One night in 1909, in Peterborough, a police constable named Kettle looked up and saw ‘a strange cigar-shaped craft passing over the city’. This was the start of the great Zeppelin panic that preceded the first world war. There were dozens of sightings, newspaper editorials, and questions in parliament, but it was all a fantasy: not a single Zeppelin had actually crossed the North Sea. What Constable Kettle saw was a kite with a Chinese lantern attached. Today, we have the makings of a similar panic over Iranian drones.   

Zeppelins were dangerous: eventually, they did bomb London during the first world war. Iranian Shahed drones, too, are deadly, and they could cause mayhem if ever used here: each has a 50 kg payload of explosives, roughly equivalent to a car bomb. Imagine, as some writers have done recently, such a kamikaze drone crashing into Liverpool Street Station at rush hour.  

In this scenario, the drones are launched from ships that have approached the UK from the North Sea. But the question is whether Iran really can get these weapons close enough to threaten the British mainland. And why the mullahs would risk drawing Britain into the war with the United States when the Starmer government is trying so hard to keep us out.  

The US has already had one Iranian drone panic. It was in December of 2024, just over a year before the start of Donald Trump’s war with Iran. A Congressman declared on Fox News that ‘very qualified sources’ had revealed an Iranian ‘mothership’ was launching drones at New Jersey. It wasn’t true. More recently, the FBI issued a warning that Iran........

© The Spectator