Lammy says he told Iran it would be a mistake to blockade Strait of Hormuz
The Foreign Secretary said it would be a 'catastrophic mistake' for Tehran to fire at US bases in the region, after an American attack on Iran's nuclear programme over the weekend.
Questions are being asked about whether the shipping channel or oil exports through it could be blocked amid the tensions.
Important discussion with @SecRubio this evening on the situation in the Middle East.
We will continue to work with our allies to protect our people, secure regional stability and drive forward a diplomatic solution.
— David Lammy (@DavidLammy) June 22, 2025
Speaking to BBC Breakfast on Monday morning, Mr Lammy said he had been 'crystal clear' that 'it would be a huge, catastrophic mistake to fire at US bases in the region at this time. We have forces in the region at this time.
'It would be a catastrophic mistake. It would be a mistake to blockade the Strait of Hormuz.'
He said he thinks his counterpart 'gets that and understands that'.
The UK has been pressing for Iran to engage in negotiations and diplomacy over the issues, and Mr Lammy told the same programme: 'Let's take the diplomatic off-ramp. Let's get serious and calm this thing down.'
Mr Lammy is expected to address MPs in the Commons about the situation on Monday.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer warned on Sunday that there is a risk of the crisis escalating beyond the Middle East, telling reporters 'that's a risk to the region. It's a risk beyond the region, and that's why all our focus has been on de-escalating, getting people back around to negotiate what is a very real threat in relation to the nuclear programme.'
Sir Keir spoke to US President Donald Trump on Sunday, and Downing Street said the leaders agreed Tehran must not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon and called for Iran to return to negotiations.
The conversation came after the air raid by American B-2 stealth bombers and a salvo of submarine-launched missiles hit Iran's nuclear facilities.
'They discussed the actions taken by the United States last night to reduce the threat and agreed that Iran must never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon,' Downing Street said.
'They discussed the need for Iran to return to the negotiating table as soon as possible and to make progress on a lasting settlement.'
pic.twitter.com/wu9mMkxtUg
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 21, 2025
Mr Lammy suggested on Monday that the action by Mr Trump 'may well have set back Iran several years'.
He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the US President's rhetoric was 'strong' but that strikes had been 'targeted' to 'deal with Iran's nuclear capability'.
The Foreign Secretary later added: 'Donald Trump made a decision to act to degrade that capability. It may well have set back Iran by several years. That was a decision that he took.'
Mr Lammy has also spoken to his Iranian and Israeli counterparts 'to stress the need for de-escalation'.
'I urged a diplomatic, negotiated solution to end this crisis,' he said over the weekend.
Overnight, Mr Trump called the future of the Iranian regime into question, posting on his TruthSocial platform: 'It's not politically correct to use the term, 'Regime Change,' but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn't there be a Regime change???'
It appeared to be a different approach to that of his defence secretary Pete Hegseth, who had said on Sunday that 'this mission was not and has not been about regime change'.
