the veteran Israel lobbyist as recently as last month.
In 2022, when a lobby campaign successfully barred British-Iraqi political commentator Lowkey from addressing the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival, he was told that Rayner had “refused to share a platform” with him.
Starmer the person
A few days before writing this piece, I was contacted by a former housemate of the UK prime minister. Benjamin Schoendorff lived with Starmer in London in 1987 after meeting him at Oxford University the previous year.
After interacting with Starmer in his youth and then viewing his later conversion from “lefty student” to authoritarian leader sending RAF jets from Cyprus on intelligence gathering sorties over Gaza, Schoendorff does not buy into the “working class leader” portrayal of Starmer’s official biographer.
In July 2024, Starmer quietly appointed two individuals linked to the Israel lobby to key government roles. Ruth Smeeth was made government whip in the House of Lords and Gillian Merron was appointed under-secretary of state for patient safety and life sciences.
Smeeth is marked on leaked diplomatic cables as a “strictly protect” informant for the US Embassy in London. She was previously a director of public affairs for the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre. Merron is a former chief executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
In the lead up to the 2024 general election, Starmer had been celebrated by legacy media as “the Labour Party in human form” who could “lead a team”. But Schoendorff claims that, even from a young age, Starmer was an apolitical “blank slate” readily moulded to suit the aims of the establishment.
Starmer will be remembered as the UK prime minister who went further than any other in defending the interests of the Israeli state. As hunger spreads in Gaza and bombs fall on Tehran, the weak man’s history as a humanitarian lawyer will not save him in the court of public opinion.
Featured image via the Canary
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