The lost art of late dining

One of the most memorable dinners I ever had was about 20 years ago, at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Fitzrovia called Pied à Terre. It’s still going, and indeed remains a stalwart of the city’s fine dining scene, but what I especially remember, rather than the food or wine, was how deliciously louche an experience it was. I couldn’t get a booking before 9 p.m., and by the hour that I turned up, it was packed to the rafters with well-heeled diners. My guest and I were kept happy with complimentary champagne until we finally sat down for dinner sometime after 10 p.m. In my (admittedly hazy) recollection, we didn’t finally leave the restaurant until well after 1 a.m. As we were staggering out, I asked our waitress whether she minded being kept out so late.

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Sadiq Khan will wear his Trump insult as a badge of honour

Stephen Pollard

The real reason two Jewish comedians had their Edinburgh shows canned

‘I’m from Barcelona,’ she replied. ‘This is what eating out ought to be like.’ I often think of her remarks, but I was reminded of it recently when I read an interview in the Times with arguably London’s greatest – and certainly most courteous – restaurateur, Jeremy King. When he began his career in the hospitality industry in the 1970s, last orders were at 1 a.m. Things have changed. As King lamented: ‘Now, it’s almost impossible to get anything [to eat] after 10 p.m. I don’t fully understand why it happened but I’m determined to redress the situation.’ To this end, diners at King’s establishments the Park and Arlington now receive a 25 per cent discount if they make a reservation after 9.45 p.m. Forget the miserable, hurried experience of bolting down an early evening prix fixe menu before going to the theatre or to a concert. Instead, have a pre-prandial glass of wine and nibble on something tapas-shaped, and save yourself (and your appetite) for a proper repast afterwards.

At least, that’s what the discerning man or woman about town ought to be doing. The late-night dinner is a distinctly endangered species, thanks to a combination of increasing puritanism, Westminster City Council (and others) refusing to grant anything but the most basic drinks licences, and society’s apparent need to be tucked up in bed by 11 p.m. And this, as any night owl or barfly will tell you, is a tragedy. Granted, there’ll always be somewhere to get a drink at pretty much any hour of the night, although you can’t guarantee that it’ll be up to much past 3 a.m. And there are a few all-night establishments of varying quality, too. Duck & Waffle in the City is the pick of the bunch, but Vingt-Quatre in Chelsea and the Polo Bar in Liverpool Street have their bleary-eyed admirers as well.

But they are a distinct minority, and notable by their (often endangered) existence. New York is, famously, the city that never sleeps. Judging by the lack of late-night dining offerings, London is the city that goes to bed early. That said, I’m sympathetic to the wisdom of the old saying that nothing good has ever happened at four in the morning, and I don’t think there should be a surge in all-night establishments. All I want is a restaurant that doesn’t quietly start closing at half nine, one that revels the excitement brought about by an adventurous crowd, popping by for a late supper.

Because eating late it is more fun. There is something thrilling about being ensconced somewhere that you shouldn’t be, perhaps in company that you shouldn’t be, and seeing where the rest of the evening is going to take you. Yes, you may have a head on you the next day, and one’s digestive system is going to regret the intake of particularly spicy or heavy food at a late hour. But set against this, the feeling of delicious transgression makes the whole experience positively European.

Visit Barcelona, Paris or Rome, and you see the streets filled with young (and not so young) people having fun and enjoying the experience for the delightful, life-affirming thing that it is. If you do find yourself leaving a restaurant well after the last Tube, and the only way home is via the night bus or, heaven forfend, a rickshaw driver, then perhaps it’s time to remember the immortal words of Lord Byron: ‘Let us have wine and woman, mirth and laughter / Sermons and soda-water the day after.’

Baroness Casey has not held back

Baroness Casey’s ‘national audit’ of child sexual exploitation was published this afternoon, and it’s now clear why the government changed course so quickly over the weekend, and why they’ve immediately accepted all of Casey’s recommendations. She doesn’t hold back. She identifies the scale of the rape gangs, the specific ethnic groups who make up the majority of perpetrators, and makes it clear how much the state has failed victims over decades.

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Sadiq Khan will wear his Trump insult as a badge of honour

Stephen Pollard

The real reason two Jewish comedians had their Edinburgh shows canned

Of the 51 local child safeguarding reviews listed by Casey ‘where perpetrator ethnicity and/or nationality is identified’, just one describes the perpetrators as white, while nine mention Asian perpetrators of one kind or another. Another 35 of these reviews didn’t report ethnicity or nationality at all. Casey’s recommendation is that ethnicity and nationality data is captured as a matter of course.

It seems plausible that this reluctance to record the race of rape gangs was driven by concerns over ‘raising tensions’. Casey says she ‘heard from police forces that local authorities would discourage them from publicising the successful conviction of perpetrators of group-based child sexual exploitation due to fears of raising tensions’. The report describes deliberate and wilful blindness, with many organisations ‘instead of examining whether there is disproportionality in ethnicity… avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist, raising community tensions or causing community cohesion problems’. In plain terms, public bodies across the country chose to prioritise multiculturalism over the rape of children.

Even more explosive is what Casey says about foreign nationals. It is clear that the immigration and asylum systems, and our non-existent borders, are directly causing the organised rape of children. Casey saw ‘evidence of around a dozen live, complex’ police investigations into rape gangs. She notes that ‘a significant proportion of these cases appear to involve suspects who are non-UK nationals and/or who are claiming asylum’. Just last week, 1,505 people arrived on small boats.

Casey proposes a national criminal investigation, reviewing accusations of rape which didn’t proceed, and a national inquiry. The criminal investigation has already begun. The Home Secretary said today in the Commons that over 800 cases have been identified as being worthy of a full review, and that she expects this number to exceed a thousand soon. The National Crime Agency will lead on these investigations. That is a good thing, given the historic appalling failures by local police forces.

The national inquiry Casey proposes is one which will co-ordinate ‘a series of targeted local investigations’. We will need to see the precise terms of reference for these, as there is a real risk of a compromised local council continuing its cover-ups.

The inquiry is to have full statutory inquiry powers, be time limited, targeted and ‘proportionate to the numbers of victims’. It ‘should review cases of failures or obstruction by statutory services to identify… where local investigations should be instigated’. Further, there ‘would need to be a process to identify instances and allegations of statutory agencies’ failures’, and ‘each investigation will call witnesses to give evidence and will require records to be submitted. Local authorities, police forces and other relevant agencies should in the meantime be required not to destroy any relevant records.’

When the Home Secretary spoke to the Commons this afternoon, she made it clear how seriously she takes the report, and said that the government will accept all its recommendations immediately. She also made it clear that she accepts there is ‘clear evidence of overrepresentation amongst Asian and Pakistani-heritage men’, and that public bodies avoided ‘the topic all-together to avoid seeming racist or raising community tensions’.

We’ve come a very long way from early May, when Lucy Powell described concern about grooming gangs as a ‘dog-whistle’, but the war is far from won. While new criminal investigations are to be welcomed, we must also ensure that every guilty public official faces a reckoning. Today in the Commons the Home Secretary said there would be ‘no hiding from justice’ for those who had covered up or been complicit in these crimes. This must mean prosecutions and exemplary sentences for every guilty local councillor, council employee, social worker and police officer. The government should also introduce legislation allowing it to strip honours and seize pension funds and other assets from those guilty public servants. This money should be used to create a victims’ fund. We also need assurance that the inquiry will investigate fearlessly. To that end, the Home Secretary should appoint a judge from Canada, Australia or New Zealand, someone separate from the British elites who have hidden these crimes for so long.

As always, the devil is in the details. Today’s announcement is promising. Now we must wait for the precise terms of the inquiry.

Kemi was at her best skewering Labour on grooming gangs

Yvette Cooper had come to the House of Commons to shut, as loudly and with as much gusto as she could manage, a stable door long after the horse had bolted. The government was finally doing what it had long derided as ‘a far-right bandwagon’ and agreed to a national inquiry into the Pakistani rape gangs which blighted small-town England for decades.

On the bench next to her were Bridget Philistine – who branded Tory calls for an inquiry ‘political opportunism’, Big Ange, whose new rules on Islamophobia would probably have made any of the journalism which exposed the gangs illegal, and Lucy Powell – the tin-eared, suet-brained embodiment of Blob-think who claimed that mentioning the gangs was a ‘dog whistle’. To have this cavalcade of guilty women lined up as the inquiry was announced was almost insulting.

The detail was repugnant. Gangs had targeted children as young as ten, specifically grooming those with learning difficulties and those in care. ‘Perpetrators’ Cooper told us, ‘walked free because no one joined the dots’. Or rather, they did join the dots, but the prevailing orthodoxy told them to ignore what they saw for fear of being branded racist? That sounds more accurate.

Cooper admitted that the report had ‘identified over-representation of Asian and Pakistani heritage men’ in the gangs. This was like someone earnestly telling the house that they had needed a lengthy and costly investigation to tell them that the sky was blue.

Don’t worry though: having finally realised what was wrong, Ol’ Sherlock Cooper assured the house that she had a plan of action. Inevitably this looked like mashing the same buttons again and again, like an impatient pedestrian at a zebra crossing. They would be ‘new laws’ and ‘new police operations’. If only someone had tried these things before? 

