Darren Millar MS is the leader of the Conservative Party in Wales.

It has been less than two years since Keir Starmer became Prime Minister and voters elected a UK Labour Government, yet his personal ratings are already at record lows and it’s clear that people are fed up.

Just imagine being lumbered with a Labour Government for more than quarter of a century. Because that is precisely the situation for us here in Wales, where we have endured 27 years of Welsh Labour, propped up by Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats.

The impact has been devastating.

Amongst other things, the Welsh Government is entirely responsible for running and funding the NHS, education, transport, economic development and local government.

Welsh Labour like to portray themselves as the architects of the National Health Service, although this is not entirely accurate (the NHS developed from the Emergency Medical Service established under Winston Churchill’s wartime government). But what matters is the situation today. And I am afraid that it is a sad fact that patients in Wales currently wait longer in emergency departments, longer for ambulances, and longer for tests and treatment than patients elsewhere in the UK. With patients here being hundreds of times more likely to be waiting two years plus for treatment than over the border in England.

And Labour’s record on education in Wales is equally woeful.

Wales’ most famous political figure, David Lloyd George, apparently described our nation as a land of “teachers and preachers.” But no matter how hard individual teachers work, our educational standards have plummeted. In the 1990s, GCSE pass rates suggested that education standards in Wales were broadly in line with the rest of the UK. Twenty-seven years later, the independent PISA tests show that Wales’ standards are the worst in the UK and ranking below former Soviet bloc countries.

The failure to get to grips with health and education standards are mirrored by Labour’s stewardship of the Welsh economy.

Wales has the lowest employment rate in the UK and the lowest pay packets in Great Britain. Small businesses such as pubs and post office pay higher business rates than in England. Tourists are threatened with an overnight tax, and major investors are put off by the slow planning system, Labour’s failure to invest in building new roads, and an unnecessary default 20mph speed limit that has slowed our motorists and economy down.

The results of Labour’s mismanagement of our economy and public services are plain to see. Just last week an IFS report found Wales has been receiving around 15 per cent more funding per head for public services than England, yet has delivered far worse outcomes.

But there is hope. Because on 7th May, the people of Wales will go to the polls.

The Welsh Conservatives have produced a manifesto with a clear plan to fix Wales and get Wales working.

On day one of a Welsh Conservative Government, we would declare a health emergency to  get every part of government focused on addressing the crisis in our NHS by surging bed numbers to end corridor care and free up ambulances stuck outside our hospitals.

We will restore discipline in schools, ban mobile phones, and back teachers by automatically expelling pupils who bring knives into schools; something which, amazingly, Labour has refused to do.

We have set out a range of measures to kick-start the Welsh economy. With an income tax cut of 1p in the pound to put £450 back into the pockets of the average hardworking family in Wales. And by scrapping Welsh Stamp Duty (known as Land Transaction Tax) on people’s main homes, to help people realise their dream of home ownership, move up and down the housing ladder, and support the many small businesses that depend on the housing market – plumbers, electricians, decorators and many others.

“But how would this be paid for?” cry the interviewers.

It is a pleasure to answer.

We would start by cutting back on the mountains of Labour waste.

For example, we would reverse the outrageous decision to spend £120 million increasing the number of Senedd Members from 60 to 96. We would make real efficiency savings in civil service costs which have increased by more than £150 million over the past few years.

We’d also scrap spending on matters for which the Welsh Government is not responsible, such as aviation, immigration, international development and foreign affairs.

The Welsh Labour is spending £200m on grants for the nationalised Cardiff Airport, millions on a ‘Nation of Sanctuary Plan’, a small fortune on tree planting in Africa and solar panelled canoes in the Amazon, and millions more of taxpayers’ money on overseas ‘embassies’ in a range of exotic cities. All this will face the axe.

Closer to home, Wales is dotted with empty Welsh Government offices, set up for civil servants who now largely work from home. We would end this waste.

We will also scrap business rates for small businesses such as pubs, cafes and post offices and axe Labour and Plaid’s toxic tourism tax.

We will expand free access to free childcare, which is vital for enabling new parents to return to work. Mums and dads here have been denied the 30 hours of free childcare available for parents in England, even though the funding has been made available to Wales as a result of the extension of childcare by the previous UK Conservative Government.

We will make sure this cash is spent to support families in Wales, so that working parents here have the same rights as those in England, and we will also pioneer a policy allowing new parents to choose to nominate a grandparent to care for their children instead of using a traditional childcare placement.

Under our proposals, a grandparent could receive a payment of up to £4,800, to recognise their role in supporting their families. Our plans would cost less than formal childcare provision and enable families to choose what works best for them.

Where Labour cancelled new road building because of their anti-motorist agenda, we are committed to investing in our economic arteries, including delivering an M4 relief road, upgrading the A55 and dualling the A40 to Fishguard in west Wales.

