Have you heard enough pant-wetting about Britain’s “reputation” this week? Honestly, I don’t think any of us can bear the social embarrassment of not getting immediately involved in an obviously disastrous war in the Middle East. The awks of it. How will good old Britannia hold her head up high if she isn’t an instant ride-or-die for a US administration described by a former senior Nato commander as “gung-ho nutters” with “no clear understanding of how this thing is going to end”? You should be simply unable to stand it. You should have Middle East-catastrophe FOMO.

Opposition party leaders and politicians seem genuinely excruciated by the fact that Earth’s pettiest man, Donald Trump, sniffed earlier this week of Keir Starmer: “This is not Winston Churchill we’re dealing with.” Boo-hoo for you, pal. We’re having to deal with the Cheeto FDR, so everyone’s making sacrifices.

It’s often said that most things in Britain are about class, so maybe the Westminster meltdown about having at first declined our Paperless Post invitation to war is the geopolitical version of worrying you’re not keeping up with the Joneses. The Joneses in this case being a career vulgarian who addresses his nation in a baseball cap and whose defence secretary talks like a third-string capo in an AI mafia gif and is tattooed like a prison school desk.

Either way, it’s interesting to find politicians going so hard on the if-you’re-not-with-us-you’re-against-us stuff. This is very much not the view of the people, with polls showing UK citizens opposed to US-Israeli attacks on Iran by 49% to 28%. Pressed on this data indicating that wedged halfway up Trump’s colon is not actually where the British public wants to be, Nigel Farage told reporters curtly: “I don’t follow public opinion.” Weird, because the Reform UK leader has spent his entire career honking that politicians should listen to public opinion. And indeed, has spent the past year explicitly making a case for him sweeping to power on precisely the basis that he listens to ordinary people. Maybe we are entering a new “the voters are stupid” period, only instead of being in favour of Nigel’s Brexit getting you called stupid, it’s not being in favour of his American mate’s dumb war.

Incidentally, the aforementioned “gung-ho nutters” diatribe came courtesy of former general and Nato commander Richard Shirreff, whose operational experience of wars (Middle Eastern and otherwise) should arguably carry greater weight than the posturing of 20th-century commodities trader Nigel Farage – a man who would undoubtedly let down his country just to not get disinvited to his scheduled dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago tonight. A burnt steak, a burnt steak! His kingdom for a burnt steak.

Meanwhile, Kemi Badenoch’s entire demeanour since the war was launched has been that of a teenager who discovered from social media that some of her friends got together without her at the weekend and vaporised an ayatollah. Thursday found the Conservative party leader really drilling down on the nation’s most sensitive nerve, declaring: “It’s extraordinary that Bahrain and Kuwait … are publicly criticising us.” Criticised by Bahrain? Oh the shame. This feeling we’re having must be the same sort of awkwardness Bahrain feels when people remember they arbitrarily lock up dissidents and torture their own people. And is not a democracy.

Badenoch seems worried that in the rooms where it happens, all British politicians are somehow tainted by association with what she is hellbent on everyone seeing as Starmer’s shame. But Kemi should, of course, be assured that the occupants of these rooms have never even heard of her, and that she will be out of a job long before they reach the advanced stage where their protocol aides have to make a call on how to correctly pronounce her surname.

As for the various available definitions of weakness this week … the following analogy gives the attacks on the UK a nuance and depth they have yet to achieve, but they’re basically the equivalent of your child coming home from school and explaining they got involved in some stupid and dangerous trouble because some other kid told them to. Instead of deploying Correct Parenting 101 and going: “Oh my God, and would you jump off a cliff if he told you to?!”, a significant number of Britain’s politicians and punditry class are now suggesting that the notional parent in this analogy should have said: “Good boy – literally nothing is more important than your reputation in the playground. And if he tells you to jump off a cliff, you go for it.”

That said, I understand why some of our politicians thought there was a lapdog vacancy. You always need one lapdog in a madly destabilising Middle East war, and historically it’s been us. But this time it’s Trump, whose secretary of state, Marco Rubio, let slip this week that the US tagged along with the bombing because Israel told them they were doing it anyway. Rubio making this on-camera boo-boo was just another ludicrous wartime vignette in a week in which they have not exactly been in short supply.

Take Thursday in the Oval Office. If you haven’t seen the pictures, please take a moment to zero in on Lionel Messi’s million-yard stare as he realises he and the rest of the Inter Miami squad are merely the meat backdrop for a war update. Or take Trump’s suggestion that he must be involved in picking Iran’s next supreme leader, dismissing the proposed nepo-ayatollah as “a lightweight”. So … he’d like a really heavyweight ayatollah instead? Please don’t try to make sense of the president’s endlessly spasming war aims – just let them wash over you like an extremely volatile liquid and hope no one brought a match.

Finally, Trump is demanding that Israel grant an immediate pardon for his mission boss, Benjamin Netanyahu, which suggests there might have been an infinitely more elegant and infinitely less bloody solution to this. Alas, none of us has a time machine to go back a few weeks, but maybe using every pressure to simply secure Bibi the pardon before he felt the need to launch this war would have been the more reasonably priced move. Not to call it too soon, but at this stage in the Israeli prime minister’s martial journey, many observers do have the sneaking suspicion that Netanyahu will keep on finding wars he has to attend to, just to defer the day he gets booted out of office and has to face trial for his allegedly corrupt actions.

Could we all not just have a whip-round and buy him a $200m house, with a $1bn cheque in it, and promise to guard it in perpetuity just as long as he gives up his absolute favourite hobby? At this rate, it’ll be unbelievably cheap at the price.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

US-Israel war on Iran

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