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Sadiq Khan will wear his Trump insult as a badge of honour

Stephen Pollard

The real reason two Jewish comedians had their Edinburgh shows canned

Keir Starmer was on his way to Canada for the G7; exactly the sort of self-congratulatory environment he prefers to dealing with the country’s problems. Mrs Badenoch, by contrast, had turned up in the House of Commons. She was angry. ‘Three times Labour MPs voted against an inquiry’, she yelled as the members opposite squealed and squirmed.

In parliamentary terms this was probably the best the Leader of the Opposition has been: passionate, coruscating and unambiguously in the right. It’s just a shame it took such shameful behaviour from the government to bring it out.

The depths had not yet been plumbed, however, until an intervention by Labour MP for Telford, Shaun Davies, who condemned Rishi Sunak for ‘refusing to provide a statutory inquiry into’ grooming gangs in Telford – before promptly scuttling away. As leader of Telford and Wrekin Council in 2016, Davies himself signed a letter calling for the then-prime minister and home secretary to reject calls for an inquiry into child sexual abuse in the town.

There are many things we could say about Mr Davies, a typical Labour 2024 backbencher: so lightweight and ridiculous he might as well be made of helium. We might suggest that his weaselling self-preservation efforts imply a lack of conscience. We might say that his own track record in local government suggests, at best, a lack of competence. We might observe that his attempt today to smear his opponents while simultaneously claiming to ‘take this out of the party-political field’ suggests that he has no spine. 

However, one thing we cannot suggest that he lacks, in turning up and daring to speak at a moment like this, is a brass neck.

Will Labour actually act on the Casey grooming gang report?

Has the government really U-turned on grooming gangs? Six months after resisting a national inquiry into the crimes committed against young girls by men of predominantly Asian heritage, ministers have announced one. But Yvette Cooper’s statement to MPs this afternoon about the exact nature of that inquiry suggested the government had executed something a little wobblier than a U-turn.

The Home Secretary told the Commons that Louise Casey’s rapid review had recommended a national commission – with statutory inquiry powers – which will direct and oversee the local inquiries into grooming gangs that are already underway. It would not be ‘another overarching inquiry of the kind conducted by Professor Alexis Jay’, added Cooper. ‘Its purpose must be to challenge what the audit describes as continued denial, resistance and legal wrangling among local agencies.’ While it would be time-limited, the Home Secretary later told Reform MP Richard Tice that it would take around three years.

Is this a full public inquiry? Not quite. And it’s not quite a U-turn. But it’s enough of one for ministers to claim that they are taking grooming gangs as seriously as the row at the start of the year demanded. Detailing Casey’s ‘disturbing’ findings, Cooper said the law had

Ended up protecting [perpetrators] instead of the victims that they had exploited, deep rooted institutional failures stretching back decades where organisations who should have protected children and punished offenders looked the other way.

She added that ‘blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions all played a part in this collective failure’. None of these findings are particularly new or surprising, other than the need for better data, particularly on ethnicity. On that, Cooper said Casey’s review had found the following:

In the local data that the audit examined from three police forces, they identified clear evidence of over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani heritage men, and she refers to examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist or raising community tensions.

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Sadiq Khan will wear his Trump insult as a badge of honour

Stephen Pollard

The real reason two Jewish comedians had their Edinburgh shows canned

Given there is little that is new in what Casey highlighted, a more important question than what sort of volte-face ministers have executed is whether the new inquiry will lead to real changes. Cooper told MPs that further action was being taken to implement the recommendations of the seven-year inquiry from Jay. The recommendations from Casey included expunging the criminal records of those who had been convicted for child prostitution while their abusers walked free. The National Crime Agency will also launch a new criminal operation into grooming gangs which will develop a new operating model for police forces nationwide to ensure grooming gangs are always treated as serious and organised crime.

Both Cooper and Tory leader Kemi Badenoch spent considerable portions of their respective speeches pointing out that they had been working on this for years and arguing that the party on the other side of the Chamber had done nothing. Both of them had a furious tone as they railed against the injustice of it taking so many years for too few victims to get justice.

Badenoch – who would not normally, as leader of the opposition, respond to a statement from a secretary of state – also asked for details on what changed Keir Starmer’s mind from ‘thinking this was dog-whistle politics’. She also spent a fair chunk of time defending the Conservative record on tackling the sexual exploitation of children – something Cooper then used the report to try to repudiate.

Cooper and Badenoch also fought over whether Labour MPs had really voted against a national inquiry at the start of the year, as Badenoch claimed, or whether they were rejecting a Tory attempt to wreck the Children and Wellbeing Bill at second reading. 

MPs representing areas where grooming gangs have already been uncovered, such as Paul Waugh in Rochdale, were not happy with Badenoch’s characterisation of their voting records. Waugh complained early on in the backbench responses that he felt a ‘cold fury’ while listening to the Leader of the Opposition.

That cold fury is presumably fuelled in part by the local opprobrium whipped up against MPs over that mischaracterisation of how they voted. Indeed, it was a national storm of opprobrium over a mischaracterisation that led to grooming gangs going from just one of many issues to being the dominant political story at the start of the year. Without that storm, it is unlikely Casey would have been given the audit or that there would be a national inquiry.

Given the poor record of all governments in following up the findings of all kinds of inquiries, there will need to be quite a sustained storm to ensure that there is real change in policy, not just a different sort of announcement to the one ministers intended to make when this row first surfaced earlier in the year. 

Listen: Thought for the Day bishop’s bizarre grooming gang claim

Well, well, well. As Baroness Casey prepares to publish her review into Britain’s grooming gang scandal, a rather curious speaker was invited on to Radio 4’s ‘Thought for the Day’ this morning. Step forward, the Bishop of Manchester, Reverend David Walker, who told us that…

This is not a pattern of offending confined to any particular ethnic cultural or religious group. I hope that the forthcoming inquiry will help us find ways to keep young girls safe from the groups of predatory older men, whatever their origin. But it is a natural human tendency to want to think that such horrendous crimes are only carried out by people who are not like us.

Whilst gangs may dominate the news headlines, child protection experts affirm that the vast majority of child sexual exploitation is committed by the victim’s close family members or family friends.

In fact, Pakistani men are up to five times as likely to be responsible for child sex grooming offences than the general population, according to figures from the Hydrant Programme, which investigates child sex abuse. Around one in 73 Muslim men over 16 have been prosecuted for ‘group-localised child sexual exploitation’ in Rotherham, research by academics from the universities of Reading and Chichester has revealed.

Indeed, after Reverend Walker’s speech, presenter Nick Robinson noted the new national inquiry announced by Sir Keir Starmer was into grooming gangs constituted ‘of men of largely Pakistani heritage’. Listen to the full clip here:

Lefties abandon Stella Creasy’s abortion amendment

A real cheery week in the Commons is looming for our lucky legislators. There’s assisted dying, grooming gangs and a welfare row to enjoy. But tomorrow attention will switch to abortion, with Labour MPs now pushing to ‘decriminalise’ the practice in England and Wales. Unfortunately, a bit of a row has broken out between Tonia Antoniazzi and Stella Creasy, both of whom have tabled competing amendments to the Criminal Justice Bill.

Antoniazzi’s measure would allow abortion for any reason up to birth while maintaining criminal sanctions for doctors performing late-term or sex-selective procedures. Creasy, however, has adopted the more hard-line position of full decriminalisation in all circumstances. The pair sparred earlier this month on the floor of the House of Commons. Now, the race is on to see who can get more signatures for their amendment….

Sadly for Stella, it seems she has lost once again. For some 14 left-leaning Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs who previously backed her amendment have since withdrawn their names. They are, according to the parliamentary order paper, Peter Swallow, Antonia Bance, Freddie van Mierlo, Luke Taylor, Adam Jogee, Liz Jarvis, Rachel Taylor, Sarah Smith, Jacob Collier, Alison Hume, Kirith Entwistle, Layla Moran, Helen Hayes and Dr Rosena Allin-Khan. This list was accurate up to Friday evening.

All except Allin-Khan have put their names to Antoniazzi’s amendment instead. With Speaker Hoyle likely to call only one of the two Labour MPs, it looks like Creasy has demonstrated her reverse Midas touch in politics once again….

Will the assisted dying vote be delayed?

All is not well with the Labour lot. It has emerged that more than 50 lefty MPs submitted a letter to the Leader of the Commons, Lucy Powell, at the weekend – demanding she intervene to delay this Friday’s final third reading vote on Kim Leadbeater’s controversial assisted dying bill. The letter blasts the limited opportunities afforded to parliamentarians to speak on the bill and fumes that ‘several movers of amendments haven’t been able to speak to the changes they have laid’. Oo er.

The concerned crowd includes, as reported by the Independent, a group of 2024ers alongside some longer-serving MPs. Former journalists Paul Waugh and Torcuil Crichton have added their signatures to the letter, alongside politicians Florence Eshalomi and Dawn Butler. Their memo makes the case for why the private members bill process is simply not a sufficient way of dealing with such a significant issue. The MPs refer to the assisted dying bill as ‘perhaps the most consequential pieces of legislation that has appeared before the House in generations’, before going on:

This is not a normal Bill. It alters the foundations of our NHS, the relationship between doctor and patient, and it strips power away from parliament, concentrating it in the hands of future health secretaries.

