Boris Johnson has claimed that Donald Trump “has made a big mistake in Iran”. Speaking to Italian newspaper la Repubblica, the former British prime minister said, “I don’t think it was sensible to attack Iran in the way that Israel and America did,” adding: “There’s no doubt that this is a mess, right? I don’t understand how the Pentagon thought they could do this.”

Despite his criticism of the strikes on Iran which began on 28 February and killed senior regime figures including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Johnson stressed that the UK and other European countries should “help America get out of the mess”. He said to la Repubblica that “our team captain, Trump, has made a big mistake, right? And what does the team do? Does the team tell the team captain, ‘go to hell, we have nothing to do with you’? Or does it try to help solve the problem?”

During a visit to the Middle East this week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer described the current US-Iran ceasefire as “fragile”, adding that Britain must strengthen its European alliances to ensure it is not “at the mercy of events abroad”. Referring to Starmer as “useless”, Johnson insisted to la Repubblica that while Britain shouldn’t have joined the strikes, “we should not have rejected Trump’s appeal for help. That was a very bad mistake.” The Labour leader has claimed that Iran “is not our war”, a position Johnson labeled “absolutely pathetic”.

The former Conservative PM also criticized Trump’s rhetoric throughout the war, in particular a Truth Social post on Tuesday in which the US President warned: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Insisting the threat was “against everything that I believe in, absolutely everything I believe in”, Johnson said in the interview: “I was very, very sad and shocked when I saw that. It’s a disaster. I don’t think anybody in Europe could possibly understand or accept the kind of language we’ve heard.”

Johnson highlighted Nato’s Article 2, which commits members to protecting mutual economic interests. “To open the Straits of Hormuz is in our interest anyway,” he said. “We have to do that. The economic shock is too much.” While he acknowledged that the US “venture was clearly badly thought through”, Johnson said “it is unrealistic — and wrong — for Europe to think that we can just stick two fingers up to Washington on something like this.”

A US delegation including Vice President JD Vance is currently in Pakistan for peace talks with Iranian officials. Johnson told la Repubblica that “the Americans are trying to negotiate with a regime that is, as I know personally, immensely duplicitous.” He added: “They lie. They’re brutal. They kill women for wearing the wrong clothes. These are very, very serious creeps, these Iranian mullahs. But America now looks isolated.”

Johnson pointed to European politicians who “basically think that there are no votes at all in saying anything remotely supportive of America”, adding that “the Iranians can see that the West is just divided, and that’s a massive blessing for Vladimir Putin” in Russia’s war against Ukraine. “Donald Trump has a very, very good point about Nato, and we should be there to help,” the ex-prime minister stressed. “We have to decide whose side we’re on.”

---

is UnHerd’s Deputy Editor, Newsroom.

RobLownie

---