Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, has posed a fascinating counter-factual question about our Prime Minister: what if Keir Starmer rather than Winston Churchill had been Prime Minister in World War Two?

Huckabee’s characterisation of him as the arch appeaser may be a little harsh, but it does have the ring of truth

The undiplomatic taunting of the Prime Minister by President Trump’s chosen envoy in Jerusalem is Huckabee’s response to Starmer’s decision for Britain to recognise a Palestinian state next month, and a reply to his criticism yesterday of Israel’s coming full military occupation of Gaza city, which Starmer says will only lead to more starvation and suffering for the Palestinian people.

Referring to the devastating bombing of the German city of Dresden in February 1945 by the RAF and USAF, which killed an estimated 25,000 civilians, Huckabee wrote on X ‘That wasn’t food you dropped. If you had been PM we would all be speaking German.’

Huckabee’s full blooded attack, suggesting that if Starmer had been in power during the Second World War Britain would have surrendered to Nazi Germany, is a brutal  and unprecedented criticism of an American ally by a senior U.S. diplomat, and reflects the rage felt by some in the Trump administration at the U.K. and other European countries for turning on Israel and ‘rewarding Hamas’ for abducting Israeli hostages on October 7th 2023. Only around 20 of the hostages are thought to be still alive.

Huckabee’s blistering sarcasm contrasts with Trump’s own recent attitude towards Starmer at their  meetings in Washington and Scotland when the President  praised the PM, and referred to them as friends. But the attack does invite us to speculate, and wonder just what would have happened had Starmer been Britain’s war leader in the dark days of the 1940s.

A human rights lawyer rather than a former soldier like Winston Churchill, although the Prime Minister has recently been photographed wearing a military camouflage jacket, he does not cut a very convincing martial figure. Starmer is more in the tradition of Neville Chamberlain, the appeasing Prime Minister whose attempts to cosy up to Hitler before the war ended in utter humiliation and failure.

Starmer’s natural default position, like so many in Labour today, is to side with Britain’s enemies and forget her real friends. Despite his much trumpeted campaign to rid the party of the anti-semitism that had infected it during the reign of his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, Starmer has now placed Britain firmly in the ranks of Israel’s foes.

Huckabee’s angry words on X may be crude, but they do reflect a rough and ready reality:  can we seriously imagine Starmer vowing like Churchill to fight this country’s enemies on the beaches , and never surrendering? Far more likely, surely, that the current PM would have played Chamberlain’s part in attempting to appease Hitler and give him what he was demanding?

Aren’t Starmer’s natural instincts to take the line of least resistance, and make up policy on the hoof that is in his own rather than his country’s best interests? Huckabee’s characterisation of him as the arch appeaser of our own day may be a little harsh and unfair, but it does have the convincing ring of truth.