The sponsor of the bill has proudly stated that it has received more time in parliament than some government bills have. And yet MPs have had the opportunity to vote on just 12 of 133 amendments tabled at report stage. Just 14 per cent of MPs have been afforded the opportunity to speak in the chamber on this bill. Several movers of amendments haven’t been able to speak to the changes they have laid.

The fact that such fundamental changes are being made to this Bill at the eleventh hour is not a badge of honour, it is a warning. The private member’s bill process has shown itself to be a woefully inadequate vehicle for the introduction of such a foundational change to our NHS and the relationship between doctor and patient.

This is no longer about debating the abstract principle of assisted dying. The bill before parliament has created real concern with medical experts and charities. MPs and the government should listen to their expertise.

Strong stuff. As Mr S has long reported, the controversial bill has come under significant criticism this year. The replacement of the high court judge safeguard with Leadbeater’s proposed ‘expert panel’ prompted angry outbursts from psychiatrists and their Royal College – one of the medical professions that was expected to make up this panel. The suggestion that the euthanasia process could see a ‘voluntary assisted dying commissioner’ – dubbed the ‘death czar‘ by online critics – oversee cases provoked more fear. More concerningly, the bill committee struck down an amendment that called for support for those with Down’s syndrome when initiating conversations on assisted suicide. And one of the many amendments not voted on was Labour MP Naz Shah’s demand for protection for those with eating disorders like anorexia.

So will Sir Keir’s top team intervene at the final hour? Watch this space…

Iran is too weak to wage a ground war against Israel

As Israel advances its surgical reduction of Iran’s nuclear facilities and senior command, and Iran continues to launch missiles randomly at Israeli population centres in response, it is interesting to note what is not happening. Notably absent is any ground element to the war, which is currently being fought entirely between air and missile forces.  

This brings home just how much the picture has changed in Israel’s favour over the last 20 months. It also reveals the deeper logic of this war. On 6 October, the Iran-led regional alliance stood as the most powerful strategic axis in the Middle East, pursuing clear goals via proven modes of action. As a result of an ill-fated decision by one of its most minor members (Hamas) to launch a war it could not win, the regional components of this alliance were neutralised. Israel is now seeking to complete the job by pulverising Iran itself. An optimal result would be the fall of the regime. But a battered, isolated Tehran, stripped of its nuclear programme, missile array and allies, would also suffice.  

I have been tracing the form and nature of Iran’s ambitions in the Middle East for the best part of the last twenty years. For most of those years, what I and other observers saw was the slow, incremental and seemingly inexorable advance of Iran’s power and influence across the region. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ (IRGC) capacities for irregular warfare and political organisation, coupled with the collapse and fragmentation of governance across a broad swathe of the Middle East, allowed Tehran to table achievement after achievement.  

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Sadiq Khan will wear his Trump insult as a badge of honour

Stephen Pollard

The real reason two Jewish comedians had their Edinburgh shows canned

In Gaza, Israel’s decision – in retrospect flawed – for unilateral withdrawal allowed the Iran-supported, Islamist Hamas movement to sweep aside their enfeebled opponents and assume sole control of the Strip in 2007. 

In Lebanon, the IRGC proxy Hizballah militia induced a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000. The organisation then emerged as the unchallenged dominant political force in the country in 2008, after fighting a second, inconclusive war against Israel in 2006.  

In Iraq, the US removal of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent rise of Sunni jihadi insurgency in the form of Isis enabled Iran to mobilise Hezbollah-style Shia militias. They went on to become the most powerful political-military force in the country.  

In Yemen, the removal of the dictatorship of Ali Abdullah Saleh enabled the Iran-supported Houthis to rise up, take the capital and a large part of the coast. They established an area of control comprising much of the country and most of its population.  

In Syria, the apparent victory of the Assad regime over the Sunni Islamist insurgency against it meant that this area was maintained as a vital territorial link between Iraq and Lebanon. This raised the possibility for Iran of moving ground forces from Iran in the direction of potential fronts against Israel in Lebanon and Syria, in the event of war.  

This array meant that on 6 October 2023, on the eve of war, Tehran, thanks to the skills and methods of the IRGC and the blunders of its opponents, had successfully implanted a series of powerful semi-regular militias in neighbouring states, primed and ready for war with Israel. Behind this alliance stood Iran’s own capacities, embodied in its missile and nuclear programs. 

That was how things looked 20 months ago. The direct confrontation between Israel and Iran has now come. What remains of this hard-built array? What ground options does Iran now have in a war with Israel?  

In Gaza, Hamas has lost territorial control of most of the Strip, and no longer has the ability to fire rockets and missiles at Israel. It remains as a disconnected, fragmented insurgency. It is able to inflict periodic damage on Israeli forces using guerrilla methods. That’s where it ends. It has been rendered useless as an instrument able to strike at Israeli population centres. It is also no longer serviceable as a semi-regular military force of the type that carried out the massacres of 7 October 2023.  

In Lebanon, as a result of the direct combat against Israel in the autumn of 2023, Hezbollah is a broken shadow of the powerful, semi-regular military painstakingly built up between 2000 and 2024. Its historic leadership has been targeted and killed by Israel. Its mid-level cadres devastated by successful Israeli clandestine warfare and subsequent targeting. Its long-range missile array targeted from the air and largely destroyed, its south Lebanon positions systematically reduced by Israeli ground forces. The result: Hezbollah can no longer be employed as an asset by Iran. Its token statement of support for Iran this week contained no concrete pledge of support or action.  

The fall of Assad in Syria means that the way through to potential fighting fronts is now closed to Iranian or Iraqi allied forces. The Iraqi Shia militias, in any case, appear to evince little enthusiasm for sharing the fate of their Lebanese counterparts.  

The Houthis, meanwhile, are on their feet and still firing their projectiles (usually intercepted). But, distant geographically, they are irrelevant in terms of availability for ground action.  

What all this means is that, little noticed by western commentators who were busy with their myopic focus on Gaza, Israel has, over the last 18 months, effectively reversed two decades of Iranian advance across the Middle East. The result is that Iran now finds that its intended envelopment of Israel with proxy militias has been dismantled. Tools for Iran to exert pressure from the ground no longer exist.  

This means that the current confrontation looks set to focus on air, missile and drone warfare. As to how things proceed, much will depend on the continued capacities of Israel’s air defences, its ability to keep its current air corridor to Iran open and to continue reaping a toll on Iranian regime assets and personnel. 

The goal must be the crippling or drastic weakening of both the regime’s nuclear programme and its ability to govern. The result: either the permanent weakening of the Islamic Republic to a point where it can no longer busy itself with seeking to project power and aggression against its neighbours, or, preferably, the reduction of the regime’s capacities to a point where the Iranian people are able to free themselves from the mullah’s yoke. The latter outcome would be an appropriate end both to Tehran’s two-decade project of aggression in the Middle East, and to its ally Hamas’s decision to launch war in October 2023. 

The delusion of western Palestine activists in Egypt

As the news cycle shifts its gaze to Iran and the escalating war to prevent the psychotic Islamic theocracy from going nuclear, spare a thought for the few hundred virtue-signalling westerners who thought it would be clever to traipse through Egypt and attempt to approach the Gaza border, armed not with aid or expertise, but with slogans, smartphones, and a boundless belief in their own moral radiance. They came, allegedly, to show solidarity with Gaza. What they revealed, instead, was the sheer delusion of performative activism gone rogue.

These self-styled heroes of humanity had absorbed the wildest claims from Hamas propagandists: tales of genocide, disproportionality, and babies being starved by ‘Zionists’ for sport. That this information may have come from a terrorist organisation that systematically lies, stages suffering for cameras, and steals aid from its own people did not seem to give them pause. Nor did the macabre irony that Hamas triggered this war by butchering Israeli civilians on 7 October, in an Iranian-backed rampage. For the marchers, it seems context and truth are distractions. Israel is evil, Gaza is pure, and anything that complicates this infantile morality play must be ignored.

And so they flew to Cairo, preening like missionaries, oblivious to the region they were entering. Egypt, they quickly discovered, is not Glastonbury. Its security services do not offer vegan meal options or safe spaces. Within days, hundreds were detained, deported, or dumped back in the capital. One might almost feel sorry for them, if it weren’t all so laughable. Their misfortune wasn’t just predictable, it was the logical outcome of their fantasy-driven politics colliding with a brutal, indifferent reality.

One particular scene went viral, mostly because of its tragicomic absurdity. A heavily tattooed man from Wales, claiming to be a nurse and pacifist, stood theatrically in front of Egyptian officers, pleading for passage. His Welsh lilt only sharpened the absurdity: ‘You do have a choice. You’re humans. We’re here for humanity… You are my brother. In Islam, you are my brother!’ A woman beside him asked, ‘Are you a Muslim?’ He ignored her. The performance rolled on. ‘Please, I saw them shooting pregnant women, Muslim women.’ Behind him, the crowd chanted ‘Free, free Palestine,’ and our Florence Nightingale of farce continued: ‘These people aren’t Muslims doing this, they’re Zionists. They’re not Jewish… I stand for Islam, I stand for the people of Falesteen.’

