Foreign secretary Yvette Cooper: ‘Making decisions based on what the US do or say doesn’t feel like sensible foreign policy’

Firing Peter Mandelson, convening with Marco Rubio – then handling the fallout of conflict in the Middle East… it’s been a busy time for the secretary of state, and our writer has had a ringside seat

Before Yvette Cooper joins me in a plush side room at the Foreign Office, an aide comes in and draws the heavy curtains. Outside is Horse Guards Parade. I can see a strip of Downing Street, a patch of the No 10 garden, daffodils in bloom. I say that it’s a shame to block the light on such a beautiful spring afternoon. The aide coughs, embarrassed, and explains that it’s actually for security.

So that people can’t see in?

“Um, no. These are anti-shrapnel curtains.”

The joint US-Israeli bombardment of Iran is ongoing and the mood here is solemn. News sites show oil facilities and desalination plants ablaze in both Iran and Gulf states. Black clouds rise from residential areas across Lebanon, where Israel say they are striking the militant group Hezbollah. President Masoud Pezeshkian’s apology to the Gulf states – Oman, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia – for firing more than 2,000 retaliatory Iranian drones and missiles, was undermined by continued bombardment and indicated a split in the country’s leadership. At the time of writing, more than 1,800 people have been killed across the region, including 175 schoolgirls and staff in Minab, south Iran, which a New York Times investigation suggests was a US precision strike.

Cooper, UK foreign secretary since last September, is on a call to the “shocked and angry” Omani foreign minister. Oman had been mediating negotiations with Iran before the US aborted peace talks. It’s one of multiple calls she is fielding from Gulf allies, while her officials airlift Britons from affected areas. Donald Trump continues to snipe at Keir Starmer for refusing to allow US troops to use British bases to launch initial strikes, saying the UK needn’t send aircraft carriers to a war “we’ve already won”, but the two have spoken for the first time since the war began.Earlier he’d said of the UK PM: “This is not Winston Churchill we are dealing with.”

Cooper – black suit, white top – comes in apologising for the delay. She appears crisp and cool, faltering momentarily when an adviser reminds her Monday was only yesterday. In the preceding weeks, I’ve glimpsed the relentlessness of her job at this acute point in history. I trailed her to Munich for the security conference, to New York to address the United Nations security council, to Washington DC to meet Marco Rubio, the secretary of state. Throughout, she stressed her focus on the civil war in Sudan, “the worst humanitarian crisis of the 21st century”. Then she travelled overland into Ukraine to commemorate the fourth anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s ongoing war.

But when the first missiles hit Tehran, aspects of our trip were cast in a new light. For instance, while we were at the US state department on Friday 20 February, Rubio and Cooper had broken away from a scheduled roundtable with advisers, closing the door of a private room to chat alone. The meeting overran by an hour. When the two ministers emerged for a handshake in front of cameras (“the spray”, as it’s known in the US), did Cooper’s smile seem brittle? Until the strikes, the pair had an “excellent” working relationship, communicating almost daily on the messaging app Signal. What was said in those unrecorded minutes?

Something else niggled, too. After her statement to the UN security council on Gaza and the West Bank – in which she’d spoken forcefully about humanitarian catastrophe, the violent campaigns of illegal settlers and the need for a viable Palestinian state – she was due to speak at a reception at the residence of HM consul  general, across the road from the UN building. I waited there with her advisers. They expected her to step from the lift accompanied by her close protection team any second. Minutes passed. Then half an hour. The bright room filled with dignitaries accepting miniature pies and fish and chips from staff in striped butcher’s aprons; the foreign secretary was not among them. Aides consulted phones – where was she? Finally, a message: Cooper had been intercepted by Gideon Sa’ar, the Israeli foreign minister, for an “unscheduled bilat”.

She arrived 40 minutes late, two pink patches high on her cheeks. A special adviser fetched her a glass of wine. Had Sa’ar taken issue with her criticism of Israeli policy? They’d had “disagreements”, she said. “We obviously have strong disagreements on issues, some of those issues are around the aid restrictions [to Gaza].” She did not say what else they “disagreed” on.

