The British government’s freefall continues a mere six months after it was carried into office on the crest of a historic electoral wave. But some of the brightest minds in Keir Starmer’s party are getting creative: Perhaps all that is needed is to simply expel everyone who doesn’t agree with them, or who annoys them.

And they know just who to start with.

“Can I just say one thing that grates with me in particular?” announced Labour’s ever-ornery John McDonnell. “It’s that we have an Israeli ambassador who’s an advocate of ‘Greater Israel’, refuses to recognize the Palestinian state, defies all the UN resolutions that have been passed about how we can secure that peace, and she still remains in this country. Why aren’t we expelling the Israeli ambassador?”

To which Hamish Falconer, the government’s undersecretary of state for the Middle East, responded:

“It is tempting to think that, if only we had representatives more to our tastes politically, then things would be easier. There is a disagreement, clearly. There is a disagreement between the British and Israeli governments about the conduct of the war in Gaza and the humanitarian implications that flow from it.”

Is the Israeli ambassador not to your taste, Honorable Hamish Falconer, son of Lord Chancellor Baron Falconer of Thoroton?

In the end, Falconer rejected the proposal to kick Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotovely out of the country, but it seemed to pain him to say so.

The mindset here is endemic and deeply disturbing.

By way of background: In the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks, Hotovely told an interviewer in no uncertain terms that she opposed the postwar creation of a Palestinian state. This puts her in disagreement with the UK’s ruling party.

Therefore, you must be thinking, Hotovely was added to a long line of ambassadors whose expulsion is being debated by the governing Labour party, right? After all, by my count there are some 180 foreign diplomatic missions in London alone. Surely the seven-bedroom embassy/residence of North Korea in the leafy London suburbs is cause for some discomfort within the party of the UK left?

It is the position of the government of the United Kingdom that Ukraine exist, yes? So what of the two-state solution for Russia and Ukraine? Moscow’s ambassador appears to be in no danger of expulsion over it, even though Russia has recently expelled British diplomats.

Nor do the sensitive men of the Labour Party appear to be losing sleep over the presence of, and presumed disagreements with, ambassadors from Cuba or Zimbabwe or China. Or even the United States—with the second Trump administration on its way into office, there are bound to be disagreements over policy.

Who needs ambassadors anyway? They’re just trouble. Some of them don’t even recognize the state of Palestine, all because it doesn’t yet exist.

Speaking of Palestine, let’s check in with Husam Zomlot, Ramallah’s man in London. Zomlot’s definition of a two-state solution includes a Palestinian state next to Israel and the Palestinian “right of return” inside Israel—code for the destruction of the Jewish state. Technically, that is two states. But I don’t think two Palestinian states and no Jewish state is what the Brits mean.

Of course, maybe I’m wrong, and Labour is right now debating whether or not to make Zomlot persona non grata. But I wouldn’t bet on it. There is also the fact that when Zomlot was asked why he wouldn’t condemn Hamas terrorism after Oct. 7, he responded by suggesting that Hamas’s invasion and massacre was legitimate “self-defense.”

Is that sort of thing to Hamish Falconer’s tastes?

Perhaps a more useful question might be: Does former diplomat Hamish Falconer understand what diplomacy is? Does Britain?

There is a sense of entitlement in the tone of British discussion of Israel. All countries agree and disagree on various points of policy. But how dare the Jewish state have outspoken ambassadors! Labour increasingly believes it is entitled to the Israel it wants, not the Israel that Israel wants.

But that question was settled in 1948. And this privileged tone with which British officials discuss Israel is—well, it’s not to my tastes.