I almost feel sorry for these useful idiots who have flown to Egypt thinking that Egyptians are going to let them march through the country and simply open the border to the Gaza.
I feel sorry for them because some of our media has encouraged this idiocy.
Our media hasn’t… pic.twitter.com/ERJaYOsrCU

— Nicole Lampert (@nicolelampert) June 14, 2025

It would have been risible if it weren’t so revealing. Far from being political or humanitarian action, this was mere street theatre, but it soon wore thin: even the over-enthusiastic Arabic interpreter who had manically waved his arms and relayed this poor chap’s desperate message eventually wandered off, apparently bored. The Welshman carried on alone, invoking starving babies, empty breasts, and the ‘white hearts’ of the Arab world. This, presumably, was meant to dignify his sobbing saviour complex, but it came across as patronising. The whole thing felt like a pitiful, live-streamed hallucination or a previously unseen moment from Little Britain.

But it’s not just idiocy on display. There is a deeper, darker pattern at work. Though they’re encouraged by the activist news angles which seek to paint the conflict in simplistic, black and white terms, like a Ladybird book version of reality, these activists do not simply fall into their beliefs. They seek them out. They aren’t ‘radicalised’ like someone catches a cold. Instead, they walk themselves into it, one credulous, self-congratulatory step at a time. As philosopher Quassim Cassam argues, extremism isn’t just about ideology or tactics, it’s a mindset: rigid, conspiratorial, and self-righteous. It thrives on grievance, absolutism and moral vanity. And crucially, it is chosen. People adopt it to interpret the world in a way that flatters their self-image and justifies their hostility. In this sense, the activists’ worldview isn’t imposed upon them, it is cultivated, reinforced, and rehearsed, with each act of public ‘solidarity’ functioning as both ritual and performance.

They don’t appear to ask why Hamas steals aid, embeds rockets in hospitals, or uses civilians as shields. They ignore why Gaza remains under blockade: because demilitarisation and deradicalisation were never accepted. Instead, they fixate on Israel, the Jewish state, as a unique and monstrous evil. This obscene inversion is not empathy. It is hatred, moralised.

And the media helps. The BBC and other outlets regurgitate Hamas casualty claims as gospel, air scripted stories by Hamas leaders’ children, broadcast false claims of ‘flattened’ hospitals, and treat every activist as a prophet or a saint. The BBC Arabic service even insisted that Jews spit on Christians as part of a holy festival ritual (we don’t). The result is a feedback loop of propaganda and performance. The media amplifies the activists. The activists believe the media. And all of them seem to reinforce each other’s prejudices under the performative illusion of humanitarianism.

If they cared for Palestinians, they would campaign for Hamas to disarm, for children to be educated in peace, and for aid to be routed through secure, accountable channels. They would support Israel’s right to exist and defend itself, and they would call out the Islamic fanatics who hold Gaza hostage and murder and rape Jews. But that would require moral clarity, political knowledge, and a spine. Far easier to film yourself sobbing outside Rafah and post it on Instagram for instant likes and shares.          

In the modern world, victimhood is currency. And being manhandled by Egyptian police, or weeping theatrically for the cameras, only boosts your activist credentials. They aren’t real martyrs, but they certainly play them online.

This is a grotesque masquerade. It feeds anti-Semitism, empowers terrorists, and distracts from real solutions. And all for what? So a few westerners can feel righteous for an afternoon. Spare a thought indeed, but not a tear.

Watch: Treasury minister’s car crash interview

Dear oh dear. It’s never a good look to go onto the airwaves to boast about your department’s new infrastructure fund to then, er, promptly forget the details of the project you’re funding. The unlucky minister who found herself in this position today was the Treasury’s Emma Reynolds, who appeared to forget both exactly where the new Lower Thames Crossing road is and how much the total bill will come to. Talk about a car crash, eh?

Speaking to LBC’s Nick Ferrari this morning, Reynolds was first quizzed on where exactly the new road from Essex to Kent would start and end. ‘Just remind us where the new crossing is, where it takes off and where it lands,’ the veteran presenter quizzed his interviewee. ‘Eh, well, erm…’ Reynolds began rather unpromisingly, before going on: ‘It’s… You’ll forgive me, I can’t recall the exact landing zone.’ And despite her attempts to waffle on about other details of the project, Reynolds was not allowed to get off scot-free. ‘You don’t actually know where it takes off from and where it lands, do you?’ Ferrari hit back scathingly. Ouch.

And never mind the geography – Reynolds also confused the ‘Dartford tunnel’ with Dartmouth, a town in Devon – the Treasury minister wasn’t even on top of the numbers either. Despite being on air to announce the ‘substantial’ injection of funding going towards the Lower Thames Crossing project, she couldn’t quite specify just how much the new road would cost. She told Ferrari rather vaguely that it would be ‘quite a lot of money’ and ‘several billion pounds’. When her host reminded her the correct answer was actually £10 billion, she told him rather unconvincingly: ‘I’m here to talk about the broader infrastructure plan as well that we will be launching later this week.’ Good heavens…

Watch the clip here:

Will Trump respond to Iran damaging the US embassy?

The US embassy in Tel Aviv has been damaged by an Iranian ballistic missile attack which landed close by, raising the prospect of President Trump retaliating against Tehran.

The overnight incident, during a barrage of Iranian missiles fired at Tel Aviv and the port city of Haifa, came after Trump warned the US would attack Iran with its ‘full force’ if any American assets were targeted.

It seemed the building was not directly targeted but the blast from the missiles caused minor damage at the branch office building. Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, confirmed the damage overnight but said no one had been hurt. ‘Some minor damage from concussions of Iranian missile hits near the embassy branch in Tel Aviv but no injuries to US personnel,’ he said in a post on X. He said the embassy in Jerusalem and the offices in Tel Aviv would remain closed.

In his warning to Tehran, Trump had said: ‘If we are attacked in any way, shape or form by Iran, the full strength and might of the US armed forces will come down on you at levels never seen before.’

Since Israel’s attacks on Iran’s nuclear plants and air defence systems, codenamed Operation Rising Lion, began on 13 June, Trump has made it clear that the US is not involved, although a report by Reuters claimed that the American president had vetoed an Israeli plan to assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

‘Have the Iranians killed an American yet? No. Until they do we’re not even talking about going after the political leadership,’ a senior US official told Reuters.

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Sadiq Khan will wear his Trump insult as a badge of honour

Stephen Pollard

The real reason two Jewish comedians had their Edinburgh shows canned

Washington’s hesitation to participate in the latest round of Israeli raids on Iran suggests that minor, indirect damage to the embassy building in Tel Aviv will not provoke Trump into retaliating against Tehran.

Yet it could persuade the US president to mount a full-scale defence of Israel, using warships in the Red Sea and Mediterranean and Patriot missile batteries located in the Middle East to help Israel shoot down the ballistic missiles and drones targeting Israeli cities.

Israel’s Iron Dome and Arrow 2 and 3 anti-missile systems have successfully shot down a large percentage of Iran’s missiles and drones. However, dozens have breached the missile shield, leading to multiple casualties.

When the tit-for-tat missile strikes erupted between Israel and Iran in April, the US, Britain, France and Jordan stepped in to support Israel with anti-missile defences.

This time, it has not been made clear how much support has been provided. US European Command moved two destroyers with anti-missile systems to the Eastern Mediterranean last week which may already have played a role in intercepting Iranian missiles. The UK also sent additional fighter jets and air refuelling tankers to the Middle East.

Trump’s response to the damage caused to the US embassy building in Tel Aviv is likely to be measured by the desire not to escalate an already dangerous confrontation between Israel and Iran.

During his first term in office in June 2019, he approved plans to strike Iran after the Iranians shot down a long-range US Air Force Global Hawk surveillance drone.

Bombers were on their way to hit selected targets when the president changed his mind and the raid was called off. Later, Trump explained that no Americans had been hurt and retaliatory strikes which could have led to Iranian deaths, were, therefore, disproportionate.

Now, in his second term, and following his warning to Iran, the prospect of a military response to the overnight damage to the American embassy is possible but unlikely.

The calm statement from Ambassador Mike Huckabee suggests the response will be more cautious.

The quiet desperation of Macron’s Greenland visit

Emmanuel Macron spent his Sunday in Greenland on what can best be described as an anti-Trump visit. The French president dropped in on the Danish autonomous territory en route to this week’s G7 summit in Canada. Flanked by Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland’s Premier Jens-Frederik Nielsen, Macron told reporters he was there in ‘solidarity’ with Greenland.

Donald Trump has expressed his desire to annex the strategically important island but Macron said, ‘everybody thinks − in France, in the European Union − that Greenland is not to be sold, not to be taken.’

Everybody? In truth very few people in France are losing sleep over Greenland. There are other more pressing issues: war in the Middle East, war in Ukraine, a cost of living crisis, the collapse of the country’s borders and, as Macron himself admitted last week ‘a senseless outpouring of violence’.

The president made that statement hours after a playground supervisor had been fatally stabbed, with a 14-year-old boy charged with his murder. This is the latest act of appalling brutality that has shaken France in recent years.

