The fate of this US pilot could determine the Iran war

Around dawn on Friday, a McDonnell Douglas F-15E Strike Eagle from the US Air Force’s 494th Fighter Squadron was shot down over south-western Iran. Although the Iranians initially talked about a ‘massive explosion’, it seems that anti-aircraft fire tore off the F-15E’s tail fin, causing it to crash; but the two crew members seem to have ejected before then.

The pilot has already been rescued by US Special Forces, but the fate of the weapons systems officer (WSO, or ‘wizzo’), who sits behind the pilot and controls the air-to-ground avionics, is unknown. At the same time, an Iranian announcer on the regional state television channel in the mountainous, sparsely populated Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province, made a chilling offer:

‘If you capture the enemy pilot or pilots alive and hand them over to the police, you will receive a precious prize.’

An Iranian businessman has also offered £45,000 to anyone who captures the aircrew alive. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the chairman of the Islamic Consultative Assembly – Iran’s unicameral legislature – took a different tack. On social media, he poked fun at the Americans.

‘After defeating Iran 37 times in a row, this brilliant no-strategy war they started has now been downgraded from “regime change” to “Hey! Can anyone find our pilots? Please?”’

No one should suppose this conflict is a straightforward clash between good and evil. There is the noxious Christian nationalism of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a man whose enthusiasm for violence is unsettling. And, as the US missile strike on a girls’ school in Minab, killing around 160 children, proved: war always brings suffering to the innocent.

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But the regime in Tehran is a brutal, repressive and murderous one. Since the most recent protests against the theocracy began last December, some estimate the government may have killed 30,000 people, while the security forces use torture and sexual violence as everyday tools of their trade. If the missing WSO falls into the hands of the Iranian authorities, as a representative of ‘the Great Satan’, there must be an enormous, probably existential risk to his safety.

The capture of a pilot by an enemy regime would rekindle some of the American public’s worst, most horrifying atavistic memories. They will think of the torture of Captain Richard Storr and the rape and sexual assault of Major Rhonda Cornum by her Iraqi captors during the First Gulf War. They will think of the systematic abuse of the American prisoners of war during the Vietnam conflict, many of whom died in captivity.

They will also be reminded, inevitably, of the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran by militant Islamic students in 1979 in which 62 hostages were taken. The action, which began spontaneously and without a plan, gained the approval of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, and 52 of the hostages spent 444 days in captivity. They endured physical abuse, solitary confinement, mock executions, repeated interrogations and denial of food.

There are serious concerns for the safety of the American serviceman stuck in Iran. Did he, like the pilot, eject safely? Did he land without injury? Where in south-western Iran is he now and can he too can be rescued rather than falling into the hands of Iranian security forces?

In many ways, we have become insulated from the costs of war. In 20 years of combat deployment in Afghanistan, from 2001 to the fall of Kabul in 2021, 2,459 US service personnel were killed. In half that length of time, during the central years of the Vietnam conflict, deaths exceeded 50,000. Meanwhile, within 12 hours on 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 19,240 British and Empire soldiers were killed.

Yet the fate of this one US Air Force officer could have a significant effect on the course of America’s operations against Iran. He may not have coined the phrase, but Joseph Stalin observed that ‘the death of one man is always a tragedy. The death of thousands is a matter of statistics.’

Operation Epic Fury has not captured the imagination of the American public. Recent polling shows 59 per cent of respondents think President Trump was wrong to use military force against Iran and 61 per cent disapprove of how he has handled the situation. Some 54 per cent think the conflict will last for at least another six months, and 40 per cent believe it has made the world less safe, with only 22 per cent thinking it has become safer.

An anonymous comment by a senior White House official suggested that the President is ‘getting a little bored with Iran. Not that he regrets it or something – he’s just bored and wants to move on.’

With that level of cynicism, and the fact that Trump’s approval rating is now minus 20 – matching his own and Joe Biden’s worst figures – the President’s response to this developing situation is even more unpredictable than usual. If the aviator is not found and recovered safely, the President could respond with blind violence against Iran, or equally could make a dash to declare the war a success on his own terms.

Today is Holy Saturday, the day Christ spent in his tomb after the crucifixion. May the spirit of resurrection and hope which followed be reflected in the fate of a USAF pilot out there, somewhere in the mountains of Iran.

The madness of using cannabis to treat mental health

Some days I wonder if I’m going mad – and you don’t need to be a psychiatrist to know that’s not a good sign. I work in a specialist NHS service for people experiencing first episode psychosis – young people at their most vulnerable, teetering on the edge of severe and enduring mental illness, some of them already sliding towards schizophrenia. Day in and day out, I watch how cannabis has destroyed people’s minds. It is, frankly, heart-breaking. So you can perhaps imagine how I feel when those same patients mention, almost in passing, that a private doctor has prescribed them cannabis. Not for cancer pain, not for the muscle spasms of multiple sclerosis, not for the intractable epilepsy of a child for whom nothing else has worked (the conditions where there is at least a credible clinical argument) but for their mental health. For depression. For anxiety.

I’m sorry, what? We are handing this stuff out on prescription for the very conditions it is known to cause and worsen. It is, and I do not use the phrase lightly, a prescription for disaster. Despite the protests of the powerful pro-cannabis lobby, it has now been proved beyond any reasonable doubt that cannabis use is directly associated with depression, anxiety, psychosis and avolition, a grinding loss of motivation that can hollow a person out completely.

While cannabis can sometimes make a user feel temporary relief and give them respite from depression and anxiety, in the long term it makes them worse. It seems to me a peculiarly bitter irony that just as we as a society are becoming more understanding about mental illness, a drug directly responsible for destroying people’s mental health is not only spreading unchecked but is now being actively dispensed by doctors.

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Just recently I had a patient who had a history of psychosis. She’d been watching TikTok and become convinced that cannabis was the answer to her ADHD. A private clinic had given her a prescription without checking her notes, without calling me, and without calling her GP. It came out only by chance, in conversation. I sat there absorbing this information, thinking: a private doctor has prescribed her a powerful drug that is directly contraindicated for her condition, without contacting a single one of the clinicians actually responsible for her care. How is this right?

The latest figures, published in the Times, should alarm anyone who cares about how medicine in this country is practised. Since cannabis was legalised for medical use, just ten private doctors have signed off more than half of all cannabis-based prescriptions in the country. Ten doctors. One consultant alone accounted for one in every ten prescriptions nationwide, getting through nearly 46,000 in the first five months of last year. Do the arithmetic and that works out at roughly one every two working minutes. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about how rigorous those consultations could possibly have been.

To understand how we’ve ended up here, it’s worth remembering that the story of medical cannabis in this country started in a genuinely sympathetic place. In 2018 the government legalised cannabis-based medicines following the case of Billy Caldwell, a severely epileptic child experiencing hundreds of seizures a day, for whom cannabis had worked when almost everything else had failed. The public outrage when his medication was confiscated at the border was entirely justified, and it was right to change the law. Cannabis does have legitimate medical uses for certain rare epilepsies, for chronic pain, and for patients who have exhausted every other option. Nobody sensible disputes this. What nobody could have anticipated was quite how rapidly and recklessly that door would be shoved open. Many doctors said so at the time, of course. When the law changed in 2018, there were plenty of voices in the medical profession warning that this was the thin end of the wedge; that however carefully the legislation was drafted, a private market would find ways to exploit it, that the definition of clinical need would be stretched until it was meaningless, and that the result would be cannabis available on medical prescription to more or less anyone who wanted it. Those concerns were dismissed as scaremongering. They were, it turns out, entirely justified. You can now claim some suitably vague condition, sit through a brief online consultation, and walk away with a prescription for cannabis at a potency you would struggle to obtain from the finest drug dealer in the country. The word ‘medical’ does a great deal of heavy lifting in all of this.

The prescription numbers tell the story. From a standing start in 2018, monthly figures climbed slowly at first, then accelerated sharply, reaching around 10,000 a month by mid-2022 and surging to nearly 100,000 a month by early 2025. Almost none of this growth has been driven by epilepsy or chronic pain. At Mamedica, one of the largest private cannabis clinics in the country, over half of its 12,000 patients are being prescribed cannabis for psychiatric conditions. (Mamedica says that cannabis treatment can be ‘game changing’ for these patients and has led to improvements in mood, hope and functioning. Its CEO says that ‘At Mamedica, every patient undergoes full clinical assessment, shared decision-making and ongoing monitoring under strict governance. This is structured, accountable medicine, not volume prescribing.’)

Professor Sir Robin Murray of King’s College London, who has spent his career studying the catastrophic relationship between cannabis and psychosis, has been watching all of this with undisguised alarm. He has warned bluntly that certain private clinics are ‘causing harm to the people they are claiming to help’. But it’s another observation of his that really cuts to the heart of the matter. ‘Usually,’ he has pointed out, ‘if a person has a medical condition, they see a doctor who specialises in a particular area of medicine, for example, respiratory or kidney disease. After diagnosis, the doctor prescribes from a range of treatments’. That, of course, is how medicine is supposed to work. A condition is identified, an appropriate specialist assesses it, and a treatment is chosen on the basis of evidence. What is happening in these clinics is the precise opposite: the treatment comes first, the condition barely matters, and the evidence is nowhere to be seen.

A quarter of psychosis cases in South London were associated with skunk, according to Murray’s research at the Institute of Psychiatry. Oxford University has shown it raises the risk of depression in teenagers by 40 per cent. None of this is seriously contested, it is settled science. Last month a major review in the Lancet Psychiatry screened nearly 6,000 studies and found that cannabinoids showed no significant benefit for anxiety, PTSD, psychotic disorders or OCD. For depression – the single most common reason cited for prescription across most legalised markets – there were no randomised controlled trials to look at. None at all. Not a thin evidence base. No evidence base whatsoever. And still these prescriptions keep on coming.

