Here we go again. It turns out that military action can be habit-forming. Once you’ve got the taste for it, you just can’t stop. And there’s no sign of anyone reaching their rock bottom. The 12-step recovery meeting for MPs seeking help with their addiction is still seeking its first member.
Just over a week ago, the Commons was packed as Rishi Sunak gave a statement about the strikes on Houthi positions in Yemen. Almost every MP wanted to have their say as they reinvented themselves as military experts on the Middle East. The session went on for the best part of two hours.
On Tuesday, the Commons was barely a third full for the start of Sunak’s latest statement after further strikes the night before. Long before the end there were just six Tory backbenchers in the house. Everyone had just got blasé. These were only targeted strikes, so what was the problem? Not something to trouble anyone. Next they will only get out of bed for a full-scale war.
Sunak himself also seemed a great deal more relaxed. Ten days previously he had appeared edgy, as if slightly shaken by the seriousness of the situation. The first time as prime minister he had authorised lethal force. You could almost sense that his conscience might be slightly troubled. A hint of self-doubt.
What a difference a week makes. This was lo-fi Rishi. Dressed-down Rishi. Intensely relaxed Rishi. Give him a few more days and he will be wearing a Tony Blair bomber jacket. “I said last week I would do it again,” he said. And … and he was a man of his word. You couldn’t say the Houthis hadn’t been warned. No one messed with the Rishmeister.
The strikes he had ordered had been strictly in line with international law. Not often you hear this government talking about its obligations under international law. Quite the reverse. Normally Sunak has yet to find an international law that isn’t some attempt by foreigners to undermine our own sovereignty. Something deeply sinister. So I suppose we should be reassured.
Then Rish! got on to the targets. As yet still unspecified. The previous strikes had been 100% successful, he declared. Though not so successful that the Houthis had not renewed their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. But never mind that. The strikes had achieved exactly what had been intended. It was just time for more of them.
Now we were into the semantics of precision. Were we bombing the same targets with more precision or different targets with the same precision? These things matter. Sunak’s trust in our military capability is total. We can take out a drone launch site in someone’s back garden without inflicting a single casualty.
Unfortunately we can’t prevent the Houthis from filling in the crater within a couple of hours and using the same site again to launch more drones. So this could go on indefinitely. The Houthis are quite used to being bombed. The Saudis have been doing it to them for more than a decade. So they can just shrug off a few strikes from the US and the UK. Weirdly, the Iranian-backed group don’t appear to spend their time listening to ultimatums from the British parliament.
Sunak got down to the basics. He would be sending the foreign secretary out to the Middle East in the next few days. What? Run that past us again. What could we possibly expect from the Chillaxed Lord Big Dave? He’s a diplomatic liability. Guaranteed to make any situation worse through his superficiality and inattention to detail. Just think of the damage he has done to the UK. By the time he returned there wouldn’t be a country in the area that wasn’t ablaze.
As before, Rish! was adamant that this was all about keeping the shipping lanes open. As if the Houthi actions were happening in a vacuum. This was madness. Sometimes you have to listen to what your enemies are saying and believe them.
But the UK government line is that the Houthis are suffering from false consciousness. They may think they are trying to intervene in the war between Israel and Gaza but we know better. No one appears capable of making the link that the Houthi attacks only began after 7 October. That doesn’t mean we have to accept the Houthi narrative in full. Just acknowledge the obvious realities. But no. We prefer our own more convenient truths.
“Inaction is also a decision,” he concluded. This was a Tony Blair line. One that came back to bite him. Sunak may want to be careful. Although the stakes are not as high. Almost everyone agrees the Houthis are bastards and deserve everything they get. So what was required was an action. Any action. The country demanded a futile gesture. So this was the least he could do. Pour encourager les autres.
Labour’s Keir Starmer lapped all this up eagerly. He couldn’t even be bothered to make a fuss of the fact that the prime minister hadn’t got round to giving him advance warnings of the strikes this time. Just took it like a beta male. Treat me as badly as you like if you think it’s in the national interest.
All Keir really wanted was for the country to be aware that he would do anything to match the Tories in the pursuit of a national interest. It would be completely unpatriotic to ask Sunak any reasonable questions. Such as: was he sure our missiles were making a difference? To check whether we weren’t making a bad situation worse. After all, there were quite a lot of Nato countries that had decided against bombing the Houthis.
But the Labour leader wasn’t having any of this appeasement. He was up for anything that Rishi was. In fact, he would be willing to go far, far further. Happy to abandon all his critical faculties and bomb any place on the map. Because he too had access to these special Happy Bombs. Bombs that didn’t really do much damage. Bombs that took care to alter their trajectory in order not to inflict any casualties. So bring it on. Hell, it was probably about time we bombed Australia. They must have done something bad.
Curiously, the few Tory MPs in the chamber all felt much the same way. Bathing in the warmth of their own certainty. So it was left to a handful of Labour, Lib Dem and SNP MPs to voice a few concerns. They had no strong feelings for the Houthis, but where was this going to end? Were we going to be bombing Yemen once a week for the next 10 years? And might it not be an idea to think about a ceasefire and a two-state solution? Just to see what happened. Sunak looked as them as if they were mad. Disloyal fifth columnists. The plan was to have no plan.
Still it wasn’t all gloom. The Tories have clearly decided that making the morning media round into comedy hour is a thing. So after Lucy Frazer and Susan Hall had done their standup routines on Monday, it was now Huw Merriman’s turn. He didn’t disappoint. The News Quiz was BBC bias, he declared. Satire will eat satire. Then he declared war on a presenter of the TV show Art Attack. Good times. Bring on tomorrow.