Macron is incapable of addressing any of these issues so instead he visits the more far-flung corners of the earth where locals will clap, wave flags and afford him a warmth that he has long since lost in his homeland.

As Macron flew to Greenland a Sunday newspaper published an opinion poll that revealed his approval rating is at 21 per cent, a point above the record low of 2018, the year of the Yellow Vest crisis.

The same poll found that the most popular politician is Bruno Retailleau, the straight-talking Interior Minister. Retailleau regularly talks about the ‘Mexicanisation’ of France, and the  ‘barbarians’ who make the lives of the majority a misery. Macron, on the other hand, believes that there is nothing much wrong with France. Recently he declared that the French were being ‘brainwashed’ by the ‘tyranny’ of right-wing news channels into believing the country was being overrun by illegal immigrants, drug cartels and hoodlums. The timing of the president’s comments couldn’t have been more inopportune, coming shortly before the playground assistant was murdered outside the school gate.

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Sadiq Khan will wear his Trump insult as a badge of honour

Stephen Pollard

The real reason two Jewish comedians had their Edinburgh shows canned

Macron is also out of step with his country when it comes to the environment. At the end of last month, parliament voted to abolish low-emission zones, one of Macron’s flagship policies during his first term.

Some of his own centrist MPs voted with the centre-right Republicans and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally to defeat a policy they said targeted the poorest members of society. The zones, which began in 2019 and now encompass every urban area with a population above 150,000, ban cars registered before 1997.

Macron described the vote as an ‘historic error’, adding that ‘ecology necessarily means constraints’. His critics demur. The campaign to scrap the low-emission zones was led by the writer Alexandre Jardin. He accused Macron and his ilk of transforming green issues ‘into a sport for the rich’.

Jardin last week announced that his next target is wind farms, many more of which are planned by Macron. Critics claim they are unreliable and expensive, and likely to double consumers’ bills. Wind farms, declared Jardin, are a ‘green bobo [bourgeois bohemian] utopia, financed to the tune of billions… by whom? The poor, of course.’

Within months of becoming president in 2017 Macron was being characterised as a privileged former banker and the ‘president of the rich’. There is nothing unusual in that; most world leaders aren’t short of a few bob, least of all Trump, who last week reported assets worth at least £1.17 billion.

The difference between Trump and Macron, however, is that the American president acts in the interest of the less affluent, those most affected by mass immigration, deindustrialisation and net zero dogma.

Macron ignores anxieties about these issues. He remains the president of the rich, feted in Greenland but loathed in France.

How likely is regime change in Iran? 

The clue is in the name of Israel’s operation. ‘Operation Rising Lion’ is a direct reference to the Pahlavi flag used by Iran before the Islamic revolution, which shows a lion standing proud against the backdrop of a glowing orb, the sun. In Persian this is called the ‘Shir-e Khorshid.’ For many years now, Netanyahu has sought to speak directly to Iranians, attempting to transcend the Islamic Republic, and to present himself as the saviour of the Iranian people. These ongoing strikes are simply a continuation of this policy, and Israel’s determination to avoid civilian casualties (something we’ve not seen in Gaza) feeds into its desire for an anti-regime uprising caused by elite splits and popular rage.

For decades now, Israel has supported anti-regime groups in Iran, such as the frankly cultish Mujahedeen-e Khalq, a group so fuelled by hatred of the regime that they threw in their lot with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war, a piece of opportunism for which the Iranian people, on all sides of the divide, have never forgiven them. 

As bombs rain down on Iranian cities and Supreme Leader Khamenei hides in a bunker somewhere in Lavizan with his family, the Israeli hope is for ordinary Iranians to rise up against a regime in disarray and free the Iranian people once and for all. Yet the longer this mythical uprising doesn’t take place, the more chance there is of national sentiment swinging in behind the regime, behind the IRGC, behind those who are protecting Iranian cities. Or at least trying to. Saddam Hussein, when he began a war with a freshly-minted revolutionary Islamic Republic, gambling on a swift victory against a troubled nation, made the same miscalculation, dragging both countries into a horrendous conflict that ultimately ended in a ruinous stalemate.

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Sadiq Khan will wear his Trump insult as a badge of honour

Stephen Pollard

The real reason two Jewish comedians had their Edinburgh shows canned

Since the strikes began, we have seen videos of scattered nighttime cries of ‘Death to Khamenei, Death to IRGC,’ ringing out across Tehran, and videos sent to news outlets with commentary congratulating the Israelis. But we’ve also seen strident pro-regime protests, and the longer this conflict goes on, the more Israel will be seen less as liberator and more as oppressor. 

Persian nationalism is a quixotic phenomenon, easily capable of siding with the Ayatollah against Israel. Qassem Soleimani, a stalwart revolutionary hero killed by the US in a 2019 airstrike, was lauded by Iranians across the political spectrum for his strategic genius and his defence of Iran’s borders and domestic security. He took the fight to the US as they started wars that surrounded Iran after 9/11; he took the fight to Isis, eventually defeating it; he defended the Iranian nation. The narratives ignored his role in the brutal suppression of dissent in Iran.

Israel should remember that for all the nostalgia towards Pahlavi rule, and for all the hatred of the Islamic Republic across Iranian society, Iranian nationalism is a force that transcends flags and political eras, going back even further than Islam. And it is a force that could drag this conflict out, denying Netanyahu the ultimate victory he craves; the fall of the Ayatollahs.

The markets don’t care much about Israel and Iran

As missiles fly across the Middle East as Israel and Iran embark on what could well become a wider regional conflict, you might expect turmoil in the financial markets. After all, if the beginning of a third world war doesn’t knock a few dollars off the Apple share price it is hard to know what would. But it turns out that investors, at least for now, appear indifferent.

Looking at a trading screen this morning you would probably think not much was going on in the world. The FTSE100 was up 30 points. Overnight, the Nikkei was up by 1.2 per cent; and when Wall Street opens it is expected to be up by a few points as well. Gold was down by 0.4 per cent, and oil by slightly under 1 per cent. It is all very meh. Anyone who thought a major conflict in the Middle East would throw the global economy into chaos will clearly be disappointed. It does not look like it is going to happen.

Of course, investors might just be incredibly complacent. Yet there are two reasons for thinking they may well be right to tune out the news bulletins from Tehran and Tel Aviv. To start with, they are assuming that Israel has already won. As so often before, the Israel military has proved its mastery of tactics, surprise, and special operations, and its defensive shield largely protects it from retaliation. Investors are betting that Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu would not have started the conflict unless he was sure he could win it.

Next, the energy market has changed. Fracking has turned the United States into the largest oil and gas producer in the world, and there is plenty more to be developed. Even the Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, a fierce opponent of fossil fuels when he ran the Bank of England, is increasing production. At the same time, green energy may be more expensive than its champions predicted, and may require bigger subsidies, but there is starting to be a lot of it. The wind turbines in the North Sea generate 30 per cent of the UK’s electricity, and in Spain solar contributes 20 per cent of the total, while wind contributes another 20 per cent. The result? We rely far less on Middle Eastern oil and gas than we used to. In reality, the war may be a huge event for diplomats, for military strategists, and for the fate of the region. To the markets, however, it does not matter very much. Investors have other things to worry about.

Does anyone really want AI civil servants?

Of course they’ve called it ‘Humphrey’. The cutesy name that has been given to the AI tool the government is rolling out across the civil service with unseemly haste is a nod – as those of an age will recognise – to the immortal sitcom Yes, Minister. But it may also prove to be more appropriate than they think. The premise of that show, you’ll recall, is that Sir Humphrey is the person really in charge – and that he will at every turn imperceptibly thwart and subvert the instructions given to him by the elected minister.  

At least in the show, we’re encouraged to believe that Sir Humphrey undermines Jim Hacker because he’s cleverer and has the best interests of the nation at heart. But an AI Humphrey has no such redeeming qualities: if it undermines the elected minister, it’ll be for no reason other than an algorithmic sport.  

Item one: generative AI hallucinates. It makes stuff up. Nobody knows exactly why, and nobody knows how to stop it doing so. Some experts in the field say that there’s a good chance that the problem will get worse rather than better over time: after all, as an ever-greater proportion of the zillions of words of text on the internet comes to be AI-generated, and AI models are therefore training on the outputs of AI models, those hallucinations are going to be baked in. Garbage in, garbage out, as programmers like to say.  

So though ChatGPT and its cousins are a fantastic boon to people who don’t want to do their work – be they lazy undergraduates, lawyers who can’t be bothered to comb through case law and write their own briefs, or government ministers who imagine the savings to be made if bureaucratic emails were to start writing themselves – they come with significant risks.  

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Sadiq Khan will wear his Trump insult as a badge of honour

Stephen Pollard

The real reason two Jewish comedians had their Edinburgh shows canned

It’s not just those notorious Google searches that encourage you to put glue on pizza. Already, we’re seeing cases coming to court where lawyers have used AI to draft their arguments, and it has emerged that the LLM has invented its legal citations out of whole cloth. Academic work is being turned out with footnotes leading to works that don’t exist, and imaginary bibliographies. More than one US newspaper published a syndicated ‘summer reading’ special in which several of the books it recommended didn’t exist.  