Then there is the question of what, exactly, is being prescribed, because it is emphatically not the careful, pharmaceutical-grade product the word ‘medical’ implies. Many of these prescriptions are for high-potency products with THC content exceeding 30 per cent. One strain, cheerfully named Space Cake, clocks in at 34 per cent THC. Street skunk – the very stuff Sir Robin Murray and colleagues have spent years linking to psychosis – typically contains between 14 and 16 per cent. So we are prescribing considerably stronger products to people who are already mentally unwell, with no credible evidence that it does them any good. If this were happening with any other substance, there would be a public inquiry.

Make no mistake, the human cost of all this is not abstract. Oliver Robinson was 34 years old, a former property developer from Bury in Greater Manchester. He had been struggling with depression, bipolar disorder and anxiety, and was already under the care of NHS and Priory psychiatrists, both of whom were strongly opposed to him using cannabis, when he turned to a private clinic. A video consultation with Curaleaf was all it took. The clinic based its decision on a GP summary that was nine months out of date. It never contacted his other treating psychiatrists. It prescribed him cannabis. What followed was 18 months of deterioration as his dependency took hold, eventually costing him a £1,000 a month, until he could bear it no longer and was found dead at his home in November 2023.

The inquest, concluded in January this year, made for grim reading. Coroner Catherine McKenna ruled that the prescription had ‘probably contributed to his death’ and had ‘acted as an obstacle’ to him receiving appropriate psychiatric care, giving the drug, in her words, a sense of legitimacy that made it harder for him to engage with the clinicians who were actually trying to help him. She issued a Regulation 28 Prevention of future deaths report to Curaleaf, finding that the prescribing doctor was a children’s and adolescent psychiatrist with no experience of treating adults with Oliver’s complex presentation. His brother Alexander said afterwards that he believed profit had been prioritised over his brother’s life. It is thought to be the first time a coroner has formally linked a private cannabis prescription to a patient’s death. It will not, I fear, be the last. Sir Robin Murray, responding to the verdict, was characteristically direct. These clinics, he said, are ‘nothing more than drug dealers for the middle classes’. Some clinics seem almost proud of how easy they make it to get a prescription. The industry, when challenged, responds with the usual blizzard of patient testimonials and wellness language, insisting people have every right to try whatever they believe is helping them. Let’s be honest about what this is: it’s retail with a prescription pad.

Of course, cannabis has over the past decade acquired a sort of halo. It became the anti-establishment option, the natural remedy, the thing your GP would never prescribe because of Big Pharma and vested interests and all the rest of it. It has latched onto the broader conversation about mental health in the same way recreational ketamine has managed to: cynically and with considerable commercial savvy. The moment it put on a white coat, a great deal of critical thinking went out of the window.

To its credit, the NHS has stayed sceptical. There are only around 5,000 NHS prescriptions for licensed cannabis medicines each year, limited to conditions with genuine evidence behind them, and Nice has declined to recommend it for the vast majority of conditions the private clinics are happily treating. So the private market has simply flourished in the gap, turning NHS caution into a marketing opportunity and positioning itself as the enlightened alternative to a stuffy, out-of-touch establishment. It’s a cynical trick and it has worked spectacularly.

I’ve sat with families trying to make sense of how their bright, funny, perfectly healthy child ended up psychotic. I’ve watched patients who started smoking skunk as teenagers and never quite came back. And now I find myself watching those same patients – or patients just like them – being sent home with a prescription for something considerably stronger than what broke them in the first place, signed off by a doctor churning out one every two working minutes. It’s utter madness. It really is.

Why Israel is introducing the death penalty

A state deciding when it may end a human life outside war is always crossing a line, even when it insists it is doing so for humane reasons. Two democracies are now approaching that line from opposite directions.

In Britain, MPs are moving towards legalising euthanasia. Doctors, families, and patients describe the slow cruelty of terminal illness and the desire to end it on one’s own terms. The state is asked to permit death as an act of compassion. In Israel, the argument runs in the opposite direction. There, the question is whether the state should impose death as punishment for those who have carried out acts of terrorism. The justification lies not in relieving suffering, but in preventing it: stopping future violence, disrupting hostage-taking, imposing finality on a conflict that rarely permits it.

Both societies claim, in their own way, to be acting humanely. That is where the discomfort begins. The same value is being used to justify two entirely different relationships between the state and death. One seeks to spare individuals from prolonged suffering. The other seeks to prevent further killing by those already responsible for it. The underlying pressures could hardly be more different.

Britain’s debate emerges from a century largely free of internal violence on the scale Israel has experienced. Its moral focus is on the end of life, when death comes by natural cause. Israel’s emerges from decades in which violent death arrives abruptly, often deliberately targeted at civilians, and is followed by cycles of capture, imprisonment and exchange. Its focus is on preventing the next killing, the next abduction, the next negotiation.

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The new Israeli death penalty has been widely interpreted, particularly abroad, as evidence of a government embracing brutality. That reading is too simple. In legal terms, the change is narrower than the reaction suggests. Capital punishment has long existed in Israeli law but has not been used since the 1962 execution of Adolf Eichmann. The new legislation does not compel prosecutors or judges to use the death penalty, introduces no new evidentiary framework, and does not dismantle the system of imprisonment or prisoner exchange. Its reach is uneven, leaving out some of the most recent perpetrators of mass violence, including members of Hamas’s Nukhba forces who carried out the October 7 attacks. But without doubt, the headlines are justifiably furious.

The reaction has been intense, not only internationally but within Israel itself. That is because the law matters less for what it immediately does than for what it signals. It disturbs a long-standing equilibrium in which the death penalty existed but remained effectively dormant. It marks a point at which a society that had largely refused to use this power is now willing to consider it.

The arguments for and against the law are well-rehearsed. Less examined is how that shift became possible at all. What kind of pressure produces a demand for finality in punishment? The answer lies in a pattern that has defined Israeli life for decades. Violence is followed by arrest, trial, imprisonment and, often, by exchange. Israeli hostages are taken because Israel places such value on individual lives. Prisoners are released because Israeli society will accept painful compromises to recover its own.

I was reminded of this painful tension during a conversation with an Israeli-British woman who had been stabbed multiple times by a Palestinian attacker and left for dead. She survived. Post October 7th, her attacker was released as part of a deal, having been paid a stipend by the Palestinian Authority since his imprisonment. She described her anger at his release, but also her relief that hostages would return. Both feelings were real.

One of the death penalty law’s early drivers, the parliamentarian Limor Son Har-Melech, came to this position after her husband was killed in a terrorist attack during the second intifada, in which she herself was seriously wounded while pregnant. She was forced to give birth prematurely, while a perpetrator linked to the attack was eventually released in one of the biggest prisoner blackmail releases ever carried out.

That is the moral terrain in which this law sits. Over time, experiences like this produce a particular kind of pressure. It is not simply a desire for revenge. It is a refusal to accept that the same sequence will continue indefinitely, that those responsible for killings will pass through prison and, in some cases, return to it again.

The logic is stark: a dead perpetrator cannot be exchanged. It is a cold argument, but not an abstract one. And yet in reaching for that kind of finality, something shifts. A state built on a deep respect for life begins, however reluctantly, to redraw the boundaries of that principle in order to defend it.

The reaction beyond Israel only sharpens the tension. Saudi Arabia has signed a joint statement with regional partners condemning the change, even as it carried out more than 350 executions itself in 2025, many for non-violent crimes. Different societies arrive at the point of state-sanctioned killing through different pressures. But the threshold, once approached, carries the same weight.

Britain’s debate asks whether the state may help end a life to relieve suffering. Israel’s asks whether the state may take a life to prevent it. Both may claim humanity. But neither can escape the weight of what is being authorised.

Trump’s oil sanctions relief is a precious gift for Putin

Apart from windfall revenues from higher oil and gas prices and the political leverage that comes from supplying the Global South with fertilisers, how much sanctions relief can Russia also expect amid the war in the Middle East?

Some relief is already here. On 12 March, the United States amended its sanctions on Russian oil tankers already at sea. Under an updated general licence, Washington continued to allow the sale of Russian crude and petroleum products loaded onto vessels as of that date. It also globally extended a month-long Treasury department waiver, issued a week earlier, that had allowed India to buy Russian crude and petroleum products loaded between 12 March and 11 April. This is despite warning Delhi earlier this year that, should India fail to wean itself off Russian oil by April, a US trade deal would be off the cards.

Some European leaders were unimpressed. ‘Lifting the sanctions will… lead to a strengthening of Russia’s position,’ said Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky after talks with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron on 13 March. ‘This easing alone by the United States could provide Russia with about $10 billion (£7.5 billion) for the war,’ he added. Scott Bessent, the US Treasury Secretary, described the move as ‘narrowly tailored’ and ‘short-term’.

So who is right? On the immediate fiscal question, Bessent has a point – and Zelensky’s estimate doesn’t hold water. Or oil, for that matter.

The Russian budget funds the war primarily through oil taxation, levied on the volume extracted and the monthly average price realised. The oil covered by the waiver had already been sold before Washington acted – the revenue booked, the tankers loaded, the Urals crude oil price locked in. The waiver does not change any of that retroactively. The direct budgetary gain from releasing these specific cargoes is negligible.

Where Russia does gain – and substantially – is from the oil price spike itself. Every extra $10 (£7.50) per barrel adds roughly $1.6 billion (£1.2 billion) a month to Russia’s federal budget. Oil has risen from around $70 (£53) before the war to $100 (£750) now: that’s a $4.8 billion (£3.6 billion) windfall landing in a budget that had already been running thin. At current prices, Russia can expect close to 1 trillion roubles (£9.3 billion) in oil revenues in April alone – the highest since late last year and 75 per cent above March. Spending cut plans have been quietly shelved. The war, it turns out, is self-financing rather better than Moscow had any right to expect.

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But back to the sanctions waiver. A shrewd trader might attempt to resell the floating barrels, but any profit would flow to them, not the Kremlin’s budget as Zelensky suggested. Yet this is a sanctions relaxation nonetheless – and in a volatile market, signals carry as much weight as legislative change.