Here under the high ceilings of the Foreign Office, I raise those meetings again. Did the Americans give forewarning of strikes? Cooper goes broad at first, saying, “Obviously, we have lots of discussions with allies over a long period of time … many discussions about a whole series of things.” Did Iran come up? “We have had lots of discussions about Iran and about the Middle East.” Had the Americans or Israelis put pressure on the UK government to back them? She stalls. “Obviously, you wouldn’t expect me to talk about the detail of conversations,” she says. “But we certainly discussed Iran among other issues.”

A mug of tea arrives for Cooper. She leans back against the sofa for a moment to drink. The room we’re in is ornate, gold damask wallpaper and walnut furniture. The temperature is refreshing compared with her own office, she says, which is hot and full of people.

In Munich, Cooper had told me that UK foreign policy was anchored in international law and the rules-based order. She stressed adherence to the UN charter because the principles protect British interests. “UK security and prosperity depend on those international alliances and the rules-based order, but it’s also about our values,” she said. These informed Starmer’s refusal to join US military operations in Iran, she says now, and also his pivot after RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus was hit by a drone from an “Iranian proxy” to allow some bases to be used for “limited defensive operations”. “We are clear that we have a legal basis for all decisions we’re taking.”

Given this emphasis on law, does she think – as legal scholars have suggested – that the bombing campaign is illegal? “What we don’t do is comment on the legal approach of other governments, particularly allies,” she says. “That is for them. They have to explain. Because it’s also about the evidence [they] have, the intention, and so on. It’s for other governments to justify.”

So, what would a successful US operation in Iran look like? “Look, one of the issues of concern for us is actually, ‘What is the objective and the purpose [of the strikes]?’” She thinks what the US is focused on is the ballistic missile threats, but the British government doesn’t see how military action helps regional stability or security. Her priority is “de-escalation”, she says. “For us that’s the issue … It’s why we pursue the diplomatic route.”

If the UK government were talking to Iran, “we would just continually say to Iran that they need to stop this now”, she says. “They need to stop the ballistic missile threats. They need to [halt] the violations of the airspace, the safety and security of a whole series of their neighbouring countries.” She blames Iran for “deliberately trying to escalate this into a much wider regional conflict, which is just really dangerous”. She does not use this language for the US or Israel. She adds that while it might seem difficult to accept when a regime has been so “brutally oppressing its own citizens”, it’s the UK government’s clear view that, “the future Iran is for Iranians”.

Labour remembers too well the war in Iraq. “Yes. [We] learn lessons from things that went wrong in the past,” she says. “That’s why there’s a sense of this being about both our principles and our interests. You have to deal with the world as it is, not as you want it to be.”

Built into this conviction is the elasticity to react if Iran threatens British citizens. “Threats to hotels in Dubai, for example, or threats to UK personnel.” She reiterates this would be “simply to provide defensive protection”. Wouldn’t that make us less safe in the UK? Cooper talks loosely of “Iran-backed threats in the UK over many years”. Without specifics, this could refer to any point in our complicated relations with Iran.

Certainly, it is complicated that the government cannot ask Trump, an ally, to stop bombing, so they have asked Iran. But the UK is in a tricky position and the situation is fluid. At the time of writing, “officials” had still not ruled out UK assistance in strikes on missile depots in Iran. Whether the government will keep fudging these decisions with triangulations and U-turns remains to be seen. Meanwhile, Trump is making an example of Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez – who refused to allow the US to use joint bases in Spain – by threatening to cut all trade.

The president’s admonishments of Starmer look like an effort to bully him, too. Cooper says mildly that it’s just a difference in view. “In the end, we have to make decisions about what is in the UK’s interest and what reflects the UK’s values, not anybody else’s. That’s our guiding force.” In the US, she’d used Greenland as an example of “things where we are just going to disagree and we’ll be firm about those disagreements”. She’d also pointed to the fact that Starmer pushed back on Trump’s “insulting and frankly appalling” assertion that the UK had not stood by US troops abroad, reminding him of Afghanistan, for  instance. Trump then climbed down.

Still, many on the British right think Starmer cowardly for not backing the US assault from the start. Cooper scoffs at this. “The idea that Reform or the Conservatives would want to make decisions just based on what the US do or say – or what any other country does or says – doesn’t feel like sensible foreign policy. It’s not based on values. It’s based on dogma. Look, our partnerships are really important, our alliances, the global multilateral cooperation is really important. But also important, as part of that, is that we’re following the UK principles and interests.”

I ask, given her stress on international law, whether there are consequences for war criminals? She says that she is supporting evidence-gathering of “potential war crimes or atrocities” in Sudan and Ukraine. “Because we do believe that there should be accountability for atrocities.”

