Joshua Guillen is a Conservative candidate in the Jubilee Ward for the Enfield Council elections in May.

The local elections in May are widely expected to be damaging for the Conservatives, with both the centre-left and the right – in the form of the Liberal Democrats and Reform UK – set to be the ultimate beneficiaries in areas historically well-rehearsed at returning blue councils. Yet despite this, here in bright red Enfield, there is life in the old Tory dog yet thanks to the complacency of our local Labour council.

While it would be foolhardy to assume that Labour are guaranteed to lose control of a borough they have governed since 2010, they will inevitably benefit from a handsomely-funded ground game – some forecasts have predicted them to be defeated for the first time in over a decade and a half.

To understand why, take the example of Jubilee Ward, where I am a Conservative candidate. Habitually red, it was, until recently, considered to be safe enough for the former Leader of Enfield Council, Nesil Caliskan, to be a councillor. Yet, upon vacating her seat for the House of Commons, the subsequent by-election in October 2024 saw us get our highest ward share since 2006, which represented a swing of just over ten per cent. Other than the local picture, which was characterised by decaying public services and an ever-increasing debt-burden, to compete with Labour so soon after they had won a landslide in Westminster was a shock.

Yet it is precisely because of the council’s record of delivery, or more accurately, lack thereof, that has boosted our competitiveness in the Ward – and has made the May elections a referendum on the viability of Enfield Labour. Consider first that the London Borough of Enfield is currently indebted to the tune of £1.23 billion, and was forecast to hit £1.5 billion by the end of this financial year. Such financial distress corrodes public services, weakens the council’s fiscal resilience and creates a race to the bottom for services deemed to be discretionary or of limited importance.

While there have been many suspect decisions in this genre, the gutting of weekly household bin collections remains top of the Labour chargesheet. Nominally inexpensive and a genuine public good, their decision to remove weekly waste removals has hastened fly-tipping and made streets less pleasant. Despite barbs to the contrary, we take no pleasure in pointing this out across our campaign; we want to live in a London Borough that is clean and rubbish-free. We have made the case that having pride in place is a prerequisite to a tolerant and prosperous neighbourhood. That is why we have committed to bringing them back. Yet the reality is inescapable: Labour has made Enfield less clean, and the days of spendthrift decision-making must end.

The point I am getting at here is not necessarily one about hyper-local service provision – however crucial that is – but instead one about fairness. Enfield was recently ranked as the sixth most deprived Local Authority in England, with 37.7 per cent of the population living in a deprived household, and the Jubilee Ward itself placed among the most deprived 20 per cent in the country. So, when I hear on the doors that residents feel let down by consecutive Labour administrations, the Conservative principles upon which we campaign become more apparent. Hence, when Enfield Labour refuse to substantively address the Borough’s spiralling fly tipping crisis, it is important we call it out for what it is: a cynical assumption that people will not vote differently, no matter how bad things become. To my mind, and to those of my campaign colleagues, such an indifference implies that proper waste services are the preserve of the wealthy – and that dirty streets in the N9 postcode aren’t actually all that bad.

The same attitude persists with the top-down imposition of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) – or, as Labour insists on calling them, “Quieter Neighbourhoods” (they promise they’re different). Purportedly designed to create “safer, greener and more inclusive streets”, these definitely-not-LTNs merely serve to push congestion into avenues, by-roads and highways predominantly occupied by poorer neighbourhoods. In essence, gridlocked traffic is now the new normal.

But my contention – and this is something I have heard on the doorstep – is that is goes beyond that: it is a foul injustice. Cars are crucial to an outer London borough like ours, and are often a prerequisite for people earning a living. Even to those who may not afford to drive, busier roads lead to slower buses, in turn depriving people of an ability to earn and gain a sense of independence. Both us and TfL know LTNs lead to disruption. That Labour cannot compute this – local grandstanding aside – and refuse to acknowledge this reality, goes some way in demonstrating why they are in for one hell of a fight this May.

The fact is, Jubilee Ward, alongside other parts of Enfield, are competitive for the first time in my adult life, showing that the Conservative principles of fairness, autonomy and sound money are still in vogue. After all, stranger things have happened – and Enfield may just be the blueprint for a Tory revival.

It’s not often you write something about a politician and a party where you are confidant, yourself, it’s correct, and then the Prime Minister gives you, publicly and gratis, every proof it was.