The US waiver for Russian oil hints at a broader softening of enforcement. If traders and buyers read it as a reduction in sanctions risk, the discount for Urals crude oil compared to Brent crude will narrow. That feeds directly into the average price of oil the Kremlin uses for its tax calculations – and, consequently, flows into future oil revenues.

It also frees up tankers that had been effectively stranded, unable to take on new cargo. More available tonnage means lower shipping costs and higher net revenues for Russian oil companies. The shadow fleet operators – tanker owners, flag-of-convenience registries and the murky network of intermediaries that keep Russian oil moving – have been working under the constant threat of secondary sanctions. Even a narrow, one-off waiver reduces their risk premium, and that saving passes through to Russian exporters.

Trading counterparties face lower legal and reputational exposure too, easing the commercial mechanics of future sales well beyond the specific cargoes in question. In the longer run, reduced sanctions pressure could attract investment and nudge production higher – though that remains a distant prospect.

The most important gain, however, is neither fiscal nor commercial. It is the precedent. Washington has demonstrated that sanctions on Russian oil can bend when energy prices become politically inconvenient. That is an exceptionally useful data point for Moscow’s sanctions diplomacy – and it quietly corrodes the credibility of the wider sanctions architecture levied against Russia. That erosion, compounding over time, is worth more to Vladimir Putin than the revenue on any tanker currently making its way through the Indian Ocean.

The remarkable resilience of Israeli art

The Israel Museum in Jerusalem (IMJ) – home to impressive collections of ancient and modern art and some of the world’s rarest antiquities, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls – celebrated its 60^th anniversary last year by launching eight new exhibitions. All focused exclusively on showing Israeli artists or works within the museum’s collection. The centrepiece exhibition, Israeli Art: Swing of the Pendulum, featured Reuven Rubin’s triptych from 1923, ‘First Fruits’, a work that embodies the harmony of Jewish immigrants and local Arabs in the early days of the British Mandate of Palestine. On the opposite wall hung Zoya Cherkassky’s diptych ‘Friday in the Projects / 1991 in Ukraine’, painted in 2015, depicting scenes of brutal street violence and war. Rubin’s idyllic harmony and Cherkassky’s horror conveys how life in Israel is like a swinging pendulum, constantly shifting between war and peace.

The pendulum took a major swing last month, when sirens rang out across Israel, alerting the nation that the air force had carried out the opening salvos of Operation Roaring Lion against Iran. It was Shabbat morning, the day of rest, but museum workers and curators were called in to begin taking down valuable artworks from gallery walls, packing up rare artefacts, and storing them underground. It was a familiar task, one rehearsed last June at the start of Operation Rising Lion, on the afternoon of 7 October 2023, and many times in between.

Since 7 October, the Israeli art scene should perhaps be described not as a pendulum, but a raging storm on the high seas. Artists and museum workers alike have had to adjust to the trauma and challenges of continuous multi-front wars, a depleted tourist industry, and the adversity of being shunned by a hostile, anti-Semitic international art community. But how you ride out a storm is what matters. Rather than being swallowed alive by the waves, the Israeli art world turned inward and had innovative responses to keep the beacon of culture alive.

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Immediately after 7 October, ‘some [artists] stopped creating entirely – the reality led them to retreat inward and lose a sense of meaning,’ noted Raz Shapira, curator and head of art at Freshpaint Group in Tel Aviv. But after periods of mourning and reflection, creativity rebounded. When interviewing artists for Freshpaint’s 2025 Art & Design Fair – Israel’s premier annual art event – Shapira recalled how the opportunity to participate in the event inspired many Israeli artists to start working again.

Tal Mazliach, who survived Hamas’s October 7 attack on Kibbutz Kfar Aza, could not pick up a paintbrush for months. When she did start painting again, the 22 acrylic-on-canvas paintings in her War Decorations series, exhibited at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (TAMA), retold the fuzzy memories and haunting recollections of being holed up for 20 hours in the safe room of her home while Hamas terrorists committed atrocities outside.

For Cherkassky, work became a necessity. The Kyiv-born, Tel Aviv-based artist immediately began sketching the 12 graphic and gruesome drawings in her 7 October 2023 Series as a rapid response to sudden shock and grief. ‘When everything has changed and you don’t understand what’s going on, being able to draw – it’s something that gives me a feeling that I’m still who I used to be,’ Cherkassky said in an interview for the debut of her series at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan.

While war themes became an emotional outlet for some, others feel that current events are still too close to touch. The photographer Tomer Ganihar – whose exhibition on the work of Philip Johnson opened last year at the IMJ – candidly told me, ‘I need more time and contemplation before I can address October 7 and the current war in my art.’

TAMA and the IMJ have been riding out the storm incessantly over the past two and a half years with intermittent periods of closure. ‘We have a protocol for emergency situations; each department knew exactly which work had to be taken down [for safe storage],’ IMJ director Suzanne Landau told me. Within 24 hours of the initial October 7 attack, and during both Operations Rising and Roaring Lion against Iran, specialists relocated the Dead Sea Scrolls and select antiquities and artworks to designated safe places.

In late October 2023, the international art magazine Artforum published its infamous and controversial ‘An Open Letter from the Art Community to Cultural Organizations,’ calling for the boycott of Israeli art and art institutions over the IDF’s military campaign in Gaza. Major international exhibitions were immediately cancelled, and foreign artists refused to show in Israel out of both security concerns and to virtue-signal their rejection of Israel. As a result, Landau, like her counterparts at TAMA, instructed her team of curators to look inward and think innovatively about the museum’s in-house collections for future exhibitions. ‘We are completely isolated from the outside art world,’ Landau said. The collective inward turn became a point of strength and resilience in the face of an increasingly hostile, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic art world.

TAMA, for example, pulled from its impressive collection of Barbizon and Impressionist masterworks and launched a timely exhibition in 2025 to join major museums around the world in commemorating 150 years since the birth of Impressionism in France. Earlier this year, just before the current war with Iran, the museum wrapped up a major exhibition of German New Objectivity from the collection of a private lender. The New Objectivity artists in the 1920s and 30s interpreted European society through a sobering and often brutal lens following the horrific experiences of the first world war. The TAMA exhibition prompted the curator Noam Gal to ask, ‘What do we have in common with this work?’ especially as Israeli artists continue to face destruction and death from Iranian cluster bombs and Hezbollah rockets.

Curator Tamar Margalit at the Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Tel Aviv also had an innovative approach after international artists cancelled their shows. The CCA’s 2025 group exhibition, Spectacular Failure, showcased contemporary Israeli art that undermined the inherent competitiveness of conflicts. Perhaps the smallest and most overlooked installation in the CCA’s show left the deepest impression on me and others who attended the opening. Uri Weinstein’s ‘Incoming Call From Dad’ – an iPhone on the floor (which I almost stepped on) with a perpetual incoming call from ‘Abba’ – was a sobering reminder of sons and daughters who, for a multitude of reasons, cannot answer their parents’ incoming calls.

To open IMJ’s 60^th anniversary exhibitions last year, the museum held a major open house event in June. Musicians played in various galleries, performances were staged in the atriums and hallways, a DJ played to cocktail drinkers in the Isamu Noguchi-designed art garden, and the galleries were packed as if all of Jerusalem showed up to celebrate.

Eight hours later that night, the Israeli Air Force carried out Operation Rising Lion against Iran, igniting the so-called 12-day war, or the first Iranian war. The country shifted back into a state of high alert, and museum specialists set to work removing priceless artworks. The second Iran war would erupt less than a year later. But the resilience remained.

‘It doesn’t matter what happens, artists are going to continue working, and, in a way, really interesting art is being made,’ Margalit from the CCA told me. ‘They’re doing it out of conviction and passion. In a way, the art is kind of freeing because it’s kind of against all odds.’

Britain needs better missile defences

When the Iranian ambassador to the United Kingdom, Seyed Ali Mousavi, said RAF Fairford was a ‘legitimate target’ on Times Radio this Tuesday, this wasn’t diplomatic bluster. The ballistic missiles fired by Iran at the UK-US military base on Diego Garcia travelled roughly 3,800 kilometres – the exact range needed to hit Gloucestershire from Iranian soil.

In a sense, Mousavi has done us a favour: he has exposed the glaring hole at the centre of British national security. Since the end of the Cold War there has been a belief that war happens ‘over there’ and not here. As a result, Britain has seriously underinvested in its missile defences.

Westminster has not kept up with the pace nor scale of the challenge. For years two things have been clear. The first is that the geopolitical environment is deteriorating. Direct state-on-state conflicts, especially prolonged and large-scale wars, were seen as a thing of the past in the neoliberal era of intervention. They are now back with a vengeance. We cannot assume that we will have the luxury of choosing to join the next one.

The second is that the threat has changed considerably. A complex mix of weapons has been used to bombard Ukraine and the Middle East. Massed numbers of cheap drones, low-flying cruise missiles and fast-moving ballistic missiles must all be contended with.

The UK armed forces have a long list of problems at the moment, but one of the worst is its Integrated Air and Missile Defences (IAMD), both in terms of depth and breadth.

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As we have seen, Britain is not entirely defenceless. Aircraft from the Royal Air Force have been very active in downing drones over the Middle East. The Royal Navy has sent a Type 45 destroyer – one of the world’s most capable air defence ships – and on the ground anti-drone teams have been scoring some impressive results. But while this might be fine for helping out local allies in a regional conflict, it is far from sufficient when it comes to protecting our own country.

For a start there is almost no depth to our force. The UK only has six Type 45s (of which only two or three will be available on a good day), and only a handful of SkySabre missile defence batteries. To make matters worse there is the financial asymmetry to contend with. If the UK has to swat down a £20,000 Shahed drone with a £1 million Aster missile that took a year to build, we will lose the numerical and financial war of attrition. And perhaps most concerningly, the UK has almost no Ballistic Missile Defences (BMD) to speak of. The Type 45s have a limited BMD capability, but this is only for short-range ballistic missiles. A couple of Nato missile defence facilities in Europe would be able to defend the UK against longer-range ballistic missiles. But while they are very capable, this is an awfully thin level of protection.