Across the board? “Yes.”

* * *

It’s no secret in Westminster that Cooper was unhappy to be replaced by Shabana Mahmood in the Home Office last September. She’d been secretary of state since Labour was elected in 2024 and before that as shadow home secretary in two stints totalling six years. She reminds me, over tea in the UK ambassador’s residence in Washington, that she’d been shadow foreign secretary under Ed Miliband in 2010-11. The decision to move her to shadow home secretary back then was the “flipside” of what happened last year, she says, relating how she’d been in a cafe in Paris waiting to meet French ministers and enjoying the winter sun when Miliband had called with news of the reshuffle. “But you can’t!” she’d thought.

This time she was in her Yorkshire constituency, Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley, when Starmer rang. He told her to get to London – four hours away – in time to be filmed walking up Downing Street for the six o’clock news. She was in a scruffy jacket and trainers, so while she belted across the country, a Home Office adviser ran to Zara to find a suitable trouser suit. “I  made it at about two minutes to six,” Cooper says.

While it’s an “incredible and fascinating time” to be foreign secretary, she admits feeling disappointed to have left some domestic policies incomplete. “We just nearly finished this violence against women and girls strategy,” she says, “and the policing reform strategy.”

But it’s her decision to proscribe Palestine Action that marks her time in the job. The group used “direct action” – including protest, occupation and vandalism – to disrupt the UK arms industry, which it said was complicit in genocide in Gaza. The government’s decision to class activists as “terrorists” (as opposed to criminals) triggered a wave of civil disobedience. Over the summer, 2,287 people were arrested for holding placards that said, “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” Among them, a retired colonel, a Catholic priest, NHS workers, pensioners. We’re in Munich when the high court rules Cooper’s decision was unlawful (something Mahmood is seeking to overturn). Aides are concerned Cooper may “clam up” if I broach it, so I watch her defend her position on a broadcast round, repeating time and again how she followed “clear advice and recommendations”.

Sitting in the Foreign Office two weeks later, I ask if proscription was a mistake. “So I was given a whole set of evidence and advice and recommendations, which included evidence about public safety, about potential future threats, about issues that could affect the Jewish community and so on. Ultimately, when you’re the home secretary, you take very seriously advice that you’re given.” Many argue that she relied too heavily on civil servant advice. “When you’re given advice, including from security experts and including from counterterrorism, policing, the whole range of advice that we get, you have to take that seriously. There’s a real difference between the organisation Palestine Action and the freedom to protest around Palestine. This is about one small group and the whole set of issues around violence.”

She knows, of course, that we have adequate laws for violence and criminal damage. Many, including on the right, believe proscription was ludicrous state overreach. People who share her values, law-abiding citizens, including elderly people lifted in their wheelchairs, were arrested. Was that painful to watch? “People have every opportunity to protest about Palestine,” she repeats. “The proscribing legislation was very specific. It’s [also] absolutely possible to lawfully protest a government decision.” Has she wrestled with the decision, personally? Have family members challenged her on it? Friends? “There is something particular about the role of home secretary, where you feel a really heavy responsibility on public safety,” she says. “If you dismiss or ignore advice or information that you’re given around public safety and get that wrong, that is really serious. There’s so much complexity. None of these [were] easy decisions.” She says home secretary is different from other jobs in government and then corrects herself to say that, actually, health carries a similar burden.

Then she talks about signing warrants, about counterterrorism, MI5, the “really awful threats” that the Home Office deals with every day. Nonetheless, Palestine Action, according to the high court, was not a severe enough threat to justify a ban. Does she feel the whole fiasco could have been dealt with differently? “The challenge is that we have a piece of legislation, which has different elements to it … ” The spiel starts again.

It’s frustrating when she talks in long, obstructive, unpunctuated answers that sound much rehearsed, as if she’s speaking on the Today programme. Sometimes she avoids speaking in the first person at all. It may be to depersonalise what she’s saying, but she comes across as – how can I put it? – robotic. The effect is not good.

