Gavin Grey: UK Correspondent on Keir Starmer announcing the UK will send four fighter jets to Qatar

The UK Prime Minister has an uphill battle to convince the public his response to the war in Iran is the right one.

Sir Keir Starmer has announced four extra Typhoon jets are being sent to join the squadron in Qatar, while helicopters with anti-drone capabilities will shortly arrive in Cyprus and the HMS Dragon is being deployed to the Mediterranean. The move follows a strike from an Iranian-made drone at the UK’s Akrotiri air base in Cyprus.

But Starmer is still being accused of having “completely misjudged” the need to put defences into Cyprus, UK Correspondent Grey told Ryan Bridge.

The HMS Dragon wouldn’t arrive for around a week, while other European nations were very quickly filling the void by sending naval assets.

“Frankly many people think Keir Starmer has been caught rather napping on this - plus the fact, rather embarrassingly for him, the first...government-chartered flight out of the Middle East for people who were stuck there had been delayed for some engineering problems.”

The flight had now taken off, Grey said.

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