Is this going to be a problem when it comes to the machinery of Whitehall? I would say so, wouldn’t you? The Post Office Horizon scandal – which had at its root a lot of credulous officials believing everything that a malfunctioning computer told them – ruined lives and cost the taxpayer a small fortune in compensation and in the inquiries that had to sort out the whole mess. Embedding a large language model at the heart of government is a recipe for any number of repeat performances. It seems perfectly reasonable to suppose that the legal risk will outweigh any vaunted efficiency savings – to say nothing of the potential for human suffering if the LLM goes wonky in the tax and benefits systems. 

The promise to ‘have meaningful human control at the right stages’ sounds like an excellent principle – but it’s not clear how it can be more than an aspiration. You won’t know when you’ve got it wrong until it bites you in the bum. And people, remember, are lazy. What’s the betting that they won’t always bother to check the computer’s homework when the homework sounds plausible enough, and it’s getting towards time for a pint in the Red Lion? 

Item two: there is a moral case as well as a practical one against Humphrey. Not only does generative AI have serious environmental costs, but it’s a plagiarism machine. ChatGPT, which is one of the models on which Humphrey has been built, is known to have scraped text to train its models from piracy websites. This is still a live legal issue. And as Ed Newton-Rex of the campaign group Fairly Trained has put it: ‘The government can’t effectively regulate these companies if it is simultaneously baking them into its inner workings as rapidly as possible.’ 

Why is Sir Keir Starmer so absolutely hellbent on turning us into, in his wince-makingly gauche phrase, ‘an AI superpower’; so keen to jump the gun that he hadn’t even allowed the public consultation on AI and copyright to conclude before he pushed the government’s recommendations – which were, basically, to let copyright holders be damned. He seems to have been seduced by the blandishments of the salespeople for this technology, whose main sales tool is FOMO. AI is a solution in search of a problem. Big tech has invested so much in it that they’re trying to brute-force it into every area of life, and they are succeeding.  

Of course, one can see how – for instance – using AI to minute meetings or draft memos can save costly man-hours. But the way to integrate it into the machinery of Whitehall is, or should be, with extreme caution and on a case-by-case basis, not with the panicky haste of someone who’s been persuaded by a lobbyist that if you don’t go all-in on this exciting new technology as fast as possible you’re going to be left behind. It seems something of a tell, for instance, that Principle 8 in the government’s own AI Playbook is: ‘You work with commercial colleagues from the start.’ 

 As Sir Humphrey would say: ‘No, Prime Minister.’  

The danger of recognising a Palestinian state

As Western leaders prepare to gather in New York this week to discuss international recognition of a Palestinian state, a stark signal from Washington demands their attention. US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has openly stated that he does not believe Palestinian statehood remains an American foreign policy goal.

‘Unless there are some significant things that happen that change the culture, there’s no room for it,’ Huckabee told Bloomberg News this week, adding that such changes ‘probably won’t happen in our lifetime’. The White House, far from rebuking him, referred reporters to past remarks from President Trump questioning whether a two-state solution ‘is going to work’. 

Huckabee’s statement is, of course, one of plain fact – rather like President Trump’s observation in his inaugural address that there are two sexes, male and female. Yet in today’s political climate, even such elemental truths have become politically fraught. In saying it now about Palestinian statehood, Huckabee is doing something more than stating the obvious: he is exposing a long-protected fiction, a tired diplomatic orthodoxy that has endured for decades despite its manifest unreality. It is high time it was said plainly. 

In this spirit, the United States has now issued a formal demarche urging governments around the world not to attend this week’s UN conference co-hosted by France and Saudi Arabia, warning that the gathering is ‘counterproductive’ and will undermine Israel’s security. The message could not be clearer, and underscores a hardening recognition of a grim reality: to reward the current Palestinian leadership with statehood would be a profound moral and strategic failure.

That failure is made plain by an unforgivable truth. For those who previously weren’t paying attention, Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s recent public praise for the Hamas atrocities of 7 October ought to be a useful wake-up call. Far from condemning the savagery carried out by Palestinian terrorists, he described the massacre as having achieved ‘important goals’. This alone should suffice to disqualify Abbas and the PA from the privileges of statehood. In an interview published last week in the PA’s official daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, and translated by Palestinian Media Watch, Abbas enthusiastically declared:

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Sadiq Khan will wear his Trump insult as a badge of honour

Stephen Pollard

The real reason two Jewish comedians had their Edinburgh shows canned

Hamas launched a sudden attack… killed 1,200 Israelis, abducted 250 others… this attack shook the foundations of the Israeli entity.

He focused not on the massacre of civilians, the rape, or the horror of hostage-taking, but on the ‘strategic impact’ of the assault. He lauded Hamas for exposing ‘the glaring failure of this entity’s components, especially the army and the various security forces,’ and framed Israel’s intelligence lapse as a ‘strategic victory for the Palestinian cause’.

Abbas’s sole expression of regret concerned not the barbarity of the attack but the suffering inflicted upon Gaza:

As important as the goals that Hamas attempted to achieve… they are not comparable to the damages and heavy losses that the Gaza Strip residents… have suffered.

Not a word of remorse for the innocent Israeli lives brutally extinguished; not a flicker of empathy for the abducted. This is not the language of a statesman. It is the cold calculation of a corrupt and barbaric man who sees terrorism as a legitimate path to political gain. We in the civilised world must face down this violent agenda, not only for Israel’s sake, but also for our own.

This alignment with terror is no aberration. Abbas’s senior adviser, Mahmoud Al-Habbash, reinforced the message in March, declaring repeatedly that ‘resistance is legitimate’ and insisting that ‘what happened on 7 October is a legitimate thing’. These statements, emerging on the eve of a United Nations event sponsored by France and Saudi Arabia to advance Palestinian statehood, strip away any remaining pretence. Western leaders must no longer hide behind diplomatic euphemisms.

Abbas’s latest comments are no aberration; they are the blunt restatement of a reality his leadership has embodied for years. Just as President Trump and Ambassador Huckabee have now said openly what many Western leaders privately acknowledge about the futility of a two-state solution, so too Abbas has merely reasserted his unwavering commitment to terrorism and rejectionism.

The true nature of the Palestinian leadership has never been in doubt for those willing to see it. In 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered a peace deal granting a Palestinian state on nearly all of the West Bank and Gaza, with a capital in East Jerusalem. Abbas rejected it outright, later telling the Washington Post: ‘The gaps were wide. We didn’t sign.’ In 2014, during US Secretary of State John Kerry’s mediation, Abbas again walked away – refusing a framework that included land swaps, a shared Jerusalem, and security guarantees, while insisting on full refugee return and rejecting recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.

Faced with the reality that peace would require genuine compromise, Abbas chose another path. In his 2011 New York Times op-ed, ‘The Long Overdue Palestinian State’, he laid bare this strategy:

Palestine’s admission to the United Nations would pave the way for the internationalisation of the conflict as a legal matter, not only a political one.

The goal was clear – to bypass negotiations, to litigate rather than reconcile, and to wage diplomatic and legal war against Israel, adding to the decades of violent terrorism the Palestinians had perpetrated.

This is the essence of even the most moderate parts of the Palestinian political approach: evade the responsibilities of peace, pursue maximalist aims through international bodies, and cultivate a political culture that glorifies and encourages violence. The PA continues to honour ‘martyrs’, to pay stipends to the families of terrorists, and to inculcate hatred in its media and schools. And they are meant to be the ‘moderates’.

With Abbas now openly praising the bloodiest day of anti-Jewish violence since the Holocaust, the moral bankruptcy of his leadership is undeniable. It is grotesque that Western diplomats should contemplate bestowing statehood upon an entity whose leaders celebrate mass murder, less than two years after such a vicious and barbaric attack carried out in pursuit of the same cause. We must ask, what sort of state would we be ushering into existence? Another Islamic terrorist state intent on anti-Jewish violence and bloodshed.

As Itamar Marcus of Palestinian Media Watch rightly stated: ‘Mahmoud Abbas has reminded us once again that if the PA were to become a state, it would be a terror state.’ In this context, Huckabee’s blunt assessment in Jerusalem resonates with unflinching clarity. Unless Palestinian leadership undergoes a radical transformation, there is no room for statehood.

The French and Saudi sponsors of the upcoming UN event, and all attending Western leaders, must confront this reality without equivocation. To proceed even with discussions of recognition in these circumstances is to reward terrorism and embolden those who seek the destruction of a neighbouring state.

Recognition of Palestinian statehood must be contingent on an unambiguous, demonstrated commitment to peace. Abbas and his regime have not merely failed to meet this standard – they have defied it. Until a leadership arises that rejects terror, embraces coexistence, and upholds the sanctity of human life, Palestinian statehood will remain not only unmerited, but a peril to international order. The signals from Washington should serve as a warning. Western leaders must heed it.

The death of celebrity gossip

When I was in hospital for almost half a year, learning how to face life as a ‘Halfling’ – a person in a wheelchair, patronised and petted – the thing I looked forward to most was a normal, some would say banal, event. I longed to be in my local Pizza Express, in Hove, reading Heat magazine to my husband as he ‘savoured’ his American Hot. To put it mildly, I am a far faster eater than Mr Raven, and rather than chatter to him and expect an answer, thus hindering his progress still further, I read to him. To add to the fun, I framed the problems of the Beckhams or the Sussexes as those of people we actually know, doing the appropriate voices, which rendered it delightfully bitchy.