Perhaps this is what happens if you spend your entire life in politics. Elected in 1997, Cooper, now 56, is one of the longer-serving figures in the party. She has an impeccable political profile – she studied PPE at Balliol, Oxford, was a Kennedy scholar at Harvard and has a master’s in economics from the London School of Economics – and started in Westminster in 1990, first as an economic policy researcher, then policy adviser for Harriet Harman, then shadow chief secretary to the Treasury. It was as if she always had a plan. It was while working for Harman, who shared an office with Gordon Brown, that she met her husband, Ed Balls (because all men in the Foreign Office seem to be called Ed or Tom, he is referred to by staff as “Ed B”).

In government, she has held a number of jobs – in health, housing, work and pensions. She came third in the leadership contest of 2015, which Jeremy Corbyn won (she commended him for trying to introduce “kinder, gentler” politics). Reading through her interviews over the years (including a transcript of my own from 2017), it’s striking how long she’s had to deal with the boys’ clubs in politics. She finds it embarrassing that she’s still talking about Labour’s failure to elect a female leader. “To be fair, I did try [to stand] in 2015; somehow that didn’t quite work out,” she adds, smiling. “I don’t think this can be my fault.” She cites the number of women doing important jobs in Starmer’s team – chancellor, foreign, home.

A mark of how quickly things change in politics is that on the eve of our time together, Starmer’s position looked shaky, the party close to implosion. No 10 was said to be presided over by a tight-knit toxic group run by Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, and heavily influenced by Peter Mandelson. Both men – wrongly, as the Gorton and Denton result showed – argued that Labour needed a rightwing reset in order to beat Reform. The left of the party was shunned or banished. It was McSweeney who forced through the appointment of Mandelson as US ambassador, despite widespread concern about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, jettisoning Karen Pierce, the first woman in the role. By the time we are on the road, McSweeney has quit as chief of staff and Mandelson has resigned from the party.

“Look, I think there has been a boysy culture,” Cooper says. “And I hope we’re not going to go back to that. Over nearly 30 years, I’ve seen lots of different Westminster boys’ clubs. Some of this recent stuff has been frustrating exactly because we were doing so much to drive forward change around women and girls.” She references work that she did with fellow MPs Jess Phillips and Sarah Jones to halve violence against women and girls in a decade, and the work she does as foreign secretary, making the safety of women and girls “one of the six cross-cutting priorities”.

Overall, she feels “really, incredibly angry” with the shadow Mandelson has cast across the Foreign Office and party, describing his promotion as an “own goal”. “Peter Mandelson should never have been appointed as ambassador to the US. The prime minister has apologised about that.”

Later, I take in the glorious rooms of the ambassador’s residence. No wonder Mandelson had to be all but dragged out. The story goes that the first official to inform him he’d been sacked as ambassador was told to “eff off”. It was Cooper’s first week in the job. She won’t discuss the specifics of her conversation with Mandelson, and says, “There were a whole series of employment issues … but I did take the action of withdrawing him as US ambassador.”

Mandelson, sources say, was woken up at 5am and taken to a secure room in the residence to receive a call from the prime minister. Even then, it was days before he packed his bags and left, and the Foreign Office had to pay him a far higher severance fee than had been reported (up to £75,000). I ask Cooper if this is true. “So, all of that information we will release, but we have to do that as part of the formal process.” (Since then, newly released documents have revealed that he had asked for a severance fee of more than £500,000.)

We are in the UK space in the UN building – small rooms and a kitchen overflowing with Nature Valley oats and honey snack bars, because someone had heard the foreign secretary liked them. News has broken of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest on suspicion of misconduct while in public office (Mandelson is arrested on the same charge four days later). Cooper says exactly what you’d expect about not wanting to comment while the police investigation “takes its course”. But as chief secretary to the Treasury (2008-9) in the time that Mountbatten-Windsor was trade envoy (2001-11), did she ever hear of allegations of his misuse of government planes or possible abuses of the role? “I don’t recall seeing things at all,” she says. “But government departments have said they are all willing to cooperate with any information that the police need.” So she’d speak to them if required? “Of course.”

She declines the offer of sugar in her tea. “Just on the separate issue,” she says of being chief secretary to the Treasury, “I was shocked that while everybody was doing everything they could to tackle the financial crisis and protect people’s savings and livelihoods, Peter Mandelson was sharing information. I mean, it’s really shocking.” She has a face like thunder. Something she finds particularly frustrating about Mandelson and Mountbatten-Windsor is that focus on them “ends up then shifting focus away from the victims and survivors of Epstein; women and girls who were facing criminal exploitation and abuse”.

