Melanie Phillips is very critical of how Britain dealt with the hostage crises in her article Britain on its knees
[..] From the start, it was clear that its priorities were completely wrong. Tony Blair said his overriding concern was the welfare of the hostages. Bad mistake. His overriding concern should have been to ensure that his country delivered the appropriate response to an act of war, to discourage the aggressor who so menaces the entire free world from ever striking again. The appropriate response was to fight back. But Britain had previously taken a decision not to strike back at Iran. Its rules of military engagement didn’t allow it because its overriding priority was ‘not to escalate’ hostilities. In other words, the British strategy towards Iran, laid down at the highest level, was appeasement. Iran has been at war with the west for almost thirty years, but we have decided to ignore it. Iran has been a major factor behind the carnage in Iraq, but we have decided to ignore it. And with the grimmest possible timing, the fact that Iran is in a state of war with us — a fact which we refuse to acknowledge — demonstrated itself almost simultaneously with the release of the hostages when four British soldiers were blown up by a roadside bomb in Iraq, a bomb almost certainly supplied by Iran.