We will stand up for the rights and safety of women and girls, by respecting the ruling of the Supreme Court on women-only spaces, and commissioning a Wales-wide grooming gangs inquiry.

We will fight for our farmers and rural Wales, by boosting the farming budget, ditching unnecessary regulations, and promoting Welsh produce and honest labelling.

We will also honour our heroes. We are committed to establishing a National Military Museum for Wales to celebrate the enormous contribution Wales has made to the armed forces of the United Kingdom. And we will back our military veterans by increasing funding for Veterans NHS Wales, and extending free bus travel to all who have served in our armed forces.

Finally, we will stop the obsession with trying to grab more powers for the Senedd. Defence, immigration and policing are reserved matters, and rightly so. Only the Conservatives will respect the devolution settlement and promote the benefits of being part of the UK to the people of Wales.

This is a fully costed and authentically conservative manifesto.

After 27 years of falling standards and economic decline under Labour, this is an offer of a better future: lower taxes, better public services, and a growing economy.

After nearly three decades of Labour rule, we are offering real and credible change.

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Dr Sarah Ingham is the author of The Military Covenant: its impact on civil-military relations in Britain.

A narrow waterway in the Middle East. Vital for global trade, especially for transporting oil, it is threatened with closure.  A global power needs to take military action to reassert control, with Israel playing a key role … Not Iran 2026, but Suez 1956.

The Suez Crisis of 70 years ago humiliated Britain.

The post-Second World War comfort blanket of great power status was ripped away. The recent global hegemon with the largest Empire in history, the country finally realised it had been usurped by the United States.

Linking the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal cuts through Egypt. Like the Strait of Hormuz, it is a major strategic artery. Until July 1956, the Suez Canal Company, backed by the French and British governments, ran the waterway. Then Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s charismatic leader, nationalised it and took control of the Canal.

Denouncing Nasser as a “Muslim Mussolini”, Prime Minister Anthony Eden was determined to take it back and overthrow the Egyptian leader. British tonnage accounted for 28 per cent of the traffic using the waterway: two-thirds of oils imports came via it. He declared: “The industrial life of Western Europe literally depends upon the continuing free navigation of the Canal.”

While military plans were drawn up in mid-August, nothing was done until early November. Newsreels of British warships sailing for the eastern Mediterranean and the call-up of 20,000 reservists escalated the sense of crisis. Weeks, then months, passed. The military plan to re-take the Canal was constantly revised and public backing waned.  In contrast, across the Arab world, there was huge support for Nasser.

Meanwhile, it was business-as-usual for the Canal under new Egyptian management.  An enterprising MP Frank Bowles visited twice, stating in October he  found “no difficulty at all about transit north or south.”

The British case for taking military action against Egypt became increasingly flimsy.

It would be neither legal nor legitimate. It went ahead anyway, but only after a pretext for intervention was secretly cooked up between the governments of Britain, France and Israel. This involved Israeli forces invading Egypt on 29 October, with the other two nations stepping in to “separate the belligerents”. Even 70 years on, the chicanery defies belief.

Operation Musketeer can be judged a military success. It was also, however, a political disaster.

Fearing the intervention would lead to closer alignment between Egypt and other Arab nations with Moscow, the Eisenhower administration in Washington led international condemnation. In the UN General Assembly, nation after nation demanded a ceasefire.

The US used Britain’s financial weakness as leverage.  The British asked for a loan – or rather, yet another post-1945 bail-out – which Washington refused until a ceasefire was agreed. The US also threatened to sell its sterling reserves, offering the unpalatable prospect of the pound devaluing and possible bankruptcy.

Operation Musketeer had provoked what it had intended to avert: the closure of the Canal. Soldiers returned home to a country polarised by Suez, with petrol rationing and, in January 1957, PM Eden’s resignation.

Britain’s prestige was irrevocably harmed. Suez 1956 highlighted that the country was a second rank power and that any future British military operation would need US support. Iran 2026 reflects Britain’s strategic incoherence and weakness in defence capability.

One lesson was learned by Musketeer’s commander, General Sir Charles Keightley: “World public opinion is a most important weapon of war.” It is doubtful that the Trump administration considered this ahead of Operation Epic Fury.

If Labour believes that opposing controversial military action brings political success at home, Suez is a warning. By rights, the Conservatives should have been punished for the botched misadventure, but in the 1959 General Election, Eden’s successor Harold Macmillan won with a landslide majority.

Is the Starmer government betting that American forces get bested by Iran, ensuring the Trump administration is forced into a Suez-like humiliating retreat? It is the only explanation for its strategic shortsightedness in jeopardising Britain’s “Rolls Royce of allies” status.

