The US-led war in Iran and its side conflict in Lebanon have cost an estimated 5,000 lives so far. Politically, however, one of the biggest casualties has been the US-UK alliance, at least insofar as it exists through leaders Donald Trump and Keir Starmer.
But as the focus moves towards resolving the military conflict, officials in London also hope the deployment to Washington this month of British royal soft power will smooth over the hard edges in the frazzled political relationship between the sometime allies.
The US-Israeli attack on Iran has had three main ramifications for Starmer, who arrived in Saudi Arabia for talks with Gulf nations on Wednesday.
The first and most obvious is that the UK prime minister has had to endure a torrent of public insults from the US president, who infamously chided him as “no Winston Churchill” for refusing to get involved. Starmer had to watch as the bromance that he had spent the past year crafting went up in a bonfire of fiery Trump social media posts.
READ MORE
Beyond that, the inflationary impact of the war has upended the Starmer administration’s arithmetic for the UK economy, upon which his Labour government has staked its future on reviving.
Finally, and most crucially for the UK prime minister, the war has had a positive side effect for him by steadying his domestic political position, at least in the short term. Starmer has been able to present himself as a wise statesman who kept Britain out of an unpopular war, and his rivals, Reform UK’s Nigel Farage and Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, as rash and superficial for initially cheering on Trump’s military adventure.
Labour sources believe that, as a result, the chances have ebbed of any challenge to Starmer’s leadership after next month’s devolved and local elections in Britain.
That still leaves the British prime minister with a sticky issue to resolve: how to get Trump back onside after a month of undiplomatic broadsides.
Enter Britain’s King Charles, who arrives in the US at the end of April on a formal state visit to mark the 250th anniversary of US independence from Britain.
[ Starmer’s cautious Iran policy sparks Tory fury and Trump disappointmentOpens in new window ]
British monarchs have smoothed over political differences between the UK and US in the past. Most notably, Charles’s mother, Elizabeth II, flew to Washington in 1957 to mollify US president Dwight Eisenhower, who was furious at Britain over the UK’s military adventurism in Suez the previous year.
Buckingham Palace has stressed in all of its public communications that the British king’s visit is being undertaken on the advice of Starmer’s government, which wants him to woo back inveterate royal-lover Trump.
Through his falling-out with Starmer, Trump has stayed warm towards Charles, whom he described as a “beautiful man”. The British king has remained more circumspect by sticking to platitudes about the bond between the two nations, if not the men who are their heads of state. Meanwhile, Starmer needs his king to deliver the diplomatic goods.
