JOHN McEVOY
5 January 2026
Keir Starmer says the UK was “not involved” in the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro. But Britain has been supporting regime change in Venezuela for years.
During the early hours of Saturday morning, US forces bombed Venezuela and kidnapped its president, Nicolás Maduro.
This was a clear breach of international law, violating the terms of the UN charter which prohibit interference in and the use of force against sovereign states.
Yet Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, has refused to condemn the attack or even acknowledge its brazen illegality.
“I want to get all the material facts together and we simply haven’t got the full picture at the moment”, the prime minister told the BBC on Saturday.
Starmer then wrote on social media that Britain “regarded Maduro as an illegitimate President and we shed no tears about the end of his regime”.
By contrast, it took him less than 24 hours to call Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine a “war of aggression”.
Former British ambassador Sir Richard Dalton told Declassified the government has failed to stand up against “the law of the jungle” with its “cynical” stance on Venezuela.
While refusing to condemn Trump’s actions, Starmer insisted there “was no UK involvement in this operation”.
Royal Navy personnel have nonetheless been embedded in the US armada surrounding Venezuela over recent weeks, with the Ministry of Defence refusing to clarify whether they were present during the attack.
Defence secretary John Healey apparently ordered them not to take part in strikes on Venezuela and US-UK intelligence sharing was reportedly frozen in the Caribbean in order to avoid British complicity in breaches of international law.
This is in sharp contrast with the government’s current position that it cannot adjudicate on the legality of Trump’s actions.
But even if British forces did not directly participate in the military operation, the UK government has been quietly backing Washington’s destabilisation efforts in Venezuela for years.
Since 2019, Britain has frozen over $2 billion of Venezuelan gold in the Bank of England, sponsored anti-government initiatives, and even set up a secret “Venezuela Reconstruction Unit” to plan for the day after Maduro’s overthrow.
Starmer is therefore not speaking in abstract terms when he says “the UK has long supported a transition of power in Venezuela”.
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