The British Right’s Permanent War Fantasy
How the Telegraph, Mail and GB News turned a dangerous global conflict into another excuse to shout “weakness” and a supplicating audition for Trump’s approval.
The world, as it so often does these days, has yet again taken a serious dive into becoming even more peri-apocalyptic than even I could have imagined at the start of 2026.
The potentially demented bright orange tyrant currently squatting in the White House, Donald J. Trump and his DUI hire Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth’s little adventure in the Middle East has, in the space of barely more than a week, managed to drag the globe further towards catastrophe, spike energy anxiety, deepen international instability and, naturally, expose the British right-wing press as the same shrieking, belligerent, intellectually dishonest shitshow it has always been.
Now, there are many things I could write about the war itself - there are serious and glaring questions in my mind about the legality, proportionality, escalation1, regional blowback, civilian risk and whether blithely assassinating foreign leaders is now just something that the United States now does between breakfast tv appearances and campaign emails.
There are also in my mind serious questions about our role as the UK in this growing conflict and about Keir Starmer’s attempt to maintain a vague distinction between “defensive” and “offensive” operations, and whether that distinction is a legal principle, a political smokescreen or, more likely, a bit of both.
But, not being a Middle East Expert2, I’m not going to comment very deeply on the above - rather I want to talk about what I do know a bit about, and that’s the response that we’ve seen to date from the UK media establishment. As these things go, huge chunks of our media ecosystem have responded to this mounting crisis not with scrutiny, caution, historical memory or any truly serious attempt to help the public understand the stakes. No, no - they chose a completely different path that rather more resembles a deranged wartime cosplay that would be genuinely funny if it were not attached to actual death and destruction.
And I must stress the point here that this is all we’ve seen from primarily the right of the media environment - cosplay. Pantomime Churchillism. A salivating adolescent fantasy of resolve in which every geopolitical crisis exists for the sole purpose of providing yet another chance for Telegraph columnists, GB News bobbling heads and assorted Daily Mail hobgoblins to accuse someone, anyone, of being weak.
That shakily pointing the finger and shouting “weakling” at someone is, after all, what has become the well practiced right-wing script.
The names might be different, the corpses might change but the well rehearsed castigation that the right-wing thrives on remains intact, and has been on full display over the past nine days.
When the Prime Minister rightly showed caution, he was portrayed as “weak”. When he consults on legal advice, he’s “effete.” When he hesitates before going completely prone and offering up British bases to a completely erratic and possibly deranged American administration, he is “betraying the special relationship.” When he eventually conceded limited support, that changed nothing - he was still weak, because in this telling, weakness is not a description of conduct, but rather an identity assigned to a political opponent.
The last nine days of reporting has shown it in spades, led from the front by the Telegraph, a publication now never knowingly under-moisturised when the opportunity presents itself to play ventriloquist for the Trump administration. According to its numerous columnists and reporters, Starmer was disappointing, dithering in Trump’s own words, “no Churchill3.” At no point has the Telegraph truly attempted anything that would resemble actual analysis of the crisis, rather deploying the inillustrious Allison Pearson to tell us all just how humiliated we have been.
No, no - rather it used its enormous influence and reach to frame the issue not as a complex subject of war powers, alliance politics and regional escalation, but as a display of morality. A question of our national virility. Britain, according to the Telegraph, had been insulted. We had hesitated. We had failed to stand tall enough next to the orange imperialist and his Fox News action-figure sidekick, a man apparently cobbled together from whiskey fumes, a belligerent nationalist podcast and a tactical vest.
On the more overtly tabloid side of things, the Sun did what the Sun always does when complexity enters the world - it did everything in its power to reduce the whole subject to fit the emotional vocabulary of a pub bore six pints in4.
Humiliation. Shame. Sovereignty.
That exact same hackneyed lexicon still reaching for a long-faded imperial glow5, dusted off every time anyone suggests that perhaps launching or enabling yet another war in the Middle East should at least involve about fifteen minutes of thought, consideration or risk management.
The Mail followed a very similar route and pushed a filthier version of the same theme, blending attack lines about Labour’s internal divisions with all the now familiar insinuations about whose loyalties supposedly lie where, with overt aspersions to certain voting blocks supposedly influencing decisions.
As ever, the moment you scratch a right-wing foreign policy panic and within moments you’ll find the domestic culture wars wriggling underneath like a trapped worm.
Then, of course, there’s GB News. Good. God.