The UK is arguably more dependent on Washington today than it was 70 years ago. Back then, Britain’s defence sector was credible: Armed Forces’ strength was 804,000 personnel in 1955. Since then, like NATO’s other European members, we have mostly outsourced defence to the Pentagon.

The US was Britain’s largest export market in 2024, accounting for £210 billion, or 22 per cent of exports. American LNG (Liquid Natural Gas) was perhaps 15 per cent of this country’s total gas supply last year. Opponents of Epic Fury could always boycott US firms, such as Google and Meta.

Despite the PM’s overwrought claims, the US did not expect the UK to “join the war”, merely give permission to use two air bases. Washington had leverage in 1956, it has leverage today.

While Britain has let down allies across the Gulf who have been loyal customers of UK defence companies, France has sent its Forces to the region, as President Macron showcases French defence capability on X.

Just like Suez, seven decades later Iran is revealing the reality of Britain’s place in the world.

“You always knew precisely where you stood with him because he always let you down.” Friends and allies of Donald Trump have ample cause to echo David Niven’s remark about Errol Flynn.

By far the most important of those friends and allies are the American people. They have twice elected Trump their President. To his supporters he offered an irresistible chance to humiliate the condescending liberals who neither knew nor cared what unfashionable Americans thought.

Trump also appealed to the isolationism which has always been a powerful current in American opinion, often the dominant one, expressed not only by the refusal of the American people to go to war in 1914 and 1939, but by no less a figure than George Washington in his tremendous Farewell Address in 1796:

“Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European Ambition, Rivalship, Interest, Humour or Caprice?”

Trump promised to put America First, never to sacrifice American lives and treasure in foreign wars, and in a primary debate in 2016 described George W Bush’s Iraq War as “a big fat mistake”.

By attacking Iran, Trump has broken this promise and betrayed his supporters. As the conservative American commentator Christopher Caldwell observes in a piece for The Spectator,

“The attack on Iran is so wildly inconsistent with the wishes of his own base, so diametrically opposed to their reading of the national interest, that it is likely to mark the end of Trumpism as a project.”

The price of petrol has shot up, bringing the war to the attention of American voters every time they fill up their cars, and this sharp rise in the cost of living is something the President cannot justify to them.

Nor can he justify the war to the wider world. No clear war aims were worked out before embarking on this adventure, so no clear war aims can now be stated, especially as the war itself is full of complications which an informed observer might have foreseen, but which were not dreamed of in Mar-a-Lago.

Were the claim by some that he acted at the behest of the Israelis true, this would in no way exculpate him. The responsibility for American involvement plainly rests with the President. The buck stops with Trump.

The President attempts to distract us from questions about morality and responsibility by playing to his undoubted strengths as a reality TV performer.

To go on winning at that tawdry game you have to go on being more disgusting than the other performers, again and again outdoing them in bad taste, and you also need at frequent intervals to change the subject, or the viewers will get bored and switch over to another channel.

Trump needs to find a quick end to the war or else American voters will switch over, and at the mid-term elections in November will turn him into the lamest of lame ducks.

The Iranian regime knows this, and can play for time.

Nobody can be certain how the war will end. How delighted one would be if the present regime in Tehran were to be overthrown and replaced with a constitutional monarchy which is on good terms with its neighbours.

But even Trump holds back from promising such a happy outcome. Much more likely, at the best, is an unhappy deal which restores freedom of navigation in the Gulf, gets a certain amount of oil and gas flowing once more through the Strait of Hormuz, but leaves open the danger of further disruption.

Freedom of navigation is and always has been in Britain’s interest, and we ought to be willing to play a full, long-term part in restoring and maintaining it in the Gulf.

We need to remember that Trump is not eternal, and that our policy should not be distorted by vain attempts to conciliate him. Channel 4 has just broadcast a three-part series, The Tony Blair Story, which recounted that Prime Minister’s energetic and in the short term triumphant campaign after the attack on the World Trade Center on 11th September 2001 to get closer than any other foreign leader to President George W Bush.

From that flowed Blair’s decision to deploy British troops alongside the Americans in the invasion of Iraq, followed by the discovery that no plans had been drawn up for the country once Saddam Hussein had been overthrown.

The Channel 4 programmes show a vulnerable old man who longs to convince us that a quarter of a century ago he did the right thing, but instead demonstrates that an air of moral seriousness, though much less vulgar than Trump’s antics, does not necessarily lead to wise decisions.

Sir Keir Starmer began by getting on surprisingly well with Trump, and hoped to follow up this success by sending Peter Mandelson to Washington.

It is curious to reflect that this manoeuvre may instead precipitate Starmer’s downfall.

Nor is his relationship with Trump as good as it was. The President now says, “Keir was willing to send two aircraft carriers after we’ve won,” and adds, “Unfortunately Keir is not Winston Churchill.”

Which prompts the thought that Trump is not Franklin D Roosevelt.

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