John Swinney appears to have softened his position on drilling in the North Sea after conceding the likely impact of the Iran War on the UK’s energy security.

The First Minister told a pre-election hustings event that the geopolitical situation raised “grave issues” for Britain and helped make the case for exploiting the Jackdaw gas and Rosebank oil and gasfields.

Both are currently under review after activists won a court ruling that a previous permission had failed to pass environmental tests.

His comments on the Holyrood Sources podcast came as the Chancellor Rachel Reeves also gave her support to the two sites, thereby opening a rift with the Energy Secretary Ed Miliband who has the legal responsibility for deciding on the licences.

Ms Reeves told the Jeremy Vine radio show yesterday: “It would, of course, create jobs and tax revenue, and that is why we continue to support oil and gas for decades to come.

“We have now got the disruption in the Middle East and it’s hard to get the oil and gas out of the Strait of Hormuz, which is pushing up prices. It does show that we have got to take control of our own energy supplies here in Britain.”

Oil prices rose above to just under $108 a barrel as President Trump raised the stakes in the war with Iran as he made new threats if the Strait of Hormuz was not reopened.

Mr Swinney will demand the House of Commons is recalled to force the Labour Government to deliver support for households and business in the face of the energy crisis. 

He accused Sir Keir Starmer of “sleepwalking into an unprecedented crisis”, and will set out a series of actions that the UK Government should take immediately to support people. 

On Rosebank and Jackdaw, Mr Swinney insisted he still favoured climate compatibility assessments before drilling was allowed to go-ahead, but was clearly mindful of the current affects of the war on supplies.

“That assessment on climate compatibility has to be undertaken,” said Mr Swinney. “I think the thing that’s changed is the geopolitical situation that is surrounding us just now, and the huge volatility that we’re now dealing with.

“I can’t give you a definitive answer about Jackdaw and Rosebank because the climate compatibility assessment has got to be undertaken.

“What I’m saying is that I think we’ve got to look at the geopolitical situation that we now face and recognise that we’re experiencing much greater risk to our energy security as a consequence of what’s happening there.”

A change of tack on oil and gas would represent a significant shift in SNP policy under Mr Swinney’s predecessors Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf who were both hostile to more drilling.

Mr Swinney has already accepted that oil gas will remain part of the energy mix for some time to come but has generally been seen to follow the line of a “presumption against new drilling”.

He has also accepted that oil and gas “is declining too fast” and that jobs in renewables are not being created quickly enough to replace them.

“So we’ve got to take that into account in the decisions that we make,” he said, and agreed that imports of oil and gas were “more climate damaging” than that produced in the UK.