Iran could strike UK with missiles, US defence secretary Pete Hegseth warns

The US' Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, has claimed Iran has the capability to strike the UK's capital London with missiles.

Sir Keir Starmer has largely kept out of the war in the Middle East and was not involved in the joint US-Israel attack on Iran last month.

The British prime minister initially planned on blocking the US from using RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire and Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean, for military purposes against Iran.

However, Starmer changed his mind on the matter and accepted the US' request for a 'specific and limited defensive purpose' of destroying Iran's missiles at its 'source'.

However, the UK has refrained from being directly involved in the war.

Now, Hegseth has expressed the threat posed by the Iranian regime to the UK after the military base on Diego Garcia was targeted last week by two missiles.

Hegseth (R) has said Iran could strike the UK (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

While the missiles may not have hit, the secretary of war expressed his concern for the UK as he said: "Two days ago they [Iran] shot two failed missiles on a target 4,000km away. For years, they told the world that their missiles could only range [2,000] kilometres. Surprise. Yet again, Iran lie.

"And to the world. I say London is 4,000km from Iran. Washington DC is 3,300km from Venezuela, another country President Trump did something about, which partnered for a long time with Iran.

"So you’re telling us that Iran is not a threat to the world or to the US? President Trump knows better."

The UK's Defence Secretary John Healey previously spoke to Sky News about Iran's capability of launching an attack on the UK.

"We have no assessment of Iranian plans to strike London," he said.

The UK's Defence Secretary John Healey (Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

"What I’m saying, and trying to reassure people, is that we’ve got no assessment that Iran has any plans to attack.

“But we have the resources, we have the alliance in place, to be able to defend Britain, and we do that with allies, and we do that with Nato."

Healey added: "As far as Iran goes, they’re demonstrating a capacity to hit across the Middle East, we see the same tactics and technologies that we see employed by Russia in Ukraine, and this is the hidden hand of Putin in both conflicts."

Donald Trump has continually criticised Starmer and the UK's response to the war in the Middle East, with the POTUS having previously described his British counterpart as 'no Winston Churchill'.