LBC granted access to drone-hit RAF Cyprus base as Healey insists Britain has been preparing for Iran conflict

All around him, servicemen and women were donning full body armour and moving quickly to shelter. Healey muted his line but remained on the call.

LBC was granted rare access to the RAF base Akrotiri in Cyprus, travelling there with the defence secretary on a tiny military plane, four days after the station was hit by a drone strike.

Tensions there have remained extremely high ever since.

It was just after midday when the alert went off, the second of three in just 16 hours. It came after a ballistic missile was fired from Iran, and the base needed to confirm it was not heading towards Cyprus.

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The third came on the road as the Defence Secretary and his convoy were driving through the base.

The driver, upon hearing the siren, sped up immediately: “We need to go faster”, she said.

The three servicemen in our car donned hard hats, and we were rushed into shelter. No time to grab our belongings. As the siren continued to ring out, we spent our time in what was the base’s school.

It’s not been used since Sunday night, when the Defence Secretary made the call to evacuate the base of families. The walls of the room were still covered by children’s drawings.

Some Ministry of Defence employees, not able to reach a reinforced building in time, were ushered under a table.

“This is just what life is like here at the moment,” one serviceman said.

The Ministry of Defence does not know exactly where the drone which hit the base over the weekend came from, but has narrowed down its origins to Lebanon or western Iraq.

It was small and flew low and slow, staying undetected until it hit. Despite its size, it could have been deadly. Had it hit a room full of people, it would have turned it into a room full of casualties instantly.

While at the base, Healey was presented with a piece of that hangar as a gift by officials. It is being driven back to the UK, and he will keep it as a reminder of the attack.

That drone hit on Sunday. But a day later, other missiles were intercepted.

On the base, a Royal Navy pilot had been airborne for four hours when he shot down the two Shahed 360s with an advanced short-range air-to-air missile.

He described the incident as “like training” but said there was no “euphoric sense of success”.

Speaking on an airfield, in front of a missile loaded Typhoon and F35B, he described the moment of his shot: “Because they're so small and difficult to detect, we don't know if there's any more out there and when you have to turn your aircraft around to shoot them down, what you're not doing is turning your radar back to where they came from to try and find the next.”

When he returned to base, he celebrated with one solitary Kia beer at sunrise.

The conflict in the Middle East did not come out of the blue.

The ratcheting up of tensions both in private and in public has meant the UK has been long preparing.

Healey told me that Britain has been stepping up air defences in Cyprus “for weeks” and some sources suggest the base has been being readied since January.

Of course, that has been questioned by others who are furious that the HMS Dragon warship, which is being readied to protect the British base in Cyprus, is not set to sail until next week.

It is currently being loaded with ammunition in Portsmouth before departing for the Mediterranean.

When I quizzed the defence secretary about this delay, he claimed he was not “annoyed”.

He said: “We're responding and I'm making decisions as things change, as we have to adapt the action that we're prepared to take. And I'm stepping up the air defences as we need to.

"So today we've got our top air defence planners coming into the island.

"They're going to help coordinate the ships and the systems that other allies are now starting to put into the area as well, alongside the UK.”

The big question here at the base is what might happen next.

“Don’t rule anything out,” was the advice of one minister yesterday.

I asked the defence secretary what that might mean and how far the UK could get dragged into this conflict.

He replied: “We've made a big commitment to allies in the region. We've made a big commitment because we have around 9,000 military personnel throughout the Middle East, and we have, as of a couple of days ago, almost 300,000 Brits in different parts of the Middle East.

"Of course, we're committed to this.

"We'd made the big commitment of defensive air defences and stepping up the defence weeks ahead of this conflict.

"We're adapting to the conflict as it changes the threats and strikes that we see from Iran.

"And we're determined that we'll do everything we need to, to protect British lives and protect British bases, but also British allies like Cyprus here.

"And it's very important that I'm here to be able to say that and then meet some of the extraordinary British personnel that are here doing that job.”