fdr, thank you for your insightful comments re. Art. 5 & 6 following the initial overnight attack on RAF Akrotiri, which seems to have been quite unprovoked if indeed the UK had not sanctioned the use of RAF Fairford (albeit just for “defensive” purposes) by the USAF in the current conflict at the time the attack was launched.
According to later news, it seems that a second attack on RAF Akrotiri followed the subsquent RAF Fairford announcement ... my initial gut feeling was that the UK government should at once, however belatedly, try to grow a pair and act accordingly ... but Starmer, being a lawyer, might be having difficulty untwisting his knickers right now, wondering who actually launched the attacks on RAF Akrotiri?
What if the attacks did not not come from Iran, but from the regime’s trigger-happy Hezbollah proxies in Lebanon? I imagine that a lawyer might have quite a high-quality problem in invoking Art.5 whilst still being unable to identify the adversary beyond doubt.