A cynic might wonder if Cooper has opened the door to me with one eye on the main prize in a leadership battle. Certainly, there’s jostling within the party. Wes Streeting and Angela Rayner are contenders, but even if Cooper decides the top job isn’t for her, might she play the role of king- (or queen-) maker? She is not without ambition. Balls once cautioned against  underestimating her. “In private,” he said, “Yvette is one of the most competitive people I’ve met.”

I ask if she is on the left or right of the party, and she says she’s always seen herself as “in the middle” of a “centre-left” party. “There have been times when the party has moved to one side of me,” she indicates to her left. “Then there’s times it’s moved to the other,” she indicates right. Brownite “is probably a fair description”, she says, “but it feels out of date for new 21st-century challenges”. I’m not sure if this works, except to say that Cooper does not want to alienate anyone right now.

Nonetheless, she has been shy of publicity. Despite her long career, she has no memoirs, no Desert Island Discs, and is – unlike colleagues – rarely the subject of long profiles. Some advisers in No 10 have called her “quiet”, which counts against her in a world where “everything is comms”.

That’s changing in the Foreign Office, a role where having your photograph taken at regular intervals, usually shaking hands with a rictus grin, is a key job requirement. She says the photo ops have had the dispiriting effect of making her more aware of her appearance. What’s the vainest thing she does? There’s a long pause, the only sound a clock ticking. Her aide prompts that they try to get hair appointments in the diary. Oh yes, she says. It’s one of the drawbacks of a crop, the upkeep.

I ask – because I once asked Balls this question in an interview – if she ever loses her temper. Sometimes she does “stony anger”, she says. Then she admits she’s a “shouter”. When did she last shout? She laughs and blushes. There was a meltdown while trying to pack at the ambassador’s residence in DC. She and Balls had agreed that she would travel directly from the airport and meet him in Chevening, the foreign secretary’s grace-and-favour country residence in Kent. Balls had asked her to ferry a load of his stuff to the US and back so that he didn’t have to carry it himself. So, although her bags “were already bursting at the seams and the zips wouldn’t close”, she was trying to squeeze in his clothes, too. “I was literally shouting, ‘I can’t get this bloody bag closed.’” She throws her hands up in a mime of despair. “So, yeah, packing … drives me up the wall.”

In the rare moments she relaxes, she seems like she could be fun. I spy her kicking off her shoes with a G&T on the NY-DC Amtrak. Mostly she is hyper-focused, with the glassy reserve of a politician in power. Even flying overnight to Heathrow, she is frowning at her phone. Actually, it’s for this expression that her three children tease her. Tense, locked in, serious. Also, for nodding and making affirmative noises when she “hasn’t a clue what was actually said”.

It wasn’t easy navigating Westminster as a woman and parent. In 2001, she was the first minister to take maternity leave. But when she inquired about arrangements for new mothers, she was told by the cabinet secretary, “Well, it turns out we don’t have any. There’s nothing.” She says, “We drew up something that was based on what a civil service arrangement looked like.”

For a long time, Balls had the louder career and Cooper was the target of online sexist abuse. There was the “laziness” of those who thought she automatically held the same views as her husband, she told me before. “People didn’t make that assumption the other way around.” In 2015, Balls lost his seat to Andrea Jenkyns – then Conservative, now Reform. Friends who badgered him to stand again say he wanted to stay out of the way for Cooper. Instead, he took to the dancefloor on Strictly; took up piano. Cooper remembers listening to him play repeated bars at 8am while she got the kids ready for school – scrabbling for permission slips, games kits, missing homework. Later, he joined the ITV breakfast sofa and a podcast with George Osborne.

Their schedules are so extremely out of sync, “I can go a week at a time and not actually see Ed awake.” To smooth his 3.45am start on TV days, for Christmas she bought him the sort of 70s-style Teasmade his mum used to have. Because it beeps loudly when ready, he’s programmed himself to leap from bed just before, so it doesn’t wake her up. “He has his cup of tea then resets it for when I wake up at seven.” Some mornings, when war is not raging in Iran, she cold-water swims at the local reservoir, close protection waiting at the bank with a towel. She’d like to exercise more. Her mother, a retired schoolteacher, thrust on her a secondhand book called Strong Women Stay Young. “It’s got exercises that she’s been doing – she’s totally amazing, she’s just had her 80th and she’s doing weights. I’m now supposed to use it and haven’t.” The book sits by the bed, next to the latest Robert Harris and a Jacqueline Winspear Maisie Dobbs, and “glowers, reproaching me”. Her mother doesn’t sound like someone you argue with, I say, and, ever the diplomat, she replies, “She’s got fabulous force of personality.”

