GORMLESS and unresponsive as ever, Defence Secretary John Healey decides an international energy crisis sparked by an illegal war in the Gulf is the moment to send prices still higher by urging piratical seizures of Russian oil tankers.

Even the United States has suspended sanctions on Russian oil in a desperate bid to limit the price spiral triggered by its attack on Iran, which seems to have taken the White House by surprise.

Healey pretends Britain and other US-aligned powers have some moral authority to snatch ships on the high seas, depicting Russia’s so-called “shadow fleet” as smugglers who must be apprehended by the law.

Actually sanctions on Russia by Britain, the EU and US have no standing in international law at all, since they are not endorsed by the UN security council. Refusing to buy Russian oil ourselves is our right as a sovereign country: seizing it when sold to third parties is straightforward piracy.

Like most of the wind-up Westminster politicians intoning the same set phrases as the world crumbles around them, Healey probably can’t even see what’s obvious to everyone else: talking up his determination to punish “Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine” while deploying British forces to assist Trump’s illegal war on Iran oozes hypocrisy.

But the clearer-eyed Canadian PM Mark Carney has already called time on lip service to a now shredded “rules-based international order,” and politicians merely look pathetic taking the moral high ground while excusing US war crimes — the worst of which, the Minab school bombing, killed more innocents than any one atrocity of the Ukraine or even Gaza wars.

Healey’s a hypocrite. The whole architecture of unilateral sanctions he upholds has to go: it is a weapon for powerful countries to bully and starve others, most obviously in the six-decade US blockade of Cuba, now tightened to deadly extent through severing the oil supply.