Starmer’s dogged refusal to answer a single question on fuel duty at PMQs but to keep trying to paint Badenoch and Farage as – and he actually used the word – ‘war mongers’ was the clearest sign of the very co-ordinated narrative he and his party want to spin to discredit his opponents and buy himself back some badly needed credibility

The House of Commons has long had a proscription about using the term ‘liar’ towards another member of the house, so it takes some anger for a Tory front bencher to shout the term at the PM. The Speaker rebuked them for it, as they always have, but there was a real anger on Tory benches at the corkscrew logic Starmer applied – whilst dodging the question –  to make him look sensible and statesman-like whilst covering up his flatfooted response, diplomatic fence sitting, and the fact his decision making has been largely guided by domestic political considerations including his own survival.

His one time image of being an unlikely but seemingly effective ‘bridge to Trump’ is in tatters. And 24 hours after his weekly – weakly – PMQs exchange it was his decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as his official ‘bridge to Trump’ that he was having to answer for.

His answer given to reporters was that the decision was his ‘mistake’, and again apologised to the victims of the world’s most infamous paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein.

It is in keeping with previous problems the PM has faced, that: on Iran Number 10 briefed against the Chief of the Defence staff that a ‘lack of planning’ was more his fault and on Mandelson the minister sent out to ‘defend the indefensible’ on the media yesterday said the topic of Mandelson should really be dropped as raking over it was re-traumatising Eptein’s victims.

Hiding behind, has become a habit. A Chief of Staff, a deputy National Security Advisor, the Head of the Defence staff, it’s a bad pattern but hiding behind trafficked victims of a paedophile is a real low.

The Times reports that Mandelson brokered a meeting in Downing street for Tony Blair and Jeffrey Epstein where they ‘discussed religion and world conflicts’ in 2002, that’s of course 23 years before Mandelson was appointed UK Ambassador to Washington. The general media response to the first file release of what the PM knew before he appointed Mandelson was that they were very awkward for Starmer but no ‘smoking gun’. It is however very clear that he knew enough, for the man who made such play of his moral compass before he was PM to reconsider the appointment as the PM.

The release also shows his claim, to the House of Commons, that a full process had been gone through was at best disingenuous, and that that process was not the standard operation most have to go through. I have seldom seen or faced LBC’s veteran inquisitor Nick Ferrari in such obviously genuine frustration and anger. It’s worth a watch.

Starmer is in Downing Street, partly because he repeatedly suggested, he’d be different. Country before party, service before self-service, a new standard in public life across his government. He and a number of his ministers and aides have spent the last 20 months repeatedly trashing that claim. If on this slate alone, he was ‘the change’, he was a change for the worse.

No, Conservatives can’t remotely pretend to have been squeaky clean in the past, and Reform have been dogged by accusations since they entered Parliament. The Lib Dems have been quietly trying to handle a longstanding issue with a senior member of their party, and Zack Polanski has his – for want of a better phrase – his weird ‘boob thing’.

It takes me back to a line widely picked up in the 2024 conference leadership speech made by my old boss Sir James Cleverly urging the Tories to ‘be more normal’.

If the whole party, indeed all our political parties could take that to heart we might, just might, find that the public didn’t retain quite such an intense distrust of politics as a whole and politicians as a species. Remember when “MPs expenses” was supposed to be the watershed moment?

The losses the Conservative’s sustained in 2024 were numerically appalling for them, but some of those who lost their seats were loses equivalent to a ‘cleansing‘. A few MPs who were dismissed by the electorate were embroiled, in the brutal words used to me by one party Chairman, “in some pretty dark shit”.

In October last year Kemi Badenoch gave a very sensible response when I asked her about standards for candidates and MPs, and the risks of doing opposition the halo-polishing way Starmer had.

It was partly to highlight, as is her job, that it had massively backfired on him and Labour within a year, but she went on to say:

“You know we want everybody to be working to the highest possible standards… I’m sure once in a while, there’ll be some people who fall short. But what I’m not doing is pretending the Conservative MPs are perfect. We’re not. What we are, are people who recognise that people are flawed, make allowances for that, and we don’t want to be a country where the people who are in there [government] are neither competent nor honest. We’ve got to make sure that we bring honesty and competency through and that’s one of the things that I’m focused on. “

Every politician, like every individual has flaws. A year ago a number of Conservatives, some no longer Conservatives were more than happy to tell me hers, whilst glossing over their own. No body needs saints or sinners in their ranks, but competent, honest people who are ‘normal’ would be a massive plus.

