Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has banned a scheduled pro-Iranian demonstration in London on Sunday at the request of the Metropolitan Police, over concerns it would lead to “serious public disorder” and provide a platform for extremist propaganda. The Al Quds Day march, which has previously been criticised for featuring anti-Semitic slogans and Hezbollah flags, will instead go ahead as an easier-to-police static protest. The US says it has destroyed 16 Iranian minelayers near the Strait of Hormuz as Donald Trump warned Tehran it would face “never seen before” repercussions if it mines the vital shipping lane. Three vessels, including a Thai-flagged cargo ship and a Japanese-owned container ship, were hit by unknown projectiles in the strait this morning. Hereditary peers will be removed from the House of Lords after a deal was struck granting life peerages to some Conservatives and cross-benchers who would otherwise lose their seats. The centuries-old parliamentary role will cease to exist at this end of the parliamentary session this spring.

Our media and political establishment appears aligned on Britain’s involvement in the Iran war, says Owen Jones in The Guardian: Keir Starmer should have backed the US from the off, no questions asked. Proponents of this view include Tony Blair – “apparently eager for a successor to emulate his own record of dragging Britain into US-led catastrophes” – Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch and most of the right-wing press. Set aside the irony of these conservative “patriots” who urged the UK to take back control from Brussels now demanding the UK “acts as Trump’s poodle”. How is it that insisting Britain blindly support a “plainly illegal war” – as defined by the UN charter, at least – is a respectable mainstream position?

More than 1,000 civilians have already been killed in Iran, including 168 at a school, “mostly little girls”. Air strike targets have included medical facilities, a water desalination plant and oil refineries, the last of which resulted in Tehran being smothered by black rain and toxic air. Donald Trump has made it clear he has no interest in bringing democracy to the country, and no idea what will constitute victory. Did our elites learn nothing from Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, which cost a combined £47bn and left thousands of troops killed or injured? The British public certainly did: some 49% oppose the Iran war, with only about a quarter supporting it. No wonder people are turning to the Greens and other smaller parties in disgust. Millions have concluded that our rulers are not the sober, moderate, “grown ups in the room” – they are extremists who drag their country into one hideous crisis after another, “and learn nothing from the wreckage”.

🛢️😡 The truth is that voters will probably punish Keir Starmer no matter what he does, says Daniel Finkelstein in The Times. Ted Heath faced a similar choice during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. He refused the US permission to use British bases in Cyprus for intelligence gathering. But energy prices rose regardless and the resulting inflation was perhaps the most important factor in Heath’s election defeat a few months later. Heath repeatedly pointed out that he had no control over the situation, as Starmer will no doubt do in the coming weeks and months. “A fat lot of good it did him.”

Really lavish book launches are generally thought to be a thing of the past, says Alexander Larman in The Spectator. But you still get the odd one. I fondly remember Andrew Roberts’s “Veuve-laden” 2021 launch at the Mandarin Oriental for his George III biography. At one point an esteemed publisher keeled to the floor, prompting cries of: “Is there a doctor in the house?” As eager academics trundled over, this was swiftly clarified: “A medical doctor!”

High school cross country coach Nathan Martin won last weekend’s Los Angeles marathon with an extraordinary burst of speed in the final yards, pipping the exhausted front runner Michael Kimani Kamau by one hundredth of a second – the 26.2-mile race’s closest ever finish. To see the full (extraordinary) clip, click here.

The energy chaos sparked by the Iran war is turning into a “geopolitical dividend for the Kremlin”, says Pratinav Anil in The i Paper. Donald Trump has started to loosen sanctions on Russia and granted India a specific waiver to buy Russian oil that’s already “on water”. It’s not much – perhaps four days’ worth of demand – but Moscow will take any concession as a strategic win. Sanctions regimes are delicate things: “once breached, even slightly, their deterrent aura dims”. Meanwhile, the Chinese are leaning more heavily on Russia as Middle Eastern flows are choked off, deepening ties between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. And Brussels is in the absurd position of bullying Kyiv to allow inspectors to visit the damaged Druzhba pipeline, which carries Russian oil through Ukraine to Hungary and Slovakia.

A rise in oil prices might provide temporary relief from Russia’s tanking oil and gas revenues, says The Economist, and Moscow will be happy to see the US using up missiles that might otherwise have been sold to the Ukrainians. But the Iran war is still a strategic loss for the Kremlin. It further demonstrates that Putin is unwilling or unable to protect his partners. And although Iran is not a strong Russian ally – the two countries have a long history of mutual antagonism – it is a bargaining chip in Moscow’s strategic contest with the West. Previously, Putin could give himself leverage in negotiations with the US by making noises about supplying the Iranians with advanced air defence systems or fighter jets, say, or helping them build a nuclear power plant. If the US-Israeli campaign succeeds in removing the threat from Tehran, Moscow no longer has that leverage. Higher oil prices are “poor compensation”.

FontCrafter turns your handwriting into a digital font that you can install and use on your devices. All you have to do is print out the writing template from the website, write the alphabet and various other symbols in uppercase and lowercase, then upload a scan of the document to the platform. Sounds like a faff, but pretty good fun. Give it a go here.

In the year I spent as a special adviser in the Foreign Office, says Ben Judah in The New Statesman, I saw for myself just how the “special relationship” works. I will never forget a Trump delegate explaining why we needed to accept his 10% tariffs and not push our luck. “You’ve got to remember,” he grinned, “it’s like being at school. America’s the big kid and it’s coming for your lunch money.”

It’s a bumblebee submerged in water, says Sarah Knapton in The Daily Telegraph, which turns out to be something they can survive. When scientists at the University of Ottawa who were studying bee hibernation put several queens in soil-filled test tubes in the fridge, a few of the glass containers filled with condensation and flooded. But the bees were fine. Further research found that the winged insects can breathe underwater using a kind of “artificial gill”, whereby they trap tiny bubbles of air all around their bodies and extract oxygen using tiny tubes in their abdomen called spiracles. Miraculously, as the oxygen levels in the bubbles deplete, more is pulled in from the surrounding water.