The inside story of how Putin torpedoed Starmer’s first big foreign policy ‘tough decision’ moment

When the government plane took off from Joint Base Andrews just outside Washington on Friday evening, Keir Starmer came down to have some small talk with the travelling pack of journalists handing out packs of M&Ms from the White House signed by Joe Biden.

But the smile on his face, easy-going casual look and football banter hid what had proven to be an extremely difficult 48 hours for the prime minister in what had culminated in a diplomatic failure.

The lesson of the excursion was perhaps that it is far easier to make “tough choices” regarding thousands of Britain’s pensioners potentially dying in a cold winter than it is to sort out a rabid dictator Vladimir Putin threatening to use nukes.

Both Downing Street and the Foreign Office (FCDO) staff at the embassy did their best to play down the significance of the trip. But — despite their denials — this meeting of an outgoing lame-duck US president and the recently elected prime minister was mostly about one major issue: whether to allow Ukraine to use long-range Storm Shadow missiles against targets in Russia.

The decision to allow it was supposed to be made but not announced. Instead, it was delayed for further discussions at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

How do we know this to be true? Well, just days before that US secretary of state Antony Blinken and foreign secretary David Lammy held a joint press conference in the Foreign Office and basically said so. They revealed the help Iran was giving to Russia and told journalists that they were going to Kyiv together to listen to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and others make the case for using storm shadow missiles on Russia territory. They then said that these talks would feed into the