Ignoring a man’s relationship with a convicted paedophile to give him one of the highest and most important diplomatic position this country can confer, is, I’d suggest, worse than a man who broke his own rules to eat a cake, and was hounded by the party now defending their PM – but in the real world neither is a good look.

Starmer is still on borrowed time, for all his self-congratulation about his own leadership skills and his loud denigration of others’. His premiership is so riddled with holes by now you could market him as a Swiss cheese. He ‘was the future once’

It’s the politicians coming forward, the candidates and MPs with a future I’m thinking about.

If we can all find a way to choose candidates and foster MPs who are just a bit more normal to a majority of the electorate, we wouldn’t be doing ourselves a favour.

We’d be doing everyone a favour.

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George Beglan holds an LLM (Distinction) from Durham and read Jurisprudence at Oxford; he has published on law reform in the Cambridge Law Review

A fortnight ago, the United States and Israel killed Ayatollah Khamenei, destroyed significant portions of Iran’s nuclear and missile infrastructure, and triggered a regional counterstrike that hit Gulf civilian infrastructure, closed major airspace, and set the Middle East on the edge of a wider war. The British government lent its bases for ‘defensive’ strikes, scrambled RAF aircraft to intercept Iranian missiles over the Gulf, and announced, with apparent sincerity, that it did not want to see further escalation.

The British commentariat’s response was, broadly, to reach for international law. Was the strike legal? Was it sanctioned? Did it violate the UN Charter’s prohibition on aggression? The SNP invoked Article 2(4). The Greens called it illegal. Academics queued to explain the self-defence thresholds under Article 51. It was, as the same conversation was in January over Venezuela, a performance of legal seriousness that served primarily to avoid the actual question.

The actual question is simpler: was it strategically justified, and what should Britain do now?

I argued elsewhere in January, writing about Venezuela, that international law in military matters has always been more facade than framework: that it lacks enforcement mechanisms, that it derives its apparent authority from hegemonic sponsorship, and that appealing to it not only fails to constrain great power behaviour but obscures the real debate. The intervening weeks, culminating in Operation Epic Fury, have provided a rather emphatic real-world test of that thesis.

The Legal Debate Is Not the Debate

The legal arguments are real, in a technical sense. The US-Israel strikes almost certainly do not satisfy the imminence threshold for Article 51 self-defence as it is generally understood. Iran had not launched an armed attack immediately preceding the operation. The 2025 US intelligence assessment judged that Iran was not actively building a nuclear weapon. The Security Council was not consulted. On a strict reading of the UN Charter, this is legally difficult territory.

None of this matters, in any practical sense, and the reason it does not matter is the reason it never mattered: the UN Security Council exists primarily to formalise great power disagreement, not to constrain great power behaviour. Russia and China have condemned the strikes. They condemned the Libya intervention in 2011. They condemn Israeli operations with metronomic regularity. The condemning party and the acting party have simply traded positions depending on convenience, and the ‘law’ in each case is invoked to legitimise the position already held.

What the legal framing does, more damagingly, is replace a tractable question with an intractable one. Whether the US-Israel strikes were strategically wise, what their likely consequences for regional order are, what Britain’s interests actually are in the outcome, whether a destabilised or collapsed Iranian state serves Western interests better than a constrained one: these are questions that can, with difficulty, be analysed and answered. Whether the strikes violated Article 51 is a question that, in the absence of any enforcement mechanism, generates argument without resolution and virtue-signalling without consequence.

The legal framing replaces a tractable question with an intractable one. Whether the strikes were strategically wise is analysable. Whether they violated Article 51, in a world with no enforcement, generates argument without resolution.

Britain’s Position Is Incoherent

The British government’s own position illustrates the confusion perfectly. We did not participate in the strikes. We do not want escalation. We have, however, lent our bases for what the Prime Minister called ‘a specific and limited defensive purpose,’ and we have RAF aircraft actively intercepting Iranian missiles in the Gulf. The legal architecture being invoked by our opposition politicians would, if applied consistently, render Britain a co-belligerent. The government has chosen to say nothing about this, presumably because acknowledging it requires engaging with the strategic question directly.

