Hours after President Trump announced a two-week cessation of hostilities against Iran, I travelled to the Gulf with the prime minister and his team, in the official government plane. We have just landed in Saudi Arabia. For diplomatic and security reasons, I have been asked not to disclose our itinerary or Starmer’s schedule of meetings with government heads. But it does not take enormous intellectual effort to deduce that the first set of talks will be with arguably the most powerful of the Gulf leaders, Saudi’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. The most pressing question in all Starmer’s meetings, including with MBS, is whether the ceasefire between Iran and America and Israel can endure long enough for there to be meaningful talks on a sustainable peace - which are scheduled to start on Friday in Pakistan. According to British sources - and frankly this won’t surprise you - the ceasefire is real, holding so far and very unstable. One source of anxiety is Israel’s somewhat ambivalent commitment to it - and notably that Netanyahu is explicit the hiatus does not restrict the Israel Defence Forces’ aggression in Lebanon. Another is that the devolved structure of Iran’s military, the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the absence of a centralised power structure in Iran brings the risk of continued sporadic and unlicensed attacks by Iranian militia on Gulf countries - and also means that very few shippers of oil, gas and other vital commodities will yet take the risk of moving their tankers and ships through the precarious Strait of Hormuz. As one intelligence source put it to me, Israel’s assassination of so many Iranian leaders makes it incredibly difficult to know who is in charge in the country, if anyone. On the more positive side though, there may be a little more underlying common ground between Tehran and Washington than their public positions on their “non negotiable” aims for any peace settlement would suggest - though I don’t have a clue how their respective positions on Iran’s nuclear ambitions or Iran’s determination to be turnpike keeper of the Hormuz Strait can be bridged. Because the Hormuz Strait is the supply route for a fifth of the world’s carbon energy, and therefore a kind of oesophagus for the global economy, much of Starmer’s focus in talks with Gulf leaders will be a continuation of British diplomatic activity with 40-odd other nations in recent days, namely whether there is any practical way to make the Strait safe for commercial traffic. But his other message is bound to be along the lines of “when this chaos is finally over, don’t forget who your true allies and friends are.” The point is that - like Starmer - none of the Gulf states wanted Trump to attack Iran when he did. And although the UK’s military has been exposed by both the Ukraine and Iran conflicts as depleted and unequipped for this era of drone wars, the UK has been deploying planes and weapons to protect the region from Iran’s assorted uncrewed aerial threats. In the eyes of Gulf leaders, the UK - and Europe more widely, including Ukraine with its formidable drone capabilities - presumably looks a less intimidating friend than either America or China. They have a material interest in strengthening ties with Britain. This is important because Trump’s Iran war is re-configuring the global balance of power in a fundamental way. For Starmer and the UK there are risks, especially if the US were to precipitously withdraw its military umbrella from our continent. And to be clear, there is no sign of Starmer unilaterally abandoning the UK’s historic entente with America, even if Trump is an unreliable, and sometimes abusive, friend. 1/2