Keir Starmer pushed ahead with the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador despite explicit warnings that it posed “reputational risks” to the government. A 147-page cache of documents released yesterday also showed that the PM was told Mandelson had reportedly stayed at the late paedophile’s house while he was in jail for child sex offences, and that the New Labour veteran demanded more than £500,000 as a pay-off for being sacked from his ambassadorship. (He received £75,000.) The price of oil surged back to around $100 a barrel this morning after increased attacks on oil infrastructure and shipping in the Middle East overnight. Iranian forces struck two fuel tankers – one of them US-owned – in Iraqi waters, setting them ablaze and killing one crew member, and fired drones at key oil ports in Iraq and Oman. British wildlife will replace historical figures such as Winston Churchill and Jane Austen on the next series of Bank of England banknotes, after beating alternative categories including architecture and landmarks in a public vote. A second consultation will be launched this summer to decide which plants, landscapes and animals will feature.

The decision to choose Mojtaba Khamenei as Iran’s new supreme leader was made in a “highly opaque manner”, says Saeid Golkar in Foreign Policy. For Iranians, this is nothing new. The late Ayatollah’s son has long been a “shadowy but influential” figure inside the Islamic Republic. He entered politics after his father was appointed in 1989 and has been gradually building power behind the scenes ever since. Former President Hashemi Rafsanjani’s 2000 political memoir frequently mentions Mojtaba interfering; in 2005, top cleric Mehdi Karroubi accused him of fiddling the presidential election to bring the hardline Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. During the 2009 Green Movement, when Mojtaba supervised the regime’s suppression of protesters, crowds chanted: “Mojtaba, may you die, and never become leader.” Some 17 years later, their fears have been realised.

After his leadership was announced, I received a text from a friend in Iran: “If Mojtaba stays in power, he will pulverise us.” To millions of Iranians, he is the embodiment of the most “closed, corrupted, punitive and hereditary” form of the Islamic Republic. Politically speaking, he has the same mentality as his father: hostile to America, obsessed with annihilating Israel, convinced that coercion as the main instrument of rule. He has cultivated deep ties not only to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but also the Basij militias and conservative clerical circles who view him as a reliable guardian of his father’s doctrine. For Iranians who openly celebrated the death of the hated ayatollah, even as the “theo-security state” shot anyone who dared cheer his demise, the ascent of Mojtaba is an insult. And that may be the point.

🤕🤷 Iranians still haven’t heard from their new leader, says Patrick Wintour in The Guardian, most likely because he is still recovering from injuries suffered in the strike that killed his father. No one really knows how badly Mojtaba was hit, but it seems a broken leg and facial injuries are “the minimum”. Opposition groups even claim, perhaps mischievously, that he is in a coma and has no idea he is now running the country.

America’s super-rich are increasingly flexing their political muscle, say Mike Baker and Steven Rich in The New York Times. In 2024, 300 billionaires and their families donated more than $3bn in federal elections – a whopping 19% of all contributions. In 2008, before a landmark Supreme Court ruling lifted many campaign finance restrictions, the share of billionaire spending was just 0.3%.

In 1997, says Alice Lambert in Tatler, Ginger Spice broke royal protocol by planting a lipstick kiss on the cheek of the then Prince Charles and patting his bottom. With that, the popstar – real name Geri Halliwell – kickstarted an unlikely friendship spanning some 30 years. When she quit the band in 1998, Charles wrote to her saying “the group will not be the same without you”, and later that year she sang the royal heir Happy Birthday at a concert held to celebrate his 50th. Just this week, she was seen giving him a “friendly kiss on the cheek” at Westminster Abbey.

Emboldened by the successful shakedown of the UK by Mauritius over the Chagos Islands, the African Union is preparing to take Britain to the International Court of Justice to demand reparations for colonisation and slavery. The case is feeble, says Ross Clark in The Spectator. You can’t compensate slaves who lived 200 years ago by making cash transfers to the countries from which they were taken, especially when the tribal kingdoms that existed then were often involved in capturing and selling slaves. There’s the added irony that some of the money would come from people in the UK who are descended from slaves – the descendants of the victims paying the descendants of the guilty.

The central argument deployed by African Union countries is that they would be better off than they are today if there had been no colonialism. In the words of Ghanaian president Nana Akufo-Addo, “the entire period of slavery meant that our progress, economically, culturally and psychologically, was stifled”. In other words, we were doing just fine, and if it weren’t for European meddling we’d all be as rich as Belgians and the Portuguese. This is easily disproved: Ethiopia was never colonised, and should therefore be streaks ahead of its colonised neighbours. Instead, it ranks 30th out of 54 African countries in per capita GDP. Meanwhile, former colonies like Singapore have achieved extraordinary growth. The problem is that the ICJ is stacked with politicised judges – one of whom has already said Britain owes £18.8trn in reparations – and Keir Starmer and his “legal sidekick” Richard Hermer are “drunk on the concept of international law”. With leaders like these, Britain is a “sitting duck” for outlandish legal nonsense.

To the London Review of Books:

Adam Shatz refers to Richard Nixon as an “often monstrous leader who... presided over bombing campaigns in Vietnam and Cambodia”. Laos is too often forgotten. Between 1964 and 1973, first Johnson then Nixon conducted the largest bombing campaign in history in Southeast Asia. In Laos, a country of fewer than three million people, the US dropped more than two million tons of ordnance: 270 million bombs via 580,000 planeloads, an average of one planeload every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. A third of the bombs failed to explode. Poor rural areas, where 70% of the country’s population live by subsistence farming, remain minefields to this day.

Lee Gillette
Brussels

In the hours after the US and Israel first attacked Iran, say Jacob Judah and Alan Smith in the FT, a long-distance radio transmitter in western Europe began sending out “ghostly broadcasts” in Farsi. The message begins with the word “Tavajjoh! (Attention!)” three times, followed by a steady stream of numbers: “Six. Four. Zero. Nine. Three. Nine…” It appears to be a so-called “number station”, an encrypted message for spies inside Iran. The voice was at one point drowned out by a barrage of beeps and chirps, in what was presumably an Iranian jamming attempt, but quickly re-emerged on a new frequency.

It’s Balendra Shah, says The New York Times, a 35-year-old rapper, engineer and former mayor, who is set to become prime minister of Nepal. The election, which is still being officially certified, was the first since a Gen Z-led uprising last year overthrew a government that many Nepalis saw as corrupt and out of touch. Preliminary results show that Shah – known as Balen on social media, where he deploys an “aggressive and aggrieved” tone – has won the largest mandate in Nepal’s electoral history. The doctor’s son, whose socially conscious rap lyrics champion the underdog and decry the powerful, was a popular mayor who got things done outside the ossified elite. Plus he never takes his sunglasses off, even indoors.