To its credit, the recent UK Strategic Defence Review did identify investment in missile defence as a clear priority. But then it also identified a litany of other priorities. It suggested an additional £1 billion funding for missile defence on the British Isles, but this is small change in this area. For reference, this is roughly the cost of a single Patriot battery – arguably the world’s premiere terminal (final stage)defence against ballistic missiles. £1 billion is enough perhaps to provide some coverage to a couple of military sites, or London, but not much else. Poland is a useful counterpoint; Warsaw has spent more than ten times this on its own missile defences and will soon field 23 Narew batteries (a ‘Polonised’ version of SkySabre) as well as eight Patriot batteries.

This does not mean Britain should attempt to cover the entire country with an impenetrable, ruinously expensive bubble. Instead, the UK approach must be tailored, cost-effective and ruthlessly prioritised.

The first priority is the defence of critical military infrastructure. Bases such as RAF Fairford and Lossiemouth and the naval bases in Faslane and Portsmouth are essential. If these sites are hit in the opening hours of a conflict, Britain’s ability to defend itself against further attacks would diminish rapidly, leaving not much else but the (literal) nuclear option. These specific high-value sites need an umbrella over them. If an adversary knows they cannot deliver a knockout blow to our ability to function and fight back, the strategic incentive to launch a strike diminishes.

Second, the true value of missile defence lies in its ‘integrated’ nature. We need a truly integrated command-and-control network capable of connecting any sensor to any interceptor. This is important not just to maximise detection, but to ensure the most appropriate interceptor is used against each threat. This has been talked about for years and is a real challenge to do in practice; it requires both countries and companies to share sensitive information with each other.

Finally, we must urgently expand our interceptor stockpiles. The conflicts in the Middle East and Eastern Europe have proven that without deep magazines, even the most advanced defensive systems will run dry in days. Expanding domestic missile production will not only reduce unit costs but ensure we have the endurance to fight.

The MoD can achieve this by abandoning its short-termism and signing multi-year procurement contracts, giving the defence industry the financial certainty it needs to increase production. Simultaneously, we must aggressively accelerate the deployment of Directed Energy Weapons (DEW) – or lasers. Systems such as the British-designed DragonFire laser – which costs roughly £10 per shot to operate – as well as gun-based drone defences similar to the ‘flak’ artillery of the second world war are the only viable long-term solution to reversing the brutal cost asymmetry of drone warfare.

Relying on the largesse of our allies and the forbearance of our adversaries to keep us safe is no longer a viable defence policy. This will require increased investment, which the Treasury will loathe, especially given the MoD’s questionable track-record of getting ‘bang for its buck’. But it is many orders of magnitude more cost-effective than being on the receiving end of a missile bombardment.

London’s St James’s is losing its soul

London is full of little ecosystems: areas that are distinctive by virtue of their purpose or history and where individual elements make up a sum greater than the whole. St James’s is like that: a patch south of Piccadilly where the pleasures of a walk down the street are all to do with being able to look at the windows of the art galleries. There’s a succession of independent dealers selling paintings – Old Masters in some cases – drawings, objects d’art and art books. You probably can’t afford to do more than look, but there’s pleasure in fantasising like a Dorothy Parker character about what you might buy if you only could.

There used to be streets like that on both sides of Piccadilly but Cork Street, once famous for its dealers, is a ghostly shadow of what it was, with a few anonymous contemporary galleries – somehow, all white – and much of one side dominated by the blank windows of a dealer in modern art, Stephen Friedman, who had to shut up shop in February, partly because of high rent.

It’s looking as if St James’s is going the same way. There are five businesses in and around Duke Street and Ryder Street which are facing closure because the Crown Estate is dramatically increasing the rents, proposing to double them in some cases. (Others too are affected, including those with other landlords.) And owners of little galleries and shops can’t afford to pay; they’ll close. If the rents double, the rates go up correspondingly. The Crown Estate is, in short, threatening to obliterate the distinctive character of what estate agents like to call a quarter, but is really even smaller.

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The dealer I know best there, from years coveting his illustrations, is Chris Beetles, a dealer in illustrations and cartoons as well as Victorian drawings and watercolours and contemporary paintings. The Crown Estate is proposing to double his rent, from £104,000 a year to £208,000. He’s already paying £67,000 a year in rates; that would go up too. If the Crown Estate goes ahead with this, he’ll have to shut up shop and operate online from a warehouse. From eight employees, he’ll go down to one. He’s been there for 42 years; the others have been around for decades too.

He’s not alone; the five businesses which are making their case against the dramatic rent rises face closure or a drastic reduction in their gallery space.

Thomas Heneage runs a specialist art bookshop (there used to be two; one had to close) and his lease comes up for renewal later in the year. He too is exercised about the increases: “I am concerned that The Crown Estate will make it impossible for specialised, high end art retailers to remain in the area”, he told me. “If St James’s loses the art market, or just becomes a place for contemporary galleries it would no longer be worth our while to be in the area. We have been described as “the last remaining specialist bookshop selling Art Reference Books in the world”. We would want to remain just that and not be forced to move or close.”

So what would replace these galleries if they were forced out of business? A couple of very small dealers have in fact opened at increased rents, but it remains to be seen if they survive. But what’s likely is that contemporary galleries – like the white spaces in Cork Street – would take the place of the dealers that at present specialise in Victorian work, Impressionists or Old Masters. And the contemporary galleries deal in work that commands vast sums. Saatchi Yates, down the road, could probably shrug off rent rises of any size. If modern galleries take over from the very English dealers in older work, the feel of St James’s will change forever. It matters; it would be one more marker in the homogenisation of London. But if there aren’t takers, there would be a temptation to amend the present rule that galleries may not be replaced by fashion retailers or restaurants. Another branch of Ralph Lauren or Prada then?

The thing about the Crown Estate is that it is indirectly owned by us all. The properties it owns all over Britain belong to the Crown with the revenues going to the Treasury – £1.1billion in 2024-5 of which the Crown receives some 12 per cent. Lucky King Charles. From the website it looks like a positively philanthropic outfit; there’s talk of shared prosperity and social benefits with images of diverse communities engaging in fun activities, plus wind turbines. A spokesman for the Crown Estate told me: ‘Art galleries and specialist retailers are an important part of the distinctive St James’s neighbourhood, with many more opening across the portfolio in recent years. We work closely with our customers to support that heritage while also following our statutory responsibilities to commercially manage the portfolio for the long-term and for the benefit of public spending.’

But the question is whether it’s necessary in order to fulfil its statutory responsibilities for it to put long-established tenants out of business. How to square doubling rents with supporting that heritage, then? I did ask the spokesman but haven’t heard back yet. Yet the rent increases from the galleries are the merest blip in the £1.1 billion profit in 2024 of the Estate, that come chiefly from offshore wind energy. As a result, the pay of Dan Labbad, the CEO originally from Sydney, rose to £1.9 million a year. The Crown Estate may have to get a return from its properties but it doesn’t have to double rents from small galleries to do it.

The dealers are already struggling. Chris Beetles says that last year he lost money. So did at least one other of the galleries facing closure. The gallery next door, Martin Beisly, a famous dealer in Victorian art, can’t take a rent increase of any size. The little group of dealers versus the Crown Estate represents the plight of many others, including the tenants of other big property owners. Once the owners think they can squeeze tenants to any extent, others will follow. More traditional individual private businesses will be forced from central London, and it’ll be London’s loss.

The galleries can challenge the rent increases, but the tribunal that deals with these things doesn’t deal with intangibles: the way that people and businesses are drawn to the area precisely because they’re surrounded by beautiful things, the character and tradition of the streets, the way one business bolsters another, creating a distinctive sense of place. An awful lot of central London is already soulless – take a walk around Mayfair – and many small independent places have closed. Do we need more?

Ozempic has ruined Easter

It’s a funny thing, being a feminist surrounded by women on weight-loss drugs. As someone who recognises the health risks of being clinically obese, I’ve never been a fat liberationist – but pretty much all of us used to be against prescribed beauty standards. In practice this meant we would critique the harmful impacts of the ‘size zero’ or ‘heroin chic’ trends rather than obsess over having gained a few pounds over Christmas. Yet, with the rise of weight-loss jabs, skinniness has become a norm rather than a feminist discussion. And twee ideas about ‘being good’ or ‘cheating’ have been replaced by – well – feeling too nauseous to cheat at all. 

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Which is why Easter is a fascinating holiday in this era of weight-loss jabs. After all, for many Western agnostics, Holy Week is as much about its chocolate trade as it is its Christian sentiments. What will Easter look like with so many saying no to chocolate bunnies and eggs, I wonder? Will the weight-loss industry mark the end of Easter as we know it? 

Around 1.6 million Britons are estimated to be on diet jabs. With the range of drugs now on offer (including Wegovy which is about to be made available on the NHS to around one million people at risk of heart disease) let’s assume there are more skinny people around than ever before – and many of them look terrible. ‘Ozempic face’ has left many with protruding teeth, bulging eyes and sagging facial skin as the weight drops off – all of which combine to make the user appear several years older. Whenever I see ‘Ozempic faces’ on the very feminists that used to rant and rage against the diet industry, I can only conclude that it wasn’t the industry that offended them after all. Perhaps it was simply the pain of having to count calories or restrict themselves rather than eat or drink what they really wanted – without the fear of added weight gain. 

Or, at least, that’s how many seem to think of the jabs. Last Christmas, the chief of the Independent Pharmacies Association said there was a huge increase in those requesting weight-loss injections to pre-emptively ward off weight gain over the festive period. She warned that these medicines are not intended for preventative use and expressed concern about them being seen as a quick or easy fix. Which, of course, they’re not – as the weight-loss crowd and their shrunken appetites will learn. 

