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.