The Balls-Cooper household is unflashy and down-to-earth. While Balls cooks – his answer to a range of problems is to set a roast on the table – Cooper plans eccentric holidays. It says something that their children, all in their 20s, still join them each summer. She shares last year’s itinerary: Amsterdam to Basel (“You can swim for, like, three miles in the river in Basel”) to Lucerne by train, followed by “a steamboat and a cog railway”. Fast train to Milan, Naples; ferry to Greece. Previously they’ve cycled in the Netherlands and taken a Sound of Music tour in costume. This year the kids have issued an ultimatum: Mum, something calmer. Please.

She’s been through all the usual parenting difficulties, but there are some things specific to being an MP. In the last year, security services received a threat from someone who “lived nearby”. Cooper wasn’t unduly worried, but “the police said, ‘Notify your family, just in case.’” Forgetting that her family are not as battle-hardy when it comes to “security issues”, she delivered the information “too casually”. “For them it was much more troubling. They were worried – ‘Does this mean somebody’s going to be on our street?’ It’s much harder from your kids’ point of view.”

We return to politics. I suggest she might be relieved that McSweeney has gone, and she pulls a face. Has Labour abandoned the left? The victory of the Greens’ Hannah “the plumber” Spencer in Gorton and Denton would suggest they have. Cooper looks conciliatory and says the government know they have “a huge amount of work to do”. The byelection had become very polarised, she says. “Some of the people I spoke to in Gorton and Denton wanted to send a message to the government about things [they were] feeling frustrated about.” She acknowledges aspects around “the nature of the campaigning” (the Greens drew a significant portion of the Labour Muslim vote) but hopes that people will see that in their foreign policy discussions Labour is “demonstrating the principles that are guiding us”.

She hesitates and adds that a key difference with the Greens is on foreign policy. “Things like the Nato alliance” (the Greens traditionally favoured withdrawal, but have shifted under Zack Polanski). Back in Munich she’d told me it was “hugely important” for the UK to work more closely with the EU on defence and security. Now, she adds, “There are some basic issues about international alliances at a time [like this]. You have to work in alliances.” This is no time, she says, scathingly, for “a caricatured approach to foreign policy”.

* * *

We are due to speak again, but as the situation in the Middle East intensifies, we exchange texts. Many – including UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher, who described this as “a moment of grave, grave peril” – now fear we are on the brink of a world war. Cooper says she knows people will be worried. She is concerned about security risks as the Iranian regime continues to target countries not involved in the original airstrikes. “[It is] a deliberate attempt to escalate and widen the conflict. Our partners in the Gulf … are shocked and angry to have been dragged into this conflict by Iran.”

She repeats that the UK wanted a negotiated settlement, and that’s why they hadn’t joined the initial strikes and says that’s what “we will keep pursuing”. But she adds that they won’t “shy away from defending allies, UK interests and people in the region”.

John Healey, the defence secretary, has refused to rule out offensive action alongside the US and Israel, so I ask if she will. Like Ed Miliband, she doesn’t believe it’s right for the UK to be engaged in this. Would she be prepared to resign over the issue? She doesn’t answer.

I ask how her role differs from that of Jonathan Powell, the UK’s national security adviser (said to be the only person in the UK government Benjamin Netanyahu will speak to) and how they work together in this crisis. She doesn’t answer. How does she feel when she hears Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich talk about razing the southern suburbs of Beirut, “like Khan Younis” (which was flattened in Gaza). She says “that sort of language is shocking and unacceptable. And it’s worth remembering that it was this Labour government which sanctioned Smotrich alongside fellow minister [Itamar] Ben-Gvir for inciting violence. We must avoid this war expanding into Lebanon. That will see more civilians killed and families displaced.” She says Hezbollah must cease attacks on Israel and addresses Netanyahu saying, “Israel must not expand this war to Lebanon.”

I send more questions – I’m interested in the fate of the “special relationship”, her personal ambitions and the future direction of Labour – but the replies stop coming. The foreign secretary goes quiet, presumably dealing with more urgent matters, and it makes sense that the interview is over.