Sometimes, as in 1940, war is unavoidable. But to engage in war can also be a choice, a political decision, a whim even. And what war does is bring more war.

The first casualties of the Iran war are said to have been around 170 girls killed when a Tomahawk missile hit their school. Donald Trump mumbled a semi-coherent response to those deaths, saying the Iranians must be to blame as it was the sort of thing they did.

All kudos, then, to the US reporter Shawn McCreesh who asked the president: “You just suggested that Iran somehow got its hands on a Tomahawk and bombed its own elementary school on the first day of the war… but why are you the only person saying this?”

We need more reporters like that. Trump won’t answer or will spit out an insult. That’s if he can concentrate long enough. But such questions need asking.

We also need more leaders like Sir Keir Starmer. His lawyerly hesitancy might not tickle everyone’s political fancy, but it does put us at one remove from Trump and his unnecessary war against Iran.

A war illegal by most international definitions, apart from those written out in capital letters in Trump’s Big Book of Artful and Awful Lies.

The orange-hued man baby dislikes Starmer’s lawyerly caution , telling reporters that he was “no Winston Churchill” – that from a man with less gravitas than the Churchill dog in the TV adverts.

On the BBC website, Chris Mason twittered: “After Trump’s ‘no Churchill’ jibe can the special relationship recover?” Yet another of his attacks on Starmer. These are as frequent as his flabby puff pieces on Nigel Farage.

The Churchill of the Battle of Britain was heroic – far more so than Trump will ever be. For there is nothing heroic about his Iran war, a joint US/Israel enterprise with the equally morally dubious Benjamin Netanyahu.

To many on the British right, including Tory leader Kemi Badenoch and all the usual suspect newspapers, Starmer’s unwillingness to instantly do Trump’s bidding was a national disgrace.

Tony Blair, that spectre of ill-advised wars past, looking these days almost like his own ghost, chipped in too, chiding Starmer for declining to take part in Trump’s war.

The Mail and the Telegraph in particular have frothed with disdain about Starmer. So much, so normal. Yet their front pages no longer fit the mood of the country.

True, even writing the words ‘mood of the country’ makes me uneasy. How do we determine that national disposition – and do we trust those asking the questions?

If you believe the pollster YouGov, 67% of Britons describe themselves as anti-Trump, while only 24% of Reform UK voters do so. And 70% of Britons see Reform UK as pro-Trump.

So good on Starmer. It might, ironically, improve his popularity.

Nigel Farage, meanwhile, has been spinning like a weather vane, originally shouting that we should support Trump’s war, then changing his mind as opinion blows the other way.

Eventually people will see through Farage, the nation’s biggest sneak, always running off to the US to whisper poison about his own country. Always filling his pockets with money from abroad. And always blowing with the wind.

The FT reported that Farage went all the way to Mar-a-Lago to bend Trump’s miraculous ear about Starmer. In the event, Trump stayed away, leaving Farage to make his speech to a roomful of nonplussed diners who looked very bored as they waited to eat their over-done steaks.

Let’s close, shudders at the ready, with Pete Hegseth, the US Defence Secretary who insists on being called the Secretary of War. With a self-chosen job title like that, there is a man who loves a war, even if most of his battles have been as a presenter on Fox News, a sort of gruesome playschool for US government ministers.

Strutting into a press briefing on the Iran war, Hegseth bragged about raining “death and destruction from the sky all day long”.  With a smile, he said we were “punching them while they’re down,” and that’s “exactly how it should be.”

And then he quoted a Bible verse.

The above is borrowed from the vitally readable US commentator Heather Delaney Reese (do seek her out, she’s indefatigable). She said that Hegseth “weaponized Psalm 144”, saying: “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.”

Then he asked God for “total victory over those who seek to harm our military”.

Do we really want to rush in support of people like that?