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Sadiq Khan will wear his Trump insult as a badge of honour

Stephen Pollard

The real reason two Jewish comedians had their Edinburgh shows canned

But when we went searching for Heat on my homecoming, it took half an hour and six shops to find it; we finally located one in W.H. Smith. None of the shops with ‘newsagent’ above their door had it – indeed, only a couple of them even had newspapers. And how long is Smiths going to exist? After a whopping 233 years, the truly iconic blue and white sign will not be seen for much longer, with the brand having been sold for £76 million to Modella Capital, which will change its name on the high street to T.G. Jones. A Modella spokesperson said: ‘T.G. Jones feels like a worthy successor to the W.H. Smith brand. Jones carries the same sense of family and reflects these stores being at the heart of everyone’s high street.’

Really? To me it feels like yet another step towards the death of that gorgeous invention, the magazine. Though the sales figures of The Spectator have long been a cause of celebration round these parts, it is the exception that proves the rule. Very few magazines – like newspapers – are in a healthy state and when I opened my longed-for copy of Heat, I wondered whether it had been worth the search. For example, the old Heat would have found the concept of gender-fluid-nepo-babies hilarious; the new Heat is a humourless ‘ally’.

Heat was always different from other celebrity gossip magazines. It was neither slavish nor sleazy; it was knowing, and cheeky, and very much the brainchild of its editor Mark Frith. A boy from a Sheffield comp, he attended the University of East London, editing the college magazine but failing to graduate. He didn’t need to – at 20 he joined Smash Hits, becoming editor three years later. Smash Hits was a wonderful thing; on the surface an excitable chronicler of the teen idols of the 1980s and 90s, it was sarky and playful, written by clever journalists who loved pop music while understanding how sublimely silly it was.

Frith was perfectly placed to spread this sensibility to entertainment generally, developing and becoming editor of Heat, launching in 1999 and going on to sell half a million copies every week with a readership of around two million. Heat was such an insider that it became the medium through which the squabble between Elton John and George Michael was conducted after it published the former snarking at his friend to ‘get out more’. It was such a force that when with the porcelain-pale member of Girls Aloud Nicola Roberts it conducted a campaign calling for the banning of sunbeds for under-18s, a bill was passed in parliament.

Heat wasn’t perfect; in 2007 it gave away a sheet of stickers, one of which bore a photograph of Katie Price’s severely disabled son with the words ‘HARVEY WANTS TO EAT ME!’. No matter how much one believes in freedom of speech, it was hard to disagree with Janice Turner in the Times that ‘if a sticker mocking a blind and profoundly disabled boy doesn’t mark some new low, what possibly could?’. Mind you, it was hard not to feel a flare of defensiveness when Turner also revealed: ‘Recently at a magazine industry dinner Alastair Campbell told me he’d forbidden his teenagers from bringing Heat into his home. “It poisons the minds of women and children.”’ It was also described as a ‘dirty, filthy piece of shit’ by Ewan McGregor, which very much implies that it was doing its job properly.

The year before the sticker business, at 35, Mark Frith won the most prestigious award in magazines, the Mark Boxer Trophy, having already taken PPA Editor of the Year twice. The year after the Harvey Price debacle he left to write an excellent book, The Celeb Diaries: The Sensational Inside Story of the Celebrity Decade, in which he showcased himself as a sometimes sensitive soul, refusing to publish snaps of Amy Winehouse where she bore the marks of self-harming. Perhaps understandably, so much having happened so young, he now seems rather publicity-shy, with a LinkedIn page simply saying ‘Editorial Director at Bauer Media’.

The NME in the 1970s, Smash Hits in the 80s, the Modern Review in the 90s, Heat in the Noughties: what they all had in common was the ability to create a cool club which the nerdiest of kids could join if they had the cover price. Magazines are ruddy expensive these days; I came out of Smiths with four of them, costing me nearly 20 quid. No wonder so many people stand around reading them from cover to cover in the shop. But there’s still a lovely feeling about sitting outside a watering hole having a drink with a mate and an armful of mags on a sunny day and exclaiming over scandal together that staring slack-jawed at one’s phone can never recreate – a feeling of transcendent frivolity and ease.

Such moments are increasingly rare. Many things have led to this: the internet, the rise of PR, cancel culture – as G.V. Chappell wrote here recently: ‘Sadly, because everything’s now so carefully choreographed, there’s no danger of anything spontaneous and, therefore, interesting happening. This isn’t a rallying cry for bad behaviour for its own sake – or an argument against common courtesy, which is already in decline – but rather a call to loosen the fetters that mean, in today’s world, it’s easier and safer to say nothing at all.’ Even Popbitch, the online gossip hounds, once so eye-wateringly frank, have lost their bite. A recent item ran: ‘Eamonn Holmes fell off his chair live on air on GB News a couple weeks back. Spookily this exact same thing on the exact same chair happened to Christopher Biggins a while back, off camera, we think. After a short inquest – and to head off the threat of future C-list legal claims no doubt – GB News have dumped the slippy studio chairs and ordered new ones.’ The nearest that remains to the spirit of Heat is the Mail Online ‘Sidebar of Shame’; but crucially, without the wit, and seemingly written by AI – ‘a busty display’ is used more times than seems reasonable any time a female celeb shows a hint of cleavage.

In Pizza Express, I finally admitted defeat, put down Heat (there’s only so much pure molten excitement about Danny Dyer’s daughter I can muster) and switched to regaling Mr Raven with gossip about my actual friends. Because these days, they seem far more scandalous and fascinating than celebrities.

Is the Lake District still as Wainwright described it?

The Lake District isn’t really meant to be about eating. It’s about walking and climbing and gawping. The guide one carries is not that by Michelin but Alfred Wainwright, whose seven-volume Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells turns 70 this year. Food is mainly to be consumed from a Thermos rather than a bowl, and eaten atop a precariously balanced upturned log rather than a restaurant table. The culinary highlight should be Kendal mint cake, gratefully retrieved from the pocket of your cagoule. And so I was as surprised as anyone to find real gastronomic delights on a recent trip.

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Sadiq Khan will wear his Trump insult as a badge of honour

Stephen Pollard

The real reason two Jewish comedians had their Edinburgh shows canned

Not from Little Chef, though that was where Wainwright religiously went for his favourite meal: fish and chips, a gooseberry pancake and cup of tea. While the fells may stand immutable, the culinary landscape of the Lakes is unrecognisable from Wainwright’s day. Thus, in this polite slice of England, I found an operatic dollop of Italian gusto in Villa Positano, tucked off the high street in Bowness-on-Windermere. As with San Pietro nearby, it’s all family-run charm with the odd culinary mishap waved away as trattoria rusticism in a way only an Italian can get away with. Together with a trendy sourdough pizza joint just up the road (Base Pizza), it appears a small group of Italians have decided they’ve had it with Lake Como and are making Lake Windermere home instead. Though no amount of tiramisu can surpass a sticky toffee pudding from Cartmel.

Then there is the famed Sarah Nelson’s Grasmere Gingerbread. Spicy and sweet, it is like the ginger nut of one’s dreams. Wordsworth’s grave is just around the corner, in the shadow of St Oswald’s Church, and I wander lonely as a cloud through the wild daffodil garden planted in his honour. There is nothing wrong with cliché when it is this idyllic.

In Ambleside there is lots to enjoy. The venerable Great North Pie Co (choose between chicken and Stornoway black pudding or 14-hour braised beef, Manchester union lager and Henderson’s Relish). Serious fine dining is to be found at Lake Road Kitchen and Old Stamp House, both with Michelin stars. To enjoy a roast loin of the region’s iconic Herdwick lamb, there is the beautiful restaurant at Rothay Manor. Or for ales brewed on-site and hunks of sourdough dipped into fir oil and stout vinegar, drop into the Drunken Duck Inn. You can munch on fish and chips at the Waterhead, overlooking Windermere. Though a sign advertises that the chips are fried in oil, not beef dripping, and the fish batter made without beer. That is nothing to show off about.

What else? You can sit outside at the Windermere Jetty Museum’s cafe, spotting fast jets on low-flying training manoeuvres from nearby RAF Spadeadam. In Grasmere, stop for coffee at Mathilde’s, or on the little terrace of the Tea Gardens by the stream. Lunch at Lingholm Kitchen, walking off your meal in the walled garden as Beatrix Potter used to do. Dinner could be at Fellpack House in Keswick, The Schelly in Ambleside or Brackenrigg Inn in Ullswater, or more upmarket at Heft in High Newton, or The Cedar Tree at Farlam Hall near Brampton.

The Lakes may boast the (three Michelin) starry heights of Simon Rogan’s L’Enclume, but there are simpler culinary pleasures to be found from a rucksack. A picnic at Friars Crag in Keswick, or at Haystacks, Wainwright’s favourite. A hunk of ewe’s milk cheese nibbled under a tree near Cockshot Point. The contents of your hip flask while watching the sunset at Fleetwith Pike.

