One Exception: Gaza

On the day that, with minimal coverage, Israel accepted the Gaza Health Ministry’s figure of 70,000 war dead that had hitherto dismissed as “Hamas propaganda”, Peter Oborne writes:

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer entered office in July 2024 with a single strategy: blame the Tories.

He blamed them for the faltering economy; for National Health Service failures; for the state of prisons. Labour, he insisted, would sort out the mess.

But the new prime minister made one exception: Gaza.

Although Starmer’s government embarked on a course correction on some key issues, he’s never uttered a word of criticism over the Tory sale of arms to Israel, or the previous government’s refusal to call out Israeli war crimes.

As I explained in my book Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza, Labour entered into an informal pact with the Tories over Gaza while in opposition - and they weren’t going to break it once in power.

Incredibly, the Starmer government has now taken this cross-party collaboration a step further.

We now have troubling evidence that Starmer’s Foreign Office may be protecting David Cameron, the former prime minister who returned as foreign secretary in the final months of Rishi Sunak’s outgoing Tory government.

No denials

Some context is necessary here. In its dying days, the Sunak government engaged in a desperate struggle to defend the reputation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he embarked upon what most experts now view as a genocide.

Leading this struggle was Cameron. When South Africa accused Israel of committing genocide, bringing its case to the International Court of Justice, Cameron trashed it as “wrong” and “unhelpful”. He then suspended British aid to Unrwa, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees.

Britain also formally objected as the International Criminal Court (ICC) pondered war crimes charges against Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant.

But Cameron went further than that. Thanks to an investigation by Middle East Eye, we now learn that he personally threatened Karim Khan, chief prosecutor of the ICC, by warning that Britain would defund the court and withdraw from the Rome Statute unless it dropped plans to issue arrest warrants for Israeli officials.

To his credit, Khan ignored the British foreign secretary, and the court duly charged Netanyahu and Gallant with crimes including “starvation as a method of warfare” and “the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts”.

There have been no denials from either Cameron or the Foreign Office. When I engaged with friends of Cameron while writing my book Complicit, they privately admitted that the call took place and was “robust”.

But they insisted that rather than making a threat, Cameron pointed out that strong voices in the Conservative Party would push for defunding the ICC and withdrawing from the Rome Statute. If true, this could nonetheless be considered an attempt to interfere with the court’s judicial process.

That is an incredibly serious matter, especially for a country that claims to support international law. Yet the Starmer government has repeatedly refused to comment, still less investigate, Cameron’s extraordinary intervention.

To be fair, there has been little pressure. As so often when it comes to Israel and Gaza, the story has been ignored in Britain’s establishment media.

But now comes a bombshell development - one that the Starmer government surely cannot ignore.

Misleading reply

The Foreign Office has for the first time confirmed, in response to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request, that a phone conversation between Cameron and Khan did indeed take place.

But the revelation was more interesting than that. The FOI request, filed by Unredacted, a research unit based at the University of Westminster, asked which ministers or officials were present when Cameron spoke with Karim Khan.

In response, the Information Rights Unit at the Foreign Office stated: “The then Foreign Secretary, David Cameron, was the only person present on the call on 23 April 2024 with Karim Khan.”

This in itself was of chief importance. Foreign office minders generally sit in on all calls made in an official capacity by ministers. The fact that Cameron apparently made this call without an official present, suggests that he was acting in a freelance capacity - ie, outside the formal Foreign Office structures - when he allegedly threatened Khan.

But there is more to it. We now know that the Foreign Office’s reply to Unredacted was at best misleading.

MEE has established that - according to numerous sources with knowledge of the matter, including former staff in the prosecutor’s office - there was indeed another person on the call: a Tory peer, Baroness Liz Sugg. 

Baroness who? Sugg was elevated to the peerage after serving as a senior official in Cameron’s Downing Street. The former prime minister later recalled her to his side as a special assistant - a political appointment - when he became foreign secretary.

The Foreign Office information was thus wrong. There was someone else present, but that person was not an official.

Urgent questions

All kinds of questions need urgent answers after this latest revelation. Why did the Foreign Office issue a false statement? Will it correct the record and apologise?

Why was no official present on the line to record minutes of the foreign secretary’s conversation with the chief prosecutor for the ICC? Did Sugg take minutes in the absence of an official?

Was the Foreign Office aware at the time that this conversation had taken place? Did Sunak know about it?

Finally, did Cameron seek advice from government lawyers before making a call that could be seen as an attempt to interfere with the course of justice?

So far, the Foreign Office, Cameron and Sugg have all refused to comment. This is unacceptable, since Cameron’s apparent readiness to resort to private menaces to protect suspected war criminals places Britain among a group of gangster nations for whom might is right.

Other members of this group include Netanyahu’s Israel, President Donald Trump’s United States and President Vladimir Putin’s Russia (which itself issued an arrest order for Khan in 2023, in response to an ICC warrant against Putin).

It’s not hard to imagine the reaction had Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, rather than a British foreign secretary, been caught red-handed in a similar attempt to pervert the course of justice. The story would have been front-page news everywhere - and Britain might well have called an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council.

This Whitehall omerta stinks. At the very least, the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, chaired by Labour grandee Emily Thornberry, should call Cameron (and Sugg) to give evidence, alongside the Foreign Office permanent secretary.

This also raises also a troubling question for Starmer: why has a prime minister who loves to blame the Tories been so happy to let them off the hook over Gaza?