There’s a lot of this preposterously compressed timeline to Farage’s attempt to distance himself from Trump, as Operation Epic Facepalm rapidly unspools. He’s not alone out there, of course. As discussed here at the time, a whole posse of Britain’s political and pundit class greeted Keir Starmer’s failure to jump two-footed into Israel and the US’s Iran operation as a truly calamitous error. Yet these days, you can’t move for the spectacle of the initial cheerleaders reverse-ferreting. “I don’t like to see our prime minister be berated by foreign leaders,” was Wednesday’s emanation from Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick, who, little more than two weeks ago, absolutely loved to see it. Starmer, Jenrick explained back in the first week of March 2026, was handling the Iran crisis “just about as badly as you could possibly go about it”.