At Easter, we are supposed to eat roast lamb with garlic roast potatoes, honey glazed ham, hot cross buns, devilled eggs, creamy scalloped potatoes, simnel cake (fruitcake topped with marzipan) and of course chocolate eggs. I happen to dislike most of these: I positively detest hot cross buns, can’t eat marzipan and would sooner have a few Hotel Chocolat chocolates than any Easter egg. But what will the weight-loss crowd tuck into instead? An iceberg lettuce sculpted into the shape of a bunny rabbit, perhaps? Ryvita crackers instead of hot cross buns? Will they be joining their children for matcha latte hunts instead of eggs?

For Good Friday, it is of course fish and chips all the way – but the Ozempic lot will have to poach a little bit of cod and serve it with a tiny, boiled potato. Not forgetting a squeeze of lemon as a substitute for mayonnaise.

Dessert would have to be a piece of fruit, of course, and, instead of devilled eggs, they can be boiled with sticks of carrots and celery to dip in, rather than buttered bread soldiers. The Easter egg hunt could end up being more of an endurance test than any kind of fun. Strap some weights on your back, fire up the fitness app on your watch and if – and only if – you burn off enough calories, you can have the equivalent in Easter treats: a single square of dark chocolate and a tiny simnel cake sour. 

There is, of course, another option: ditch the jabs, fill your face and don’t worry about the calories until after the holidays. Go on, it’s Easter.

The peptides market is exploding – but are they safe?

Two weeks before the 2024 presidential election, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tweeted that “the FDA’s war on public health is about to end.” He then listed a host of treatments, all of which he claimed had been “aggressively suppressed” by a corrupt Big Pharma system.

Two Ps – psychedelics and peptides – featured on that list of treatments, one more familiar than the other. You could be forgiven for thinking that peptides are a recent creation but they’re not. They’ve been around for a long time, but they’ve gained huge attention due to Wegovy and Ozempic.

Peptides are natural compounds: short chains of amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) that function as signaling molecules within the body, sending a wide variety of messages to all sorts of tissues, from the skin to muscle and internal organs.

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The global market for peptides is growing rapidly. The regulated market alone is worth $50 billion and is projected to double by the early 2030s. The first major peptide to be synthesized was insulin, which plays a vital role in regulating blood-sugar levels. About eight million people in the US currently take insulin, mostly diabetics, but it is also used as a growth promoter by professional bodybuilders. Peptides such as insulin, Wegovy and Ozempic clearly work. They’ve been fully licensed for human use and their effects are visible for all to see.

But when it comes to the newer peptides – or at least those that have finally escaped obscure bodybuilding forums after decades of underground use – there is no rigorous human safety data at all. No human clinical trials have been carried out. All safety and efficacy data comes from animal studies and these are often few in number and limited in scope. That hasn’t stopped a rapid rise in consumer use.

BPC-157 is among the most popular. It’s a peptide that’s marketed for its regenerative qualities, including joint-healing. I’ve considered using BPC-157 to treat recurring tendinitis from a dislocated knee I suffered giving a girl a fireman’s lift at the beach (don’t ask). Lab mice given this peptide have recovered from traumatic spinal and brain injuries that would otherwise have killed them.

BPC-157 is often paired with TB-500 as part of the “Wolverine stack,” named after the X-Men character whose powers of recovery make him almost impossible to kill. In one film, he survives a nuclear explosion. Other common peptides include GHK-Cu, a copper peptide that promotes collagen production for joints, skin and hair; ipamorelin, which makes the body produce growth hormones; NR, an anti-aging peptide; and tesamorelin, which is said to increase muscle mass.

Most peptides are sold as “research chemicals” that are “not intended for human consumption,” a nice little workaround that prevents the manufacturers from being held liable for the uses buyers put them to. As well as the lack of compelling clinical evidence for their effectiveness, lack of regulation makes buying peptides even more of a lottery.

In 2023, the Biden administration decided compounding pharmacies could no longer make unapproved peptides. At a stroke, oversight vanished. Compounding pharmacies are subject to state regulations and regular inspection by the FDA. Most peptides now come from abroad, China in particular. If you want to get hold of peptides, you often need to know a gray-market distributor or someone that works at one of these Chinese factories. Deals mostly happen over encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram and Signal.

The quality and purity of peptides vary wildly. Investigations have revealed that many peptides are heavily contaminated and the actual concentrations don’t match the advertised dosages. This is a common problem in the world of health products and supplements more generally. Ecdysteroids, for example, a kind of plant steroid used by Soviet weightlifters for decades, are often sold in tablet form at a thousandth the strength indicated on the bottle.

Another consideration is price. Popular stacks that are used by celebrities and wellness influencers can end up costing hundreds of dollars a month, sometimes closer to $1,000. Jennifer Aniston and Gwyneth Paltrow have both reportedly been using weekly peptide injections and collagen supplements to improve their overall vitality and their skin’s appearance. Joe Rogan has frequently promoted BPC-157, claiming the gut-derived peptide completely healed his elbow tendinitis in just two weeks.

There remain persistent questions about the safety of licensed peptides. Well-established side effects include vomiting and nausea, diarrhea and even stomach paralysis, which requires the sufferer to be fed via a drip – but barely a week seems to pass without the appearance of a new one ending up in the headlines. Recently we’ve discovered Wegovy and Ozempic might cause vision loss, false diagnosis of cancer in routine medical scans, alopecia, gallstones and loss of muscular strength, among other things.

There are also worrying instances of changes to moods and behavior, which shouldn’t be surprising given how food is intimately related to desire (it’s why we talk about motivation in terms of “hunger” and “thirst”). There are rumors that top financial firms have banned their staff from using weight-loss drugs because they appear to blunt traders’ appetites more broadly – including the crucial appetite for risk.

So far, I’ve decided not to take BPC-157 for my niggling knee. I’ve been using ice packs and a compression sleeve instead, and most of the pain and swelling has disappeared. I can squat heavy and run again, which is good enough for me, Wolverine be damned. I can’t say I like the idea of injecting myself with an unapproved compound made god-knows-where by god-knows-whom. And however useful animal studies might be, human bodies are not the same. I am not a mouse that’s been half-crushed to death by a man in a white lab coat.

In the end, it’s up to you to balance potential rewards and risks: to do your own research, as the labeling on these compounds implies. But then I think about Paltrow. Wasn’t she singing the praises of vagina-scented candles a few years ago? Best leave the Chinese injections to people like her.

An appraisal of judicial vulgarity

If you follow the courts, you will certainly have come across Olympus Spa v. Armstrong. On March 12, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied rehearing en banc in this case, which began in 2020 when a transgender woman in Washington State alleged that a traditional Korean spa, which requires patrons to be entirely naked, refused her (or is it him?) entry because she (he?) had not yet undergone so-called gender-affirming surgery. Cases about the rights of transgender people are increasingly on courts’ dockets, with tricky legal issues far from sorted out, but what brought Olympus Spa to wide attention is the explosive and deliberately vulgar dissent by Judge Lawrence VanDyke and the formal castigation of the judge by a very large number of his colleagues. 

Many experts in the law have weighed in on the controversy, but one thing missing is linguistically informed commentary on the vulgarity. The present piece, which is necessarily – but, I hope, not gratuitously – filled with language not often found in these pages, is an attempt to fill that gap. 

Here are the opening two paragraphs of VanDyke’s dissent: 

This is a case about swinging dicks. The Christian owners of Olympus Spa – a traditional Korean, women-only, nude spa – understandably don’t want them in their spa. Their female employees and female clients don’t want them in their spa either. But Washington State insists on them. And now so does the Ninth Circuit. 

You may think that swinging dicks shouldn’t appear in a judicial opinion. You’re not wrong. But as much as you might understandably be shocked and displeased to merely encounter that phrase in this opinion, I hope we all can agree that it is far more jarring for the unsuspecting and exposed women at Olympus Spa – some as young as thirteen – to be visually assaulted by the real thing. 

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In response, no fewer than 27 judges issued a statement in which they write, “The American legal system… is not a place for vulgar barroom talk” and use such other phrases as “coarse language and invective,” “crude and vitriolic language” and “ordinary principles of dignity and civility.” A second statement, signed by seven of these same judges begins with the words, “The lead dissent’s crass language.” 

VanDyke, however, has dug in his heels. He writes, “My distressed colleagues appear to have the fastidious sensibilities of a Victorian nun when it comes to mere unpleasant words” and “The fact that so many on our court want to pretend that this case is about anything other than swinging dicks is the very reason the shocking language is necessary.” Closing by invoking the Book of Matthew, he “coarsely but respectfully dissent[s].” 

Unsurprisingly, some pundits have expressed outrage that VanDyke would have said such things while others have praised him for doing so. An especially interesting article, to my mind, comes from the pen of Michael A. Fragoso, who concludes that VanDyke’s “ironical approach” to jurisprudence – not only in Olympus Spa but throughout his career – is “uniquely postmodern.” I also appreciate the words of Josh Blackman: 

The problem with speech codes is that they prohibit people from talking about the actual world. Using euphemisms signals that society is unwilling to address problems. And this asymmetry only goes one way. Liberals can speak, conservatives cannot. 

Still, it may be that VanDyke’s linguistic experiment goes too far and will cause real harm to the judiciary, even as it highlights the idea, increasingly popular in some circles, that so much of language is dangerous. My intention in what follows is to add modestly to the discussion of linguistic unseemliness by considering which other words and phrases VanDyke or any other judge or public figure might choose instead of “swinging dicks” and what the effect of using any of these might be. 

