Last summer, soon after the General Election was called, I got a chance to see inside 10 Downing Street. It’s the only time I have been inside the building. Other than some chatter coming from the press office, it was an eerily quiet space. The political geography intrigued me. ‘And that’s where the national security adviser works,’ my guide told me, pointing towards a broom cupboard which is a desirable place to work only because it is so close to the PM’s desk.

I have been thinking of the layout recently as I wondered how Keir Starmer’s 29 July statement on Palestine was born. The full text can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-words-on-gaza-29-july-2025, and I think the phrasing of that page title is revealing. ‘The PM needs some words on Gaza,’ I can imagine Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s Chief of Staff, telling one of the speechwriters – down the phone, of course, because, as I found out during my tour of Number 10, they toil in the brightly lit basement.

‘I’ve always said we will recognise a Palestinian state as a contribution to a proper peace process, at the moment of maximum impact for the Two-State Solution,’ Starmer declared unconvincingly on 29 July. By then he was under intense international and domestic pressure: Emmanuel Macron had already said that France would recognise Palestine during the United Nations’ General Assembly. Meanwhile, over a beer a few weeks earlier, a Labour MP told me that he was inundated with angry letters about Gaza. McSweeney might say that foreign policy rarely decides general elections, but Palestine now galvanises some left-wing voters in the way that Apartheid once did, and the fact that many Labour MPs are nursing thin majorities has forced the prime minister’s hand.

In his statement, Starmer said that the UK ‘will recognise the state of Palestine by the time the United Nations General Assembly gathers in September unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree to a ceasefire, and commit to a long-term, sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a Two-State Solution’. Exactly why he chose to frame the announcement as a threat remains something of a mystery, but it must have something to do with Britain’s inability to impose wider sanctions on Israel without triggering a rift with the Trump administration.

Speaking at the UN on the same day, Foreign Secretary David Lammy said that Britain bore ‘a special burden of responsibility’ because it had issued the Balfour Declaration, the root of many of today’s problems. Issued in November 1917 shortly before British troops seized Jerusalem, the declaration expressed the government’s willingness to ‘facilitate in Palestine the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people’, as long as – and this showed foresight – it did not ‘prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country’.

The wording and tone of the declaration were cautious, reflecting differences of opinion inside the government. But the announcement gave government propagandists what they needed at a time when some ministers believed they needed the Jewish diaspora’s support if they were to raise the money on Wall Street that they needed to go on fighting the First World War. When The Times reported the declaration, it did so beneath the headline, ‘Palestine for the Jews’.

The parallel is striking, but I think it may be more useful to compare Starmer’s statement with the secret commitment the British had made the Arab dignitary Sharif Hussein two years before the Balfour Declaration: in both cases, there is a strong sense of what can happen when panic drives foreign policy. The British had approached Hussein in 1915 after it became clear that the Gallipoli landings had failed and they faced the prospect of an Ottoman counterattack targeting Egypt. They feared that even if the attack did not succeed, it might still trigger an uprising in Egypt, creating a terrible dilemma for them. As John Buchan’s fictional mandarin Sir Walter Bullivant puts it in the thriller novel Greenmantle, ‘The war must be won or lost in Europe. Yes; but if the East blazes up, our effort will be distracted from Europe and the great coup may fail. The stakes are no less than victory and defeat.’

The Ottomans had pressed Hussein, whose phone number was Mecca 1 and who claimed to be a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, to throw his weight behind their jihad. After the British high commissioner in Egypt began corresponding with him secretly in a bid to thwart this, Hussein made an extravagant claim to an empire that included Syria, Iraq and Palestine. When the British refused to entertain this demand, Hussein said that he was speaking on behalf of a wider clandestine Arab movement, with numerous adherents inside the Ottoman army. Alarmingly for the British, secret intelligence they had just received appeared to back him up, and to suggest the Arabs were on the verge of deciding which way to jump. There was a frantic back and forth between Cairo and London where the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, knew that he would also need to accommodate the interests of Britain’s key ally, France. ‘Will this do?’ reads the plaintive note he wrote on the draft instructions he slid down the Cabinet table to Lord Kitchener. Kitchener’s only qualification was that he had met one of the sharif’s sons before the war when he was Britain’s man in Cairo.

In the end, Grey washed his hands of the problem, giving the high commissioner ‘discretion in this matter as it is urgent and there is not time to discuss an exact formula… if something more precise than this is required you can give it’. The high commissioner resorted to a vague and deliberately misleading form of words to try to convey British reservations while not frightening off Hussein. Unfortunately, the first person to misunderstand the subtlety was the translator. The letter Hussein received appeared to concede him everything he wanted – including Palestine. There was outrage when the British claimed that it had not.

Significantly, Starmer was completely silent on the delicate issue that Grey delegated to the British high commissioner in 1915: where are the frontiers of the state the UK is on the point of recognising? In April 2025, the government published a memorandum of understanding with the Palestinian government stating its commitment to ‘a two-state solution based on 1967 lines’. The Palestinians might read that phrase to mean that Britain would recognise the frontiers as they existed before the Six Day War, but it is by no means clear. As the British are well aware, that was nearly 60 years ago and, since then, half a million or so Israeli settlers have moved into the West Bank.

In the last few weeks Israel’s far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich announced another settlement that would bisect the West Bank and cut the Palestinians off from East Jerusalem. ‘The Palestinian state is being erased from the table, not with slogans but with actions,’ he said. Lammy described the move as ‘a flagrant breach of international law’. The reality is that the Israelis are fast destroying the remaining chances of Palestinian statehood and there is little the UK can do about it.