Iran: is Starmer doomed to repeat Blair's mistake?
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 2 March 2026
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The fallout from America's audacious attack on Iran continues, and there are a whole host of questions for Keir Starmer.
The prime minister has been accused of being slow to react, having initially confirmed that ‘the United Kingdom played no role in these strikes', Labour since agreed to allow the Diego Garcia and RAF Fairford bases to be used for ‘defensive’ strikes on Iranian missiles sites. This came after Tehran began to hit back at Britain’s regional allies. Is Britain about to be sucked into another costly war in the Middle East? Should the PM stand up to Donald Trump? And will America's attack result in regime change, or are things only going to get worse?
James Heale speaks to Tim Shipman and Michael Stephens, Middle East expert.
Produced by Megan McElroy and Oscar Edmondson.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm James Hill and I'm joined today by Tim Shipman, |
| 0:08.8 | Spectator's political editor and Michael Stevens, Roussey Senior Fellow. Now, the only story in town at the |
| 0:13.6 | moment is America's attack on Iran and the fallout from that over the past two days or so. |
| 0:19.1 | Tim, what do we know recording on Monday morning? |
| 0:21.4 | Well, look, America with Israel's assistance basically launched a regime decapitation strike |
| 0:28.2 | designed to take out the leadership of the Islamic Republic. They have killed, depending on the |
| 0:34.8 | report, somewhere between 20 and 40 of the senior people there, |
| 0:38.1 | including Ayatollah Hamini, the Supreme Leader, the reports that his successor has also been |
| 0:43.0 | killed, people that the British public will have heard of, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, former president, |
| 0:48.5 | who was actually under house arrest for trying to stage a coup to replace the leadership of Iran with something even more |
| 0:56.0 | militant. He was also killed. And it's on the one hand a fairly astonishing intelligent |
| 1:01.1 | success. The leadership of Iran basically didn't trust itself. It knows it's penetrated by |
| 1:06.6 | Western intelligence. When the attack started, they knew they needed to get together and bluntly, |
| 1:12.6 | they were all in the same place. And either through technical intelligence, signals intelligence, |
| 1:17.6 | or through a very high place mole, Israel and America knew exactly where they were. And the Americans |
| 1:23.1 | attacked the infrastructure of Iranian ballistic missiles, the nuclear program, and the Israelis |
| 1:29.0 | went after the people. And at least on the basis of what we know so far, that was a reasonably |
| 1:34.1 | successful attack. That has obviously now opened a potential can of worms. We don't really know |
| 1:38.9 | who's going to take over. And Donald Trump even suggested over the weekend that some of the people |
| 1:43.5 | that he thought would take |
| 1:44.8 | over have already been killed. So Trump is repeating messages that these attacks will continue. |
| 1:49.9 | He's effectively saying either you change your ways or we're going to keep killing you. |
... |
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