First, however, here is what I will not do. While admitting to deep discomfort that so many Americans appear not to be bothered that biological men are now often permitted in – and are in some cases pushed into – women’s bathrooms, prisons, schools and nude spas, I am not a lawyer and will thus not comment on the legal issues in Olympus Spa, which hinge largely on the applicability of the First Amendment to the case and, perhaps, on whether the phrase “gender expression or identity” in the Revised Code of Washington “serves as a proxy for sexual orientation,” as Judge Kenneth K. Lee claims in his dissent. And aside from saying simply that I, too, feel that VanDyke ought not to have been so harsh about his colleagues, I will also not dilate on the complaint of these colleagues that, besides using vulgar language, he demeans those who disagree with him by writing such sentences as this: “Sometimes, it feels like the supposed adults in the room have collectively lost their minds.” 

So, what of the vulgarity? A striking linguistic feature of the opinions is that not a single judge who chides VanDyke uses the collocation “swinging dicks” even as a quotation. They speak of the unseemliness without being willing to spell out what exactly the unseemliness is. 

On the assumption – which some may dispute – that the case is in fact in the first place about an anatomical part that some might refer to as a dick, the question arises how a judge who wished to highlight this from the start might have written a seemly opening sentence. Should he or she use a direct word (an obvious candidate is “penis”)? Or are there any euphemisms or examples of slang – see here and here for lists compiled by linguists – that are neither extremely vulgar (e.g., “male member”) nor risible (e.g., “willy” and “pajama python”)? 

To be clear: VanDyke could have written something still more unseemly. In a post on his blog “Original Jurisdiction,” David Lat imagines that another conservative judge, not wishing to be outdone, might begin an opinion with “This is a case about huge, throbbing cocks.” I expect we can all agree that this would have caused even more of an uproar: “cock” is generally regarded as a more offensive word than “dick,” and when it comes to spas, I imagine “swinging” to be less threatening than “huge, throbbing.” 

But what would have been a less vulgar gambit – or, indeed, one that is not vulgar at all? 

Suppose VanDyke had begun with “This is a case about penises.” I don’t suppose that this sentence would have been met with disgust, but it would have provoked a smirk, and for two reasons, one having to do with meaning and the other with form. 

Let’s take meaning first: the plural “penises” is vastly less common than the singular (as the Google Books Ngram Viewer confirms) because penis-havers have but one penis, and a plurality of penises thus conjures up images that many of us find surprising. As for form, people get flummoxed when asked to pluralize English nouns that end in “-is”: most can manage “axes,” “bases” and the like, but “poleis” causes problems, “geneses” sounds peculiar, no one really wants to say either “aegises” or “aegides” – and “penises” and “penes” are both ridiculous. The same holds for “phallus” and its plurals, by the way: the singular “phallus” is much more common than “phalluses,” which sounds odd and which is, in turn, much more than common than the pretentious “phalloi.” 

So perhaps VanDyke might have written instead, “This is a case about the penis” (with a generalizing definite article) or – arguably even more apt – “This is a case about a penis.” Apt because, to quote Lat, “there’s only one transgender woman whom we know of, Haven Wilvich, who has expressed interest in going to Olympus Spa… So unless Wilvich has some highly unusual anatomy, there’s at most one ‘swinging dick’ here.” 

But to return to plurals: how about “This is a case about swinging penises”? The adjective would have been gratuitous since, as Legal Style Blog archly asks (amplified by Lat), “Where in the record did it say that the phalluses in question were sufficiently endowed to be swinging?” Whatever the case may be, this alternative sentence would, I expect, likewise have led to the charge of “vulgar barroom talk” despite the fact that there is nothing inherently vulgar about the adjective. While the phrase “swinging penises” is uncommon – Google Ngram draws a blank – when I type it into a search engine (NSFW), I am taken to gay porn sites. 

By contrast, “swinging dicks” is a known phrase, though the usual meaning of “swinging dick” is, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, “A man; spec. (more fully big swinging dick) a successful, arrogant, ambitious, or aggressively bold man (also occasionally used of a woman).” Popularized by Michael Lewis in his 1989 book about Wall Street, Liar’s Poker, the locution “Big Swinging Dick(s)” (typically capitalized) has been used most famously to describe the top bond traders in the 1980s at what was then Salomon Brothers. In any case, it is common enough that (no doubt to the surprise of some readers) the OED has an entry for the phrase, which is apparently first attested in 1957. I note, however, that as early as 1684, the author of the drama Sodom, often considered to be the Earl of Rochester, spoke of a penis as “a brave Romantick swinging Prick.” 

Now, it is striking that nearly no judge who opined in Olympus Spa uses the word “penis,” even as a singular. Only VanDyke does so: along with a quotation from a 2010 opinion that contains the word, he mentions a man who “allegedly expos[ed] his erect penis in the female spa area” of a Korean spa in Los Angeles. 

How is it possible that the opinions in a case that may be fundamentally about penises, and at the very least greatly concerns them, barely uses the word “penis” (and avoids “phallus” entirely)? 

The answer is simple: the word that judges like to use is “genitalia,” of which there are 30 examples in the 105 pages here, none of them in a quotation (unlike both examples of “genitals”) and the majority preceded by the descriptor “male.” Consider, for example, these sentences from the dissent of Judge Daniel P. Collins (italics in original): 

Olympus Spa simply does not care whether a person seeking admittance is transgender; it cares only whether the person has male genitalia. If the person lacks male genitalia, the person will be admitted regardless of whether that person was born without male genitalia or had them removed. A transgender person who was born with female genitalia will be admitted, even though that person identifies as a male, and a transgender person who was born with male genitalia will be admitted if that person has had those genitalia removed. Because the only factor at play is the possession of male genitalia, there is no sense in which a person’s “transgender” status can be said to be a “substantial factor” in Olympus Spa’s admissions policy… For the same reason, Olympus Spa’s exclusively genitalia-based line – which rests on the unique privacy, modesty, and even potentially safety concerns associated with having male genitalia in its all-nude space – cannot be said to be a pretext or proxy for transgender discrimination. 

(What about someone born with female genitalia who has undergone phalloplasty? Collins does not say.) 

But “genitalia” fudges the issue. On the plus side, the naturally plural word – it comes from the neuter plural of the Latin adjective genitālis, “concerned with procreation or reproduction” – includes scrotums (or, if you prefer, scrota), which often swing, as well as penises. And, unlike a plural like “penises,” the word doesn’t sound funny. But there’s a strong minus, too: the word also encompasses vaginas. 

In a context such as Olympus Spa, this is a minus because “genitalia” is aseptic (as is “genitals”). Undoubtedly, the penis and the vagina are alike in being generative organs. But, crucially, most people now and at all times in the historical past have viewed them as different in kind rather than like. To my knowledge, no language has separate words for “male ear” and “female ear” or for “male toe” and “female toe.” But to my knowledge, every language has separate basic words for “male genitalia” and “female genitalia.” The overuse of the word “genitalia,” which so often needs to be characterized as specifically male or specifically female, is an effort, whether conscious or not, to conceal this fundamental truth. 

Put simply, the words “penis” and “vagina” carry an important societal weight absent from “genitalia.” It is difficult for most people to speak of a penis and a vagina as pretty much interchangeable. But when speaking of male genitalia and female genitalia, as many of us regularly do, we are using language to blur an essential difference. This blurring downplays the mismatch of having the male variety in an otherwise female context, and vice versa. It is in effect the opposite of what VanDyke does, which is to use language to emphasize the essential difference. 

In short, then, I conclude the following. 1) Even without the addition of “swinging,” Judge VanDyke is making a (possibly ill-advised) point with the vulgarity “dicks” that he could not have made with anything like the same force by instead using “penises.” 2) He could, however, have gestured to the point, without quite making it, by using the singular “penis” – as I suggest jurists start to do more often. 3) Be that as it may, his colleagues on the Ninth Circuit are hiding behind language when they avoid even “penis” and use, again and again, the flaccid term “genitalia.” And so, is it any surprise that, as VanDyke suggests in his first footnote, quoting Mencken, his dissent in Olympus Spa gives it to them “good and hard?” 

Why Pakistan is brokering peace in Iran

Pakistan, the world’s only Muslim nuclear power, has traditionally been an international sideshow. No longer. The country has reportedly been passing messages between Washington and Tehran in efforts to bring an end to the Iran war. It is has a five-point plan aimed at restoring “peace and stability” across the region. How have the Pakistanis pulled off this remarkable diplomatic makeover?

The answer starts with some critical decisions the Pakistanis took last year. After the four-day armed conflict between Pakistan and India in May 2025, both sides claimed “victory”. But crucially Islamabad publicly acknowledged Washington’s role in achieving a ceasefire (something India refused to do). Pakistan later nominated President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. Both moves were part of a carefully orchestrated Pakistani charm campaign to stroke Trump’s ego.

Pakistan has also been wooing important figures in Trump’s orbit, including special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, by mixing business with geopolitics. There have been reports of discussions on investment opportunities and a crypto-deal with a Trump family-linked business as well as on security issues. Witkoff, a real estate developer, is said to have brokered an unusual deal between the American and Pakistani governments to redevelop the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, which Pakistan owns. The terms of the deal have not been divulged but a White House official, speaking to the New York Times, described it as a “potentially lucrative partnership between the two governments to co-own the property”.

In a sign that Trump thinks the Pakistanis might be useful, he publicly thanked Islamabad last year for arresting the “mastermind” behind the bombing at Kabul airport in August 2021. The attack killed 13 US service members and 170 Afghan civilians during the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan. It stood in a stark contrast to Trump’s first term when he accused Islamabad of giving the US “nothing but lies and deceit” and providing “safe haven to terrorists”.

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The other not so secret weapon deployed by Pakistan is the country’s army chief Asim Munir (elevated to field marshal, only the second officer in Pakistan’s history to hold the rank). Munir has had several meetings with Trump, including a one-on-one lunch at the White House – the first time a sitting US President has received Pakistan’s military chief without civilian leadership present. Trump has described Munir as “my favorite field marshal” and an “exceptional human being”. High praise indeed from Trump who sees international relations mainly through the prism of strong personal relationships.

