Comment
Netanyahu and Trump: different aims? Chip Somodevilla/Getty
Why Netanyahu, unlike Trump, needs Iran to fall
The claim that Israel “dragged” the US into war with Iran has always been nonsense, says Gerard Baker in The Times. Donald Trump has wanted to bomb Iran for “most of his adult life”, so the conspiratorial idea that he was somehow tricked into it by Benjamin Netanyahu and his “cabal of clever Jews” in Washington is for the birds. But if the conflict ends badly for the US, the search will be on for a scapegoat. And for many Republicans, that scapegoat will be Israel. When MAGA provocateur Joe Kent quit as Trump’s counter-terrorism chief this week, he blamed America’s involvement in the war on Jerusalem “and its powerful American lobby”. Tucker Carlson and other MAGA loyalists have said much the same. Trump himself criticised Israel for attacking the South Pars gas field on Wednesday, claiming – “despite evidence to the contrary” – he hadn’t been forewarned.
All of which means the stakes for the Israelis in this conflict go far beyond their immediate security. Support for Israel in the US has collapsed in recent years, largely because of its bloody assault on Hamas in Gaza. Recent polls suggest that Americans are now evenly divided between Israel and the Palestinians; a decade or so ago, they favoured the Jewish state by more than three to one. That is one of the reasons why Netanyahu, unlike Trump, is so set on toppling the regime in Tehran. Do that, and defuse the threat the Islamic Republic and its terrorist proxies have posed to the West for 50 years, and Americans will thank the Israelis. But if they fail – leaving the mullahs in power, energy prices elevated and the Middle East as unstable as ever – it could do “untold damage” to their most important alliance in an increasingly hostile world.
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Property
THE RECTORY This “exceptional” Grade II-listed Tudor rectory in Bedfordshire has been immaculately restored, says Country Life. On the ground floor there is a study, a panelled dining room, a drawing room, a snug, a kitchen with an Aga, and an orangery. Upstairs are six bedrooms spread across two floors, two of them with an en-suite, and two family bathrooms. In the 10 acres of gardens and paddocks outside is a swimming pool, a lily pond and a greenhouse. Bedford is a 30-minute drive, with trains to London in 40 minutes. £2.5m.
Heroes and villains
Princess Anne in 1969 (L) and this week. Getty
Hero
Princess Anne, for taking thriftiness to new levels by appearing at Wednesday’s state banquet for the Nigerian president in a white coat she first wore 57 years ago, when she was 18. It’s impressive not only that she held on to the garment for so long, unaltered but for a new collar, says The Daily Telegraph, but also that at 75 “she can still fit into an item created when she was a teenager”.
Villain
Donald Trump, whose joint attack with Israel on Iran could imperil the English cricket season. Dukes, which supplies all the red balls for top-level games in England and Wales, is considering rationing its provision for each team because of supply-chain issues stemming from the Middle East conflict.
A presumably well rested Morrissey performing in Zaragoza last weekend. Mariano Regidor/Getty
Villain
Morrisey, who called off a gig in Valencia this week because he couldn’t sleep. The notoriously grumpy former Smiths frontman, 66, said the pumping noise of a festival in the Spanish city that coincided with his tour date had prevented him from getting any shut-eye, leaving him in a “catatonic” state. “It will take me one year to recover,” he wrote afterwards. “And that is an understatement.”
Villain
A 42-year-old man in Derbyshire who was rushed to hospital after his skin turned blue, only for doctors to discover that it was dye from his new bed sheets. Tommy Lynch said he had woken from a long sleep looking like something from the movie Avatar, and assumed the worst. “Always wash your sheets before you sleep in them,” he said after being discharged. “Unless you want to jump the queue at A&E.”
Villains
Magnum, for pumping the smell of chocolate into Kings Cross St Pancras as part of an advertising campaign for its ice creams, leaving several commuters complaining of nausea. It could have been worse, says Andy Silvester in The Times. The almond-based spirit brand Disaronno wanted to waft almond smells through the Tube for a similar campaign in 2002, until someone pointed out that the scent was worryingly similar to cyanide gas.
Life
Kensington: a goldmine for Ferguson. Elena Zolotova/Getty
London’s poshest dustman
“The hardest thing about this job,” says Will Ferguson as he noses his neon yellow rubbish van through the solid traffic choking London’s Battersea Bridge, “is the parking tickets.” The Harrow-educated bin man runs at about a ticket a day, says Lucy Denyer in the FT, at £80 a go. But it’s worth it. After a degree in history of art and a brief spell in shipping, Ferguson decided he couldn’t bear having a boss and launched a private waste disposal firm, Junk Monkey, in 2006. Today, having carved out a niche collecting whatever the capital’s richest residents will pay him to get rid of, Ferguson is the walking, talking embodiment of the adage that “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”.
London’s residents throw out the equivalent of “three Wembley Stadiums-worth of rubbish every day”, in Ferguson’s patter. On a good day, he can easily bill £7,000. Anything he can sell on, he will. “I’m always looking for that elusive Fabergé egg,” he laughs. “I am more Del Boy than Del Boy – and I hustle like a bastard.” Ferguson’s clients include award-winning actors, crown princes and finance types. Some, obsessed with privacy, pay him for regular bin collections – one Swiss billionaire who is rarely in London forks out for a thrice-weekly collection – “he has permanent live-in staff and they all generate crap” – at £108 a pop. Divorce clear-outs can be a goldmine. One memorable job required his team to dispose of a chair in which an elderly gentleman had died and then continued sitting on, undiscovered, for 10 days. “It’s mind over matter.”
The Knowledge Crossword
What to watch
L-R: Ella Bruccoleri, Poppy Gilbert and Maddie Close in The Other Bennett Sister. BBC
The BBC’s latest Jane Austen spin-off, The Other Bennett Sister, is the perfect antidote to the recent string of period dramas stuffed with “steaminess and uninhibited shagging”, says Helen Coffey in The Independent. Putting Pride and Prejudice’s bookish, bespectacled Mary front and centre, the 10-part series follows her as she attempts to build a life for herself in London and escape from the narrative foisted on her since childhood: that she is “irredeemably and inherently unlovable”. It’s a “gorgeously slow unfurling” as our self-conscious protagonist – in a “pitch-perfect” portrayal by Ella Bruccoleri – finds her voice, via many missteps and with the help of her endlessly kind aunt. Sex may sell, “but so does watching the forgotten middle child finally get her flowers”. Ten episodes, 30 minutes each.
Weather
Quoted
“Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.”
Honoré de Balzac
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