This is not a criticism of the operational decision. The case for lending bases and providing defensive air cover is defensible on national interest grounds: British personnel and bases were directly at risk from Iranian strikes, Gulf stability is a British economic and strategic interest, and the alternative was to watch from the sidelines while America conducted the operation without us, sacrificing influence over its conduct and aftermath. These are real considerations. The problem is that the government is unwilling to make them publicly, because making them publicly requires abandoning the international law frame and admitting that British policy is being made on the basis of interests and judgements, not legal obligation.

Conservatives should find this uncomfortable, because the clarity they routinely demand of others on national sovereignty and the rejection of supranational constraint does not appear to extend to military matters when the politics are difficult. A conservatism that invokes sovereignty against Strasbourg and Brussels but retreats to UN Charter language when asked about Tehran is not a coherent position. It is convenience dressed as principle.

What the Strategic Questions Actually Are

Set the legal framing aside and several genuinely difficult questions emerge, to which honest answers are available.

Was the operation strategically justified?

The strategic case rests on the combination of Iran’s nuclear trajectory, its missile programme development timeline, and the judgement that the window for military prevention was closing. Contra the 2025 intelligence assessment’s headline conclusion, Iran’s enrichment levels were well above civilian requirements and its ICBM development timeline was being actively compressed.

Quite pithily, in order for Iran’s pacifist claims to be true, they would be the first and only country in the world to enrich Uranium to 60% for peaceful purposes. The pacifist claim requires not just that the late Ayatollah was peace-minded, but that he and his many associates were nuclear pacifists unprecedented in history. A high bar for the claimant to clear, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Against this, Iran was in active diplomatic negotiations when the strikes occurred, which is either evidence that diplomacy was viable and was therefore prematurely abandoned, or evidence that Iran was using negotiations as cover whilst continuing to develop capability. Which reading is correct matters enormously for the strategic assessment, and the British media has largely not tried to find out.

What are the likely consequences for regional order?

The killing of Khamenei and significant IRGC leadership creates a succession vacuum of unpredictable dimensions. CIA assessments before the strikes identified potential successors, many of whom appear to have been killed in the operation. A weakened, internally fractured Iran may be less capable of projecting force through proxies; it may also be less capable of the kind of centralised rational calculation that made deterrence work. The history of Western-induced regime instability, Libya being the obvious comparator, suggests the second risk is the more serious one, and it deserves more serious treatment than it has received.

What are Britain’s actual interests here?

They are not primarily legal. They are: the security of British personnel and bases in the region; Gulf economic stability and energy prices; the prevention of a nuclear-armed Iran; the avoidance of a regional war that would generate refugee flows and further terrorism; alongside the maintenance of influence with Washington over the shape of whatever post-conflict settlement emerges. A British government willing to articulate these interests clearly would be in a better position to advance them. A British government hiding behind ‘we don’t want escalation’ is in a position to advance none of them.

What Conservatives Should Say

A coherent Conservative position would acknowledge the following. First, that the legal framing is largely performative and that the real question is strategic. Second, that the strategic case for the operation has genuine weight, even if the execution and timing can be questioned, and that pretending otherwise for the sake of appearing principled is neither honest nor useful. Third, that Britain’s interests in the outcome are substantial and specific, and that maximising influence over the post-conflict settlement requires engaging with Washington directly and credibly rather than signalling disapproval from the sidelines. Fourth, that the risk of an ungoverned Iranian state is at least as serious as the risk of a nuclear-armed one, and that any coherent policy towards Iran must now address both.

Thatcher did not discuss the Falklands primarily through the lens of UN Security Council resolutions, though she engaged with them. She discussed it through the lens of British interests, British principle, and British will. The clarity that served British foreign policy well in that conflict is the clarity that is missing now, and its absence is not a symptom of excessive legalism. It is a symptom of a political class that has forgotten how to think about power.

The legal framing is not neutrality. It is the avoidance of accountability for strategic judgements that need to be made. Britain has interests in Iran’s outcome. We should say what they are.

The death of international law, as a meaningful constraint on great power military behaviour, is not new news. It has been dying since at least 2003, and arguably never fully lived. What Iran has done is make the body impossible to ignore. The question for British Conservatives is not whether to mourn it, but whether to develop a foreign policy capable of operating honestly in the world that remains.

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It’s World Sleep Day, and what better excuse is there to give your bedtime routine a bit of a boost?

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