The Pakistanis haven’t just been buttering up the Americans. There have been high-level engagements with countries across Central Asia, including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan. Pakistan’s military chief has held meetings with his counterparts from countries across the Middle East, including Egypt and Jordan. In September 2025, Pakistan signed a mutual defense agreement with Saudi Arabia. This states that “any aggression against either country shall be considered an aggression against both”. A commitment that has yet to be tested.

Iran is the latest focus in Pakistan’s cold-eyed diplomatic maneuvering. The two countries share a 905 km border, and a long history of cultural and religious ties. Pakistan is home to the world’s largest Shia Muslim population outside Iran itself. The Iranians were the first country to recognize Pakistan when it achieved independence. Pakistan returned the favor by being one of the first nations to recognize the Islamic Republic of Iran, created after the 1979 revolution. It helps that the US has no military bases in Pakistan. There are occasional hiccups between the Iran and its neighbor over cross-border militancy but it is not in the interests of either to let matters get out of control.

The Pakistanis have much to gain from an end to Middle East hostilities. The war is hurting Pakistan’s economy because it is heavily dependent on imported oil, much of which comes through the blocked Strait of Hormuz. The price of gas and diesel went up by around 20 percent last month and the authorities have introduced a shorter working week for government employees in an effort to save fuel. In return for playing peacemaker, the Pakistanis will also be hoping to secure future defense deals and investment from the rich Gulf monarchies.

However, Pakistan has serious problems at home. Unrest and political violence are a daily occurrence. There is an ongoing insurgency in the province of Balochistan. It is currently engaged in a bombing campaign against neighboring Afghanistan, and relations with India are tense after the military clashes last year. Pakistan is not a country of democracy or basic freedoms. Imran Khan, the former prime minister, is languishing in prison. He is just the latest in a long line of Pakistani leaders to end up behind bars after losing power.

Field Marshal Munir may have found a friend in Trump. But Islamabad’s peace efforts may well fail – or, more likely, simply be ignored. The days of being an international irrelevance are never too far away for Pakistan.

The UAE and Oman could be the big winners from the Iran war

Sixty years ago, I first gazed out on the Strait of Hormuz from the Musandam peninsula of Oman. I was there as private secretary to my godfather, Selwyn Lloyd, who had been Britain’s foreign secretary during the Suez Crisis.

The previous evening our host, Sultan Said bin Taimur, the ruler of Oman for nearly 40 years, commented gloomily: “When two fish are fighting in these waters, the British are behind it.”

I estimate that I must have made at least 250 visits to the Gulf States in the intervening six decades. The key question which would surely now be asked by the ghosts of my former Middle East interlocutors – from Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Zayed al-Nahyan, the first president of the UAE, and the visionary Sultan Qaboos of Oman – is this: who will emerge as the real winners and losers from the present Hormuz crisis?

The Americans are already big losers in terms of reputational face and folly. The zigzags of Donald Trump’s strategic pronouncements make no sense from day to day. The bombastic boasts of the War Secretary, Pete Hegseth, have turned him into the Comical Ali of this conflict. The Pentagon’s spokesman is now saying “the situation is fluid,” which is hardly a convincing cry of victory after three weeks of fierce fighting.

Despite America’s errors, the Iranians are bigger losers. The UK Spectator’s leading article, “Finish the job”, was right in its fierce condemnation of the horrors of the Ayatollah’s evil strategy but wrong to be sanguine about what might follow it. The most likely outcome is that Iran will be militarily and economically ruined for decades. This is a win for the Israelis, but trouble for almost everyone else. Iran itself will have a changed regime, yet possibly without real regime change. But sooner or later, whoever is in charge in Tehran will have to learn to live with the neighbors – the Gulf States, where Britain’s interests are still great.

Here, the winners and losers scoreboard is sure to prove complicated. Poor little Bahrain and arrogantly rich Qatar will go downhill as the price for their subservience to Trump’s America.

Cash-strapped but oil-rich, Saudi Arabia (“the big enchilada,” as Nixon called it) will remain inwardly strong but outwardly more cautious. Its special relationship with the United States – effectively these days with the Trump family – has been tarnished and weakened. My Saudi friends are furious but impotent. They loathe the Iranians but will only saber-rattle at them.

The UAE has been hit harder than it admits. It has been the target of more than 2,000 Iranian missiles and drones, whose debris has damaged oil storage depots, hotels and banks. Dubai, the emirate for expatriates, is suffering a crisis of confidence. Yet despite a reverse charge of the bling brigade, it will stagger flashily on with the declining status of a lesser Monaco of the Middle East – a sunny place for shady people.

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The true heart, strength and soul of the UAE is Abu Dhabi, which accounts for more than 80 percent of the country’s land, over 90 percent of its massive oil reserves and40 percent of its local Emirati population.

Throughout the hostilities, my son, -William, who lives and works in Abu Dhabi, has been doing the rounds of the sheikh and merchant family majlis (coffee gatherings). He reports a robust resilience among the sons and grandsons of the region’s original Bedouin desert fighters.

Sheikh Zayed’s son, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed (MbZ), whom I know well, is largely the reason for the country’s relative stability. When the first Iranian missiles struck, he gave an eloquent interview, combining menace for the Iranians, compassion for the wounded, reassurance for the expatriates, gratitude to his fellow Emiratis and hope for the future. “The UAE is a role model,” he said. “I promise everyone we will emerge stronger than before.” If MbZ can pull off his goal of making Abu Dhabi the safest and most attractive jurisdiction in the region, his already mega-rich emirate could become the primary beneficiary of global or regional instability.

Another dark horse to watch in the race for postwar success in the Gulf is Oman. Arguably the most perceptive article by an Arab author since the war began was in last week’s Economist under the headline: “America’s friends must help extricate it from an unlawful war.” It was by Badr Albusaidi, Oman’s foreign minister, who mediated the last round of apparently promising nuclear talks between America and Iran.

The Albusaidis are the Kennedys of their country, occupying seven cabinet posts. But, unlike the JFKs and RFKs, the Albusaidis follow the Omani tradition of rarely putting their heads above the parapet. Why intervene now? Because for strategic, diplomatic, geographical, political and economic reasons, Oman is likely to emerge as the new jewel in the crown of tomorrow’s Gulf.

Its Switzerland-style neutrality for many years has paid off. Over the past few weeks, Iran has fired only two or three token missiles in its direction. An Omani economic boom is coming anyway, thanks to the imminent completion of long-planned rail and pipeline infrastructure links to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. These have been encouraged by the new ruler Sultan Haitham, author of the government blueprint “Oman Vision 2040,” which aims to bring in $50 billion in foreign direct investment.

To do this, the Sultan needs help. MbZ and other Gulf leaders may need to swallow their irritation over Oman’s history of fence-sitting. If Abu Dhabi and the Gulf Co-operation Council decide to embark on an economic reconstruction program when hostilities cease, Oman – in cooperation with Abu Dhabi – would give tomorrow’s Gulf a great future. But be careful about such predictions. Experienced travelers in these desert sands remember what Lord Curzon said when he was foreign secretary in 1923: “The Arab world is a university where the student never takes his degree.”

Trump falls back on ‘you’re fired!’ as midterms loom

Pam Bondi’s departure as attorney general has prompted the usual Kremlinologist speculation. One theory has it that Donald Trump was furious that she may have warned Democrat Eric Swalwell about a planned FBI release of documents detailing his past relationship with a Chinese spy. Bondi’s replacement, Todd Blanche, dismissed these claims as false. Another theory is that the President had finally had enough of her errors over the handling of the Epstein files, given Bondi was recently subpoenaed in a bipartisan effort by the House. And Trump is widely reported to be frustrated at her failure to indict his archenemies, former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Those who are sympathetic to MAGA will have their own reasons for being unhappy with Bondi. Around 23,000 criminal cases were dropped by the DoJ in the first few months of her tenure, including more than 900 cases of federal program fraud. It’s difficult to cut waste and drain the swamp if your Justice Department chooses not to pursue potential fraudsters.

“We love Pam,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “She will be transitioning to a much-needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future.” Whatever the proximate cause for her departure, it’s clear that the President is growing frustrated with his wider team. Kristi Noem was removed from the Department of Homeland Security last month and there is talk that Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard, FBI Director Kash Patel, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick or Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer may be next. The great promise of Trump 2.0 was operational stability. The “you’re fired!” mantra of his first term was supposed to have been left behind. But things have changed.

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Trump is gearing up for November’s midterms with his worst-ever approval ratings among independents. Voters are feeling despondent, despite genuine successes by the administration. Illegal border crossings are close to zero, crime is down and inflation is back under control. Yet the White House is failing to convert those successes into support among voters, as we argue in our leading article in the next edition of The Spectator World. Meanwhile, Americans broadly disapprove of the war with Iran. Trump is spending his time on an unpopular foreign conflict rather than touting his domestic successes.

Republicans on Capitol Hill aren’t helping matters. They’ve proven unable to pass the hugely popular SAVE Act, which would require voters to prove US citizenship before casting their ballots. And they’ve failed to pin the blame for airport disruptions on the Democrats undermining DHS funding, as Daniel McCarthy recently wrote for us. The conventional wisdom has been that, while the Democrats might retake the House in the midterms, the GOP was safe in the upper chamber. Prediction markets indicate that the race has seriously tightened over the past few weeks. If Democrats are able to retake the Senate, Trump appointments will struggle at confirmation hearings.

That risk to future appointments means this could be Trump’s last opportunity to shake up his cabinet. For that reason, it seems likely that we will see more departures in the coming weeks. The President needs lieutenants who are able to communicate his successes in the run-up to November. Swing voters want to see competence, discipline and proof that the administration is focusing on the cost of living. Attack dogs like Noem and Bondi may have energized the MAGA base, but horseback adverts and shouting about the Dow Jones was always unlikely to inspire wider confidence.

