Seventeen years ago, a Labour leader was confronted by an internal revolt after refusing to call for a ceasefire in the Middle East. In his memoir A Journey, Tony Blair later wrote of his stance on the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war: “[It] probably did me more damage than anything since Iraq. It showed how far I had swung from the mainstream of conventional Western media wisdom and from my own people.”
Keir Starmer’s position is not analogous to Blair’s. By 2006, Blair had been Labour leader for 12 years and the party trailed the Conservatives by four points in the polls. Starmer has been leader for three years and the party leads the Conservatives by 20 points. But the fractures exposed within Labour this week – the most serious since the nadir of the 2021 Hartlepool by-election – are a reminder of the capacity of foreign policy to divide the party.
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