LONDON — Ever since the United States and Israel jointly launched strikes on the Iranian regime in late February, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has repeated the mantra: “This is not our war.”

Polls suggest Starmer’s position may be popular, but it’s not shared by his Conservative opponents.

“This is our war. It has already reached the United Kingdom,” says Greg Smith, the newly appointed chair of Conservative Friends of Israel, citing the 20-plus Iranian-backed terror plots in Britain detected by MI5 between late 2024 and late 2025. “It’s fantastic that our security services have foiled those plots, but at some point, if they keep trying, one will get through,” said Smith.

Overnight Sunday, northwest London’s Kenton United Synagogue was targeted in an arson attack. A pro-Iranian government Islamist group claimed responsibility for this and a recent spate of attacks across Europe on US, Israeli and Jewish targets.

Smith, the Conservative MP for the constituency of Mid Buckinghamshire in southern England, tells The Times of Israel in an interview that “nobody wants war.” But, he adds, he does not doubt that getting rid of the regime in Tehran is “a fundamentally good thing.”

“That Iranian regime is the root of all evil when it comes to the financing of terror, the [main] victims of which are Israel,” Smith says. “This is a regime that massacres its own people for having the audacity to protest in the tens of thousands.”

Smith welcomes the two-week ceasefire between Iran and the US, but says “the real test” is whether the Iranian regime “ceases all hostility towards Israel, stops funding terror organizations across the region and desists in its own malign behavior towards the West.”

Since Smith sat for the interview, the US has imposed a naval blockade on Iran as talks yielded little movement on the issues of the Strait of Hormuz and the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.

US President Donald Trump has expressed confidence that the pressure tactic could push Iran into accepting an agreement that would bring with it better ties with the West and a level of prosperity not seen in decades, but Smith seems less optimistic that the current hardline regime can be successfully negotiated with.

“This is not a regime that is interested in talking,” he says, adding that negotiations over its nuclear program simply resulted in a “level of enriched uranium that is near as, damn it, a nuclear weapon. Talks didn’t work very well in that, did they?”

His position on the conflict reflects the more hawkish stance adopted by the Conservative leadership towards the conflict. Opposition leader Kemi Badenoch welcomed the US-Israeli strikes and attacked Starmer for failing to give the US permission to use American bases on British soil for its initial operations. As the domestic economic fallout of the war has mounted, and public opposition to it has stiffened, the Tories have moderated their tone without substantively altering their position.

The Conservatives are especially critical of the Labour government’s preparedness for a conflict in the region. The British military, charges Smith, appears to have........

© The Times of Israel