Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has warned US president Donald Trump that he must not walk away from the Middle East war.
Mrs Badenoch said her message to Mr Trump would be “if you break it, you own it”.
Speaking to broadcasters on Thursday, Mrs Badenoch said: “The special relationship is between the UK and the US, not between Donald Trump and (Prime Minister) Keir Starmer or whoever happens to be holding those offices.”
She said the US is “a close military ally – they help a lot on British security”.
Mrs Badenoch continued: “But if I was speaking to him, I’d be saying, ‘if you break it, you own it’. That’s what Colin Powell, a former secretary of state in the US, had said. ‘If you break it, you own it’.
“He started this war.”
She added that Mr Trump “should now not be abandoning a mess that he’s made, if he thinks that it is a mess”, and said: “It doesn’t feel like there is a co-ordinated plan.
“What we want to see is our government showing that it is thinking ahead, it is prepared.
“The best thing it can do right now for our insecurity is increasing supply by drilling our own oil and gas in the North Sea.”
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage also questioned Mr Trump’s intentions, suggesting that his motivation for fighting a war against Iran was unclear.
Mr Farage, who Mr Trump has previously described as a “friend”, said going into Iran was against the US president’s instincts.
The party leaders tried to woo allies of Mr Trump soon after his election in 2024, both meeting vice-president JD Vance on visits to the US in December that year.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves on Wednesday said she was “angry that Donald Trump has chosen to go to war in the Middle East – a war that there’s not a clear plan of how to get out of”.
She told BBC Radio 2: “It’s why we didn’t want to enter this.
“Yes, it will have implications for our economy. I get that.
“We are monitoring very closely what is happening, trying to bring the oil and gas into the UK so that those supplies are there and to try and get the prices down.”
After her comments, Mr Farage said at a press conference: “I’m not angry with him for starting this war if – and by the way, he’s been elected saying no more endless foreign wars. His instincts are not to do this.
“And this is not something he’s been arguing since he was president, he’s been making these arguments for over 20 years, way before he was in politics, asking questions about open-ended wars.
“So what is it? OK, Israeli encouragement, I understand that. You know, the Israelis are there and Iran wants to obliterate them and kill them all, so I can understand why Israel would want to do something like this.
“What persuaded Trump to do it? What was the key motivation? And it’s difficult listening to the press conferences sometimes to work that out.
“If the goal of removing Iran as a nuclear power is achieved, the world will have been done a massive favour even if there are some quite big short-term costs – and there are big short-term costs but ones that we should never have allowed ourselves to be so vulnerable on.”