This article originally appeared in Freddy Gray’s Americano newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.

DC’s rat genocide

Like Amsterdam, like New York City, Washington is a rat city. Old buildings and moisture create the conditions for them to thrive. Rats provide the midsized city with classical urban charm.

On the other hand, they’re vermin. As of this week, it’s official: DC Health is putting rats on the pill. The agency is planning to put “edible fertility control bait in areas prone to large numbers of rats.”

Cockburn wonders if putting rodents on birth control is a little like attempting a regime change in a foreign nation. How much do we actually know about the delicate balance of the ecosystem? If we sterilize the rats, what comes next? Must we then move to kill all the eels in the Potomac?

It’s true that rats are a health hazard, carrying diseases like salmonella and the bubonic plague in their feces and saliva. Cockburn advises the health department to start in northwest, particularly Adams Morgan. Yet he hopes that population control doesn’t reach the levels of rat genocide. It would be sad to never experience the small thrill of seeing a rat scurry out of a trashcan in Georgetown again. Besides, they’re hardly the filthiest rodents in this city. Who would we, as a species, be without them?

On our radar

SPARE CHANGE The Trump administration is requesting $1.5 trillion for defense in its FY 2027 budget.

MARCH ON American employers added 178,000 jobs in March and unemployment dropped to 4.3 percent, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics.

CAN’T BE-LEAVITT Karoline Leavitt joined Erika Kirk for a Turning Point USA event at DC’s George Washington University last night. “You always want to be the most well-read person in the room,” Leavitt told Kirk, “and I try to be every day. But Donald Trump always is.”

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Sinners of the week

Cockburn is having a contemplative Good Friday, reflecting on the sacrifice of the cross and how the Lamb of God took away the sins of the world. In Washington, we are perhaps more in need of absolution than most.

Take the top Pentagon aide Ricky Buria, who’s been bearing false witness in an attempt to catch leakers. According to the New York Post, Buria spread a false rumor that he and his boss, War Secretary Pete Hegseth, had donned disguises to go out drinking – in a ham-fisted attempt to see who snitched to the press about it.

Then, aside from the usual accusations of pride and greed, President Trump added blasphemy to the list this week by comparing himself to Jesus. “On Palm Sunday, Jesus entered Jerusalem as crowds welcomed him with praise honoring him as king,” he said. “They call me king now. Can you believe it?”

And what about the lustful staffer who last week came up with the “OnlyFarms” gimmick as a means of directing people toward the Agriculture section of the White House website? Surely there’s a less porn-brained way to tout how the Trump administration has helped American farmers.

The horniness appears to be rubbing off on POTUS too, judging by this morning’s Truth Social post: “With a little more time, we can easily OPEN THE HORMUZ STRAIT, TAKE THE OIL, & MAKE A FORTUNE. IT WOULD BE A ‘GUSHER’ FOR THE WORLD??? President DONALD J. TRUMP” Why did he have to punctuate it like that?

Cockburn wishes a happy Easter to his readers, and the city. Let’s hope we can all do better.

Bondi for hire

Poor Pam. President Trump moved quickly yesterday to catapult Attorney General Pam Bondi from the cabinet. Trump confirmed her departure on Truth Social a mere three hours after a Semafor story suggested she was destined for the exit. But what’s next for the nation’s top lawyer?

Trump wrote that Bondi will “be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector.” That rules out his go-to means of moving someone on: either making them an ambassador or a “special envoy.” Cockburn has some ideas for possible landing spots.

First: why not Palantir Pam? Given her work with the Epstein files release, we know she’s a dab hand with tech. She’d fit right in there, or at any other Tolkien-themed dystopian Silicon Valley firm.

Or, given her past as a FARA-registered lobbyist for Qatar, what about FIFA? The World Cup is just a couple of months away and FIFA President Gianni Infantino, who has property in the Gulf state, is always keen to stress how good his friendship with Trump is.

She could also put her Middle East experience to use at World Liberty Financial, the Zach Witkoff-founded crypto venture which Trump’s sons are all involved in. The UAE’s national security advisor, Tahnoun bin Zayed al-Nahyan, happens to own a 49 percent stake.

Finally, there’s the charitable option. Bondi would fit right in at the ASPCA, given her long-documented love of dogs. If she took up a senior role there, she could help atone for the misdeeds of her former colleague Kristi Noem. From Justice Department to Justice for Cricket…

Trump has triggered a wave of European soul-searching

As world leaders grapple with Donald Trump’s second term, his war with Iran has accelerated European multipolarism, with leaders on the continent searching for alternative solutions to American isolationism. How far should Europe pool security and defence? Should there be a European version of the Anglo ‘Five Eyes’ alliance, as the Netherlands’s coalition government, led by their new prime minister Rob Jetten, has suggested? Is the proposal from Renew Europe – the European Parliament’s centrist grouping – for a Nato-like trade alliance between European countries and their democratic allies – like Canada, Japan and South Korea – realistic? 

The crisis has also injected some energy into Brussels, with reports that the European Union is trying to resolve the ambiguity around its own mutual assistance clause. Less well known than Nato’s Article 5, the EU’s Article 42(7) states that ‘member states shall act jointly in a spirit of solidarity’ if activated – including through military aid. It has only been triggered once, by France, in response to the 2015 terrorist attacks. There remains ambiguity, however, about how and when member states should activate the clause. 

For those countries which are members of both Nato and the EU, the clause also says that Nato remains ‘the foundation of their collective defence’. It is unclear how to resolve tensions between the two and how the EU instrument actually works. 

The issue of resolving the EU’s mutual assistance mechanism is a consequence of the attack on the island of Cyprus, as part of the wider conflict in the Middle East. Cyprus is one of four EU countries not part of Nato. While the drone attack was directed at British territory on the island, at Akrotiri, this has not quelled concerns about the Republic of Cyprus being targeted – whether deliberately or accidentally. There is an assumption that the British Overseas Territory is subject to Nato’s clause, through the UK’s membership, but this remains at the discretion of the British government. Cyprus did not activate the EU mechanism but their president has sought to move the issue up the agenda for greater clarity. Cyprus currently holds the presidency of the European Council.

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There has also been renewed discussion about Cyprus joining Nato – something Nicosia has long coveted. Membership has been complicated by the frozen conflict on the island, with Turkey consistently vetoing Nato cooperation with Cyprus over the unrecognised Turkish-controlled territory on the northern side of the island. 

Membership is controversial though. Some see it as a step towards resolution of the Cypriot question, a shared security formula towards reunification. Others fear the opposite could happen – it could entrench partition through multilateral recognition. What is certain is that there is now new attention on the Cypriot issue, compared to the 50th anniversary of the island’s division in 2024, which appeared to pass by without serious attention from Europe at large on resolving the question. 

Cyprus isn’t the only nation seeking to resolve cooperation ‘anomalies’. Moldova has announced its intention to leave the Russian-led Commonwealth of Independent States. While cooperation ceased years ago, the move is a symbolic one towards European integration for a country which has an ambitious goal to join the EU by 2030. 

The Icelandic government, which came to power in 2024 with a goal to hold a referendum on EU accession, has expedited its plans and has announced a referendum at the end of August on whether to resume negotiations about joining. Most polls show no clear winner, except that the issue of security edges it for the ‘Yes’ campaign, especially after Trump’s threats against its neighbour, Greenland (Trump also often referred to the two territories interchangeably).

The result of the Icelandic referendum will be closely watched by its EFTA-partner Norway, which has seen support for joining the EU slowly rise over the past decade. In February, arch-Europhile Ine Eriksen Soreide was confirmed as the leader of Norway’s opposition conservative party, Hoyre. This could see a renewed push for Norway to reopen questions about membership. This is happening with speed, with Soreide announcing last month that, in her opinion, Oslo ‘would be best served by being full members of the EU’.

Alongside Moldova, there are nine other EU candidate, and potential candidate, countries. With much energy and focus on Ukraine and Moldova, Balkan countries have feared their processes are stalling (North Macedonia has been a candidate for over two decades). Looking to get on the front foot, the Serbian and Albanian prime ministers issued a joint text last month calling for a ‘realistic’ path for a quicker integration, which would see countries join most EU institutions but cede veto rights and a role in parliament. How such a path would work in practice remains unclear, but it was an interesting alternative to the two-tier Europe envisaged by Emmanuel Macron a few years ago. 

Any flexibility shown by the EU raises interesting questions for London, at a time when the Labour government is seeking closer ties with Brussels. This week, Keir Starmer announced that the Iran war and subsequent energy crisis are clear grounds for closer economic integration. Could the EU reform in time to admit Britain to a second tier? And what price would be paid by the UK? It isn’t clear that the British public are willing for the question to be reopened. Yet the UK is currently stuck between a fraying special relationship with America and a Europe which is both expanding and turning inward. As other countries advance their own solutions to Trump’s isolationism, ten years after Brexit, it is still unclear who Britain should turn to. 

The fate of the Iran war lies in the Strait of Hormuz

Unless something shifts profoundly in the current direction of the US war on Iran, the Iranian regime appears set to survive this round of conflict. Survival alone does not represent victory for Tehran. If, however, the fighting ends with the Iranians still in control of the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic balance in the Middle East will have shifted, with likely profound consequences for the future direction of the region. 

The US and Israel are continuing to demonstrate their absolute superiority over Iran in the conventional military arena. Israel’s air force is working its way down a long list of regime and military targets. But planners in Israel no longer expect that their air action will plausibly lead to or assist a popular revolt in Iran to bring down the regime. No such revolt looks likely to appear. Rather, the Iranian system is currently demonstrating its durability in a number of key areas.

Regarding the nuclear file, the regime maintains access to around 450 kg of uranium enriched to 60 per cent. This means that should it choose to do so, it could move rapidly (within a few months) to produce sufficient uranium enriched to weapons-grade for the production of about ten nuclear devices, according to an IAEA yardstick.   

Regarding Iran’s ballