The US-Iran ceasefire is on the brink after the two countries exchanged strikes in the Strait of Hormuz yesterday. The US said two American-flagged merchant vessels had successfully passed through the waterway and that its forces had destroyed several Iranian small boats. Iran carried out drone strikes on two tankers and UAE oil infrastructure, warning the US that “we are just getting started”. Labour MPs are discussing plans to demand that Keir Starmer resign after what is expected to be a drubbing for their party in Thursday’s local elections. A group of disgruntled backbenchers intend to send the PM an open letter blaming him for Labour’s losses and requesting he sets out a timetable for his departure. Hundreds of celebrities arrived at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art last night for the annual Met Gala dressed in their interpretation of this year’s theme: “Fashion is Art”. The event, controversially funded by Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, celebrates the opening of a new exhibition, Costume Art.

Now that Iran has broken the ceasefire in the Persian Gulf, Donald Trump has two options, says The Wall Street Journal: keep the Strait of Hormuz open or “give Iran’s regime what it wants”. In other words: it’s a no-brainer. The US Navy has evidently spent the past few weeks clearing mines from the waterway to create a “free lane” for commercial traffic. Tehran’s forceful response – drone strikes on tankers and UAE oil facilities – shows that they know their control of the strait is their last remaining leverage in negotiations. And the American blockade of Iran’s ports has successfully increased Iran’s economic pain, making the mullahs even more inclined to get a deal done. If the US Navy can keep Hormuz open – by extreme force, if necessary – the regime in Tehran “will have been outmanoeuvred”.

Don’t get your hopes up, says William Hague in The Times. I was involved with the 2015 nuclear deal, and that took a “painstaking” 20 months to negotiate. It only happened because the US and Iran had secret backchannel talks, enabling the two sides to build up trust. It’s true that the Iranians are under greater pressure this time because of the US blockade. But the revolutionary guard corps (IRGC) are probably thinking that continued tension helps them consolidate their power internally; that Trump will fold before they do because of rising fuel prices ahead of November’s midterms; that their regime has survived crippling air strikes before and can do so again; and that they will give up their Hormuz leverage only when they have tested US resolve to the limit, “which will take weeks or months”. Striking the 2015 deal took much longer than anyone expected, in considerably easier circumstances. Those expecting a quick fix now are guilty of “wishful thinking”.

I recently unearthed my childhood copy of the 1966 Junior Puffin Quiz Book, says Charles Moore in The Spectator, containing a thousand extremely difficult brain teasers aimed, extraordinarily, at seven-year-olds. Try this: “To what questions might these be the answers: (a) 180 degrees; (b) 2πr; (c) bh/2.” Or: “Which breed of cow produces milk with the highest percentage of butterfat – Friesian, Jersey or Shorthorn?” Some are, admittedly, no longer useful – “does the ash from a coal fire do good to the garden?” – but most produce a kind of wistfulness. “Is a psaltery (a) the book of Psalms; (b) a kind of musical instrument; (c) a term used in heraldry; or (d) a kind of fossil?” What seven-year-old today would know where to begin?

More than 60,000 videos tagged #investmentbanking have appeared on TikTok in recent years, says Eve Upton-Clark in The New York Times, much of it “day-in-the-life” style montages of 100-hour workweeks and late-night finishes. Not that the banks like it much. One wealth manager at Goldman Sachs, Allison Sheehan, racked up millions of likes for her account “@investment__baker”, in which she filmed herself getting up at 5.30am to pipe icing on to cakes before starting her day job. Forced by her employer to choose between banking and baking, Sheehan chose the latter. “I cannot believe that they were concerned about me making pink cakes,” she says of her former company, “when people are insider trading.”

Britain’s councils ought to be pretty busy, says Zoe Strimpel in The Daily Telegraph. Keeping streets clean, filling potholes and preventing crime are plenty to be getting on with, and too few councils succeed. Many fail entirely, like Lambeth – one of the most dangerous areas of London – where local bureaucrats have elected to dim the lampposts to save a few pennies. And yet, looking at the “bizarre, mean-spirited, baroque and sometimes downright sinister” role many councils have claimed for themselves, you would be forgiven for thinking they were sitting around twiddling their thumbs, “forced to invent problems because all the real ones have been solved”.

In Surrey, council workers have ordered Sir Brian May to stop planting daffodils on the village green in Elstead, because the yellow flowers cause a safety risk by blocking the sight-line of traffic. As the Queen guitarist told the Farnham Herald, it’s hard to see how daffs could obstruct anyone’s view when the green is generally surrounded by parked vehicles, “including a 7ft-high ice cream van”. In South Tyneside, 25-year old volunteer Ben McGregor has been told to stop cleaning the gravestones in the local cemetery because “safety checks have not taken place”. Perhaps most egregious is North Yorkshire Council’s campaign against Hansom, a restaurant in Bedale, whose owners had been kindly offering a free lift home to anyone who lives within 10 miles. The council accused the award-winning Ruth Hansom of operating an unlicensed taxi service and insisted she either apply for a laundry list of licences or leave her patrons to the mercies of the night. In the words of the Times restaurant critic Giles Coren: “Ruth Hansom tried to do a beautiful thing… North Yorkshire Council s*** on it.”

When I was filming a cameo for the sequel to The Devil Wears Prada, says Tina Brown on Substack, one of my fellow cameo stars was the TV host Jenna Hager Bush, George W Bush’s daughter. She told me that whenever Donald Trump’s name comes up at a dinner, her father cuts short the conversation with the words: “Why spoil a good meal?”

Here’s how Keir Starmer could shore up his position in No 10, says Anthony Seldon in The New Statesman: appoint Tony Blair as foreign secretary. The 72-year-old would have the credibility and clout to stand up to Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. And while it’s true he has lots of “baggage” because of Iraq, people said the same about David Cameron (regarding Brexit) and Alec Douglas-Home (over Nazi appeasement) before they made similar moves – and both former leaders proved “effective and respected” foreign secretaries. Plus, of course, Blair could provide Starmer with guidance on how to be PM, “a subject on which he has not been listening thus far”.

It’s Jonas Lauwiner, says Adam Sage in The Times, a young eccentric who has declared himself “King of Switzerland” and used a legal loophole to amass a territory of more than 110,000 square metres entirely for free. After discovering that Swiss law allows citizens to claim any land that is registered as ownerless, simply by writing to the local council, the 31-year-old began systematically searching databases and claiming all the land he could find. Lauwiner has held a coronation, created an Order of Merit, started a sovereign bank and set up a small military, consisting of an old amphibious tank and other decommissioned equipment.