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It's imperative people start remembering how we got to the cliff edge, because we did it by skipping about blindfold and if we don't stop soon we're going to go right over. America gave Iran nuclear technology in 1957. The aim was 'atoms for peace', to create wealth, and allies in the Middle East. After years of the world's greatest democracy propping up a cruel monarchy, the shah fell, the mullahs arose, and Iran was in less-friendly hands. The 1980s was taken up with a war against Iraq, but in the 1990s two Gulf Wars and continued US tinkering led the mullahs to the not-entirely-mad opinion that a nuclear weapon was the best way of keeping the Great Satan at bay. Israel, quite reasonably, was less than chuffed. And as technology sped up it became imperative to find ways of stopping Iran getting a weapon that apocalyptic fundamentalists would see very little reason not to detonate, slap-bang in the middle of a resource-rich, conflict-heavy trade route. And so in 2015, six countries signed a deal with Iran. In return for checks that it wasn't building The Bomb, everyone was open for business. And for three years the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action worked. Germany, China, Russia, France, the UK, China and the US lifted economic sanctions, and every 90 days would ratify everything was non-nuclear and tickety-boo. But such a vague agreement could not withstand the arrival of Donald Trump, whose tiny hands happily dismantled everything that made Barack Obama look good. In 2018 when Benjamin Netanyahu - yes it really is all the same people - gave a speech claiming his spy agency Mossad had stolen 100,000 documents showing Iran had lied and was enriching uranium, Trump saw a 30-second clip and decided it must be true. It might have been. The other nations in the deal didn't think so. But rather than renegotiate, send in inspectors, react as any sane human might, Trump just went "nah", and pulled out of the deal. The other countries tried to keep it going. The International Atomic Energy Authority said there was no enrichment. But the US whacked the regime with sanctions, and Iran said it too would pull out unless they were lifted. They were not. In 2020 the IAEA said Iran had tripled its uranium stockpile, a year later it blocked access to inspectors, and by 2023 it had weapons-grade material. Over the same period, Iran's population suffered. A third were ground into poverty. The economic woes weakened the regime just enough to make it lash out. Iran was behind terror attacks worldwide, former Republican Guards were linked to planned assassinations of ex-Trump officials, and it faced internal protests too. Then Iran funded the October 7 massacre by Hamas. Cue Netanyahu, who was leading a rickety coalition and facing jail the moment it fell, cue the war in Gaza, cue pro-Palestine protests, and cue a lot of blaming Iran. This isn't hard to figure out or remember. It's just that the constant churn of new things to hold our attention never scrolls back to the start of the liveblog, or delves into the third page of search results. Iran is definitely run by a bunch of rotten eggs who could well have been pulling the radioactive wool over the world's eyes in return for a financial boost to stabilise their rule. But the best way of fixing that wasn't walking away from the only half-arsed deal anyone had. It was making a better deal, and if Trump had actually written his own biography rather than paying someone else to make him look good, he might have known how to do it. Trump's withdrawal was supported by Israel and Saudi Arabia, with 63% of US voters, most of the planet and his own advisers screaming at him not to. It was "a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made", he insisted. "It didn't bring peace and it never will." And so he destabilised and raised the oil price with sanctions, screwed regional trade which meant the price of wheat rose and people starved across several countries, and gave fresh targets to jihadis. Back in office for a second time, Trump wants a legacy and more than anything he wants the Nobel Peace Prize that Obama got, largely for diplomatic efforts with the Muslim world. Trump pledged to end the war in Ukraine "on day one" and it only got worse; he suggested building a golden beachside golf club in Gaza, and got laughed at. So his eye turned to Ayatollah Khameini, and the country which the US has done so much to make worse, for so long. Anyone with an ounce of realism in their body might wonder at the convenience with which the B-2 bombers and their bunker-busting payload were able to fly in unmolested, after the Israelis had suddenly switched attention from Gaza to take out the Iranian air defences a week earlier. It does seem odd that the imminent threat Netanyahu had predicted in 2018 bloomed 7 years later, 6 months after Trump returned to office and only after his other draft entries for the peace prize had evaporated. We might also ponder why the US president with the worst personal polls in history at this point in his leadership might be in want of some surgical strikes to appease his Muslim-hating base, and whether it would do him any harm if there were a couple of small terror attacks on US bases that would give an excuse to bomb the mullahs to the table. And having thought this far, we could ask ourselves how close to the edge of nuclear catastrophe Trump will allow the world to careen before he picks up the phone to "make a deal" which will be the bigliest, most beautiful peace deal of all time. And whether it will be worse than the one we used to have, before he ripped it to shreds out of petulance and exploited the disastrous consequences for the sake of vanity. With Iran alone, Trump has cost the world trillions. Now he is about to march an entire planet to the gates of hell, just so he can look good for marching everyone back again. And this plan works if he is a diplomatic genius able to unpick decades of crapola, and capable of remembering why and how it happened in the first place. But when all he watches is 24-hour rolling news, with constant updates about new stuff that isn't new at all, the best we can hope for is that the Nobel Committee gives him the prize now, just to make him stop.