Arriving in the driving rain to the Old Rectory near Coniston, there is complimentary hot tea and moist cake served from bone china. The lemon and poppy seed is homemade by Ann who runs the B&B assisted − or impeded − by her other half, Michael (half Falstaff half Manuel from Fawlty Towers). We fill out complicated forms for our breakfast order (I half expect a Farrow & Ball colour chart to pick my preferred tea strength) and, come morning, report to a retro 1950s dining room, frozen in aspic. A Japanese couple inspect the golden syrup with close fascination while a colossal Hyacinth Bucket holds a fan in one hand and skewers kiwi with the other. What follows is one of the best cooked breakfasts in the land – the Cumberland sausage dense,  the Cumbrian back bacon just the right amount of crisp. Not even reading over breakfast of the sewage discharges into Windermere can ruin it. Ann troops out from the kitchen concerned my boiled eggs are too hard. They aren’t; they are what all eggs should aspire to be.

The eating options in the Lake District may be better now than in Wainwright’s day, but the Lakes also differ in a way that would not have pleased him: the crowds. Alfred would go out of his way to avoid fellow hikers, seeking seclusion. ‘There are boulders you can get behind,’ he told Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs. One can still find escape here thankfully (tip: the North Lakes are less crowded than the South) but nowadays, in peak season and good weather, to dodge other walkers you might have to hide behind your boulder for rather a long time before the coast is clear. Good food is good. But a soggy sandwich and a Kendal mint cake isn’t bad, so long as it’s consumed in the bliss of solitude.

Does the BBC doubt Iran wanted a nuke?

I don’t monitor this stuff all the time. It would be soul destroying. All that happens is that I tune in, often by accident, and there is something which once again betrays the long term, institutional, anti-Israel bias of the BBC.

So, Friday night’s television news and the Middle East Correspondent Lucy Williamson. Reporting on the Israeli rocket attack upon Iran’s nuclear bases, Lucy told us that Israel ‘says’ Iran is working towards a nuclear bomb. Attribution, you see. Let us hear what the International Atomic Energy Agency had to say in its report on 9 June this year. ‘As you know, the Agency found man-made uranium particles at each of three undeclared locations in Iran – at Varamin, Marivan and Turquzabad – at which we conducted complementary access in 2019 and 2020. Since then, we have been seeking explanations and clarifications from Iran for the presence of these uranium particles, including through a number of high-level meetings and consultations in which I have been personally involved.’ And later in that report: ‘The rapid accumulation of highly enriched uranium – as detailed in my other report before you: Verification and monitoring in the Islamic Republic of Iran in light of United Nations Security Council resolution 2231 (2015) – is of serious concern and adds to the complexity of the issues I have described. Given the potential proliferation implications, the Agency cannot ignore the stockpiling of over 400 kg of highly enriched uranium.’

The IAEA believes Iran is working towards a bomb. So do the governments of virtually every other country on earth. Israel says?

Why Russia wants war between Israel and Iran

Israel’s assault on Iran represents a double helping of good news for the Kremlin. Years of two-track diplomacy have allowed Vladimir Putin to position himself both as a friend to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and to the Iranian leadership. That will make Russia an indispensable partner for the US once it embarks on the long process of patching up the new political realities of the Middle East in the wake of this war. Though Israeli planes have so far carefully avoided striking Iran’s oil export infrastructure, the war has inevitably spooked markets and boosted sagging crude oil prices – and with them, Putin’s war chest.

Over three months of inconclusive negotiations with the Trump administration over ending the Ukraine war, Russian negotiators always insisted that Ukraine was just one part of a global package of military, economic and political issues where Washington’s fundamental interests could align with Moscow’s. Now it’s happened. In the wake of the Israeli strikes, Putin was the only world leader to speak by phone to Netanyahu, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Donald Trump.

Thanks to Israel’s devastating military strikes, Washington now faces a multi-dimensional challenge as it simultaneously tries to prevent a global oil price shock, a bilateral war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and blowback against US military and civilian targets by Iranian agents or proxies. Russia, with its military and diplomatic ties to Tehran, will inevitably be part of that diplomatic balancing act. All of a sudden, pressuring the Kremlin into winding down operations in Ukraine seems like small potatoes compared to helping prevent the whole Middle East from going up in flames.

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Sadiq Khan will wear his Trump insult as a badge of honour

Stephen Pollard

The real reason two Jewish comedians had their Edinburgh shows canned

Russia has, of late, been cosplaying as an ally of Iran. In the immediate aftermath of the Israeli strikes, Russia’s Foreign Ministry issued a strongly worded statement condemning the attacks as ‘categorically unacceptable’ and warning that ‘all the consequences of this provocation will fall on the Israeli leadership’. Moscow also urged both parties ‘to exercise restraint in order to prevent further escalation of tensions and keep the region from sliding into a full-scale war’.

But that alliance of convenience is, in the Kremlin’s eyes, very much secondary to Russia’s more important role as a global power player that can stand alongside the US and China as an arbiter of world affairs. Putin may have signed a ‘comprehensive strategic partnership’ treaty with Iranian President Pezeshkian in January, but he has his eyes on a far larger diplomatic prize – to boost his own standing as a power broker in the Middle East.

In his conversation with Netanyahu, Putin ‘emphasised the importance of returning to the negotiation process and resolving all issues related to the Iranian nuclear programme exclusively through political and diplomatic means’. He also offered his mediation ‘in order to prevent further escalation of tensions’, according to the Kremlin’s readout.

In his call to Trump on Saturday, Putin also signalled Russia’s readiness to carry out ‘mediation efforts to de-escalate the crisis’ – and reminded Trump that Russia has actually been a long-time ally of the US over its years of negotiations with the Iranians over their nuclear programme.

Moscow’s relations with the Islamic Republic have always been very much an on-again, off-again affair. Back in the 1990s, Moscow helped Iran build its first Shehab long-range ballistic missiles and constructed Iran’s first civilian nuclear reactor at Bushehr, which became operational in 2013. Russia and Iran pooled efforts to shore up Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria, with Russia deploying warplanes in 2015. Moscow also supplied S-300 air defence missile systems and has been importing thousands of Shahed drones, which it has fired indiscriminately at Ukraine.

At the same time, Moscow was a signatory of the US-brokered Iran nuclear deal in 2015, which was scrapped by Trump two years later. This year, Moscow has offered to handle the enrichment of Iran’s nuclear fuel as part of a possible updated nuclear deal. That arrangement could allow Iran to maintain a civilian nuclear energy programme while depriving it of any excuse to enrich uranium to weapons-grade. And despite their professed alliance, Russia has also dragged its feet over selling Iran advanced Su-35 fighter jets that might be a match for Israeli jets in the air. Israel, in return, has refused to provide Ukraine with weapons despite strong pleas from Kyiv.

In the immediate aftermath of Israel’s attack, oil prices jumped from under $60 to $75 a barrel as nervous traders feared disruption to Iran’s ability to export crude. But it soon emerged that Israeli warplanes had not hit key infrastructure at the biggest Iranian oil terminal at Kharg Island, and traffic in the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf appeared normal. Instead, Israel attacked Iran’s domestic energy industry, including gas processing plants and petrol depots across the country – perhaps in an effort to spark price hikes that have spurred anti-regime protests in the past.

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright tweeted that the US was ‘working closely with the National Security Council to monitor the ongoing situation in the Middle East and any potential impacts to global energy supply’. Decoded, that means Washington will be urging Israel to hold off attacking Kharg to avoid catastrophic damage to the economy of Iran’s main customer, China. At the same time, Israel is keeping the option of escalating against oil infrastructure in its back pocket as it negotiates with both enemies and allies.

All of this is good news for the Kremlin, which was facing the prospect of falling oil prices pushing up deficits and stretching budgets. A major conflagration in the Middle East promises to occupy the bandwidth of the world’s media – and with it the attention of electorates and politicians. ‘The world’s attention towards Ukraine will weaken,’ tweeted Kremlin-aligned analyst Sergei Markov. ‘A war between Israel and Iran will help the Russian army’s success in Ukraine.’

On the minus side of the ledger, Israeli warplanes have reportedly blown up Iran’s Shahed drone factory in Isfahan just days after Ukrainian long-range drones damaged Russia’s plant for producing their own Shahed clones, known as Geran, in Yelabuga. That will put a dent in Moscow’s ability to continue its nightly swarm attacks on Ukrainian cities, which have seen as many as 450 Shaheds deployed in a single wave. But overall, that is a small price to pay for a conflict that suits the Kremlin down to the ground.

Last month, the Trump administration made Putin what seemed like an excellent offer – to cash out his gains and call a halt to his assault on Ukraine with a de facto border along the current line of control and a promise that Kyiv would never join Nato. But Putin refused. Many observers were mystified as to why. Now the picture becomes a little clearer. With every new conflict – especially a major Middle Eastern conflagration – the importance of the Ukraine war to the West fades a little. And the more opportunity Putin has to leverage Russia’s diplomatic weight and help Washington and Beijing solve the world’s problems, the further he moves away from being a warmonger and towards his coveted role as senior international statesman.

There is no way that Putin could have predicted Israel’s full-scale attack on Iran months ago when he began stalling on Trump’s peace deal. But he has always had the devil’s own luck.