Our supposed “news broadcaster” that has now become so consistently committed to national humiliation narratives and loud bleats of “SHAME!” and “BETRAYAL!” that even if we won Eurovision, cured cancer and discovered a way to make Southwestern Railways bearable for humans, it would still run a panel asking whether wokeness and homosexual, vegan lefties are undermining our wartime spirit.
Their particular line was that Starmer’s caution represented a brand new historic disgrace. The worst one since the Suez Crisis of 1956 in fact, if you listen to a certain Lord Hannan6. That the UK had somehow shamed itself by not immediately acting like it was hardwired into the current US administration in Trump’s latest military vanity project.
All of this seems to be what passes nowadays for patriotic political commentary in sections of the UK’s right-wing. No sober consideration of our country’s actual interest, concern for British lives or any thought about what retaliation, terror risk, energy shocks or regional collapse might mean for ordinary people. Just a permanent erection for displays of force, preferably American with Britain cast as the obedient junior, gagging to jump into the fray.
That seems to be the most indecorous thread that runs through this all. The UK’s right loves to dress up its foreign policy posture as 100% full-fat patriotism, but it’s far more often little more than near total submission to the US. Their basic position is not that the UK should in any way or form act independently, intelligently and, god forbid, in its own interests.
It’s that the UK should never, ever, under any circumstances, displease the US. It doesn’t matter how clearly deranged the current occupant of the White House might be. It doesn’t matter how transparently unlawful, reckless or self-serving the current operation actually is. No - all that’s expected of the British state is to assume recumbency and obey.
Moving this to a close, I have to add here that I’m in no way or form arguing that Starmer’s approach is necessarily correct, nor am I suggesting at all he’s beyond legitimate criticism.
There are genuine questions to be asked about whether his caution was prudent statecraft or political hedging, whether his legal distinctions hold water or merely provide convenient cover and whether the government he leads has adequately explained its reasoning to the public. Those are fair conversations to have, but they require something the right-wing media has largely and explicitly abandoned: good faith.
The problem isn’t that critics and criticism exist - it’s that the criticism has become entirely detached from reality.
The Prime Minister’s hesitation wasn’t weakness, it was a man attempting to navigate an extraordinarily complex situation involving alliance obligations, legal frameworks, regional consequences and genuine uncertainty about American intentions. I personally do not want to ever be in a position like that, as easy as it may seem to right-wing columnists.
Whether you think he got it right or wrong, that’s a substantive question, but the Telegraph, the Mail and GB News just aren’t interested in that conversation. They are only interested in performance - in demonstrating their loyalty to American power and their contempt for anyone who dares to suggest that loyalty might occasionally require independent thought.
What we desperately need is a return to honest political discourse about Britain’s actual interests and our relationship with the United States.
This basically means being willing to support American allies when it makes sense, but, even more importantly, also being willing to say no when it doesn’t.
It means patriotism that’s rooted in what’s actually good for British people, not in theatrical displays of obedience.
And, most importantly, it means a media that’s willing to scrutinise power rather than simply amplify it.
Until we get to that point, all we’ll be doing is keep lurching from crisis to crisis, guided not by wisdom or careful judgment, but by whoever shouts “humiliation” the loudest.
Three words in particular that disappear when there’s an opportunity for the right-wing to become turgid with excitement at the thought of bombs and explosions falling on brown people.
A qualification, or lack thereof, that has stopped almost no one from writing confidently about the region, but we are where we are.
Which, to be honest, is substantively true in the sense that he’s not dead and doesn’t have a completely romanticised biopic glow attached to every bad decision.
Though, to be fair to pub bores, they do occasionally show just a touch more nuance than the right-wing media establishment does.
A glow that somehow becomes brighter the further we get from the actual historical consequences. Funny that.
Which, if we’re being very honest, no one really should listen to.
Bear I have now stopped giggling at the Telegraph being ‘under moisturised ‘.
All the right wing gob shites are willing to sacrifice lives and treasure to fulfil their colonial fantasies.
Go off and risk their own lives? No chance. It is always other people, you know the little ones, the lower orders who are expected to sacrifice themselves.
Whilst the papers are owned by people unwilling to pay the tax for rearmament.
Richard Littlejohn (formerly known as Richard Smalldick)and the rest should be issued baggy shirts, Lee Enfields and parachuted into Tehran.
Wouldn’t win the war, obviously. But it would rid society of some rodents.
The idiocy is terrifying. I seem to remember those same rags screaming blue murder when Blair took us into Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq. They were right to do so back then but it's highly unlikely they did so for the right reasons.