From the Gulf to the Campaign Trail, Britain's Search for Leverage

Editorial digest April 09, 2026
Last updated : 00:42

Keir Starmer landed in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday with a message calibrated for two audiences at once. To Gulf allies nervous about Washington's unpredictability, the prime minister offered Britain as a steady hand — a country ready to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz and broker calm where Donald Trump's erratic posture has sown doubt. To voters back home, the trip was designed to project something Labour has struggled to convey since taking office: purpose.

The Hormuz crisis gives Starmer a rare opening. With Iranian reports suggesting the strait closed again hours after a supposed ceasefire, the waterway that carries roughly a fifth of the world's oil remains a live flashpoint. Britain's naval presence in the Gulf is modest compared to America's, but that may be beside the point. What regional powers want right now is a counterpart who picks up the phone, follows through, and doesn't reverse course via social media at 3am. Starmer is betting that reliability itself is a form of leverage — and that Gulf states, rattled by Trump's transactional diplomacy, will take it seriously.

Whether the strategy translates into tangible results is another matter. Britain cannot unilaterally guarantee freedom of navigation, nor does it have the economic heft to reshape Tehran's calculations. But the symbolism matters. Starmer is explicitly mirroring the coalition-building approach he attempted on Ukraine, suggesting Downing Street sees a template: assemble willing partners, define a framework, present it as the grown-up alternative to American chaos. It is diplomacy as brand positioning — and for a prime minister whose domestic approval ratings remain stubbornly flat, any sign of international stature is welcome.

The campaign trail heats up — separately

Back home, the political energy is splintering across the devolved nations in ways Westminster often ignores. The Welsh Lib Dems launched their Senedd campaign with a pledge of £300 million for social care — a significant sum for a party that holds just one seat in the current chamber. Jane Dodds's pitch is less about winning outright than about leverage after 7 May, positioning the Lib Dems as kingmakers in a fragmented parliament. In a country where social care provision has become visibly threadbare, the promise is well targeted. Whether the money would materialise in coalition negotiations is the eternal Lib Dem question.

North of the border, Scottish Labour is playing a different game entirely. Anas Sarwar's pledge to spend £30 million guaranteeing artists a living wage borrows directly from Ireland's basic income pilot for creatives — a scheme that has drawn praise and scepticism in roughly equal measure. The politics are shrewd: Scotland's cultural sector has felt squeezed under the SNP, and Labour is positioning itself as the party that takes the creative economy seriously rather than treating it as a nice-to-have. If Labour wins at Holyrood, this would be one of the most distinctive cultural policies anywhere in the UK. It also signals that Sarwar wants to differentiate Scottish Labour from the London party, offering policies with a distinctly different flavour from Starmer's more cautious centrism.

Reform's twin provocations

Then there is Reform UK, which managed to generate two separate controversies in a single news cycle. The party announced it would deny visas to nationals of African and Caribbean countries that support slavery reparations at the United Nations — a proposal so bluntly punitive it reads less like policy than like a social media post given a press release format. The intent is obvious: keep immigration and culture-war issues at the top of the news cycle ahead of local elections, and force other parties to respond on Reform's chosen terrain.

More quietly but perhaps more consequentially, the party confirmed a £4 million donation from Ben Delo, a British crypto billionaire based in Hong Kong. Delo was convicted in the US for failing to implement adequate anti-money-laundering controls at BitMEX, then pardoned by Trump. He describes himself as a champion of free speech. The donation — made before the government's new cap on overseas political contributions — underscores how comfortably Reform has positioned itself as the party of choice for wealthy libertarians with grievances against the regulatory state. It also raises a question the party would rather avoid: when your largest donor was convicted of precisely the kind of financial oversight failures that regulators exist to prevent, what does that say about your attitude to governance?

What it all adds up to

Wednesday's headlines, taken together, sketch a portrait of a country pulling in several directions at once. A Labour prime minister seeking relevance abroad while his party campaigns on domestic care and culture at home. An opposition insurgency funded by offshore crypto wealth and fuelled by deliberately incendiary proposals. And devolved elections that remind us British politics is not one story but several, running in parallel, often talking past each other.

The thread connecting all of it is leverage — who has it, who wants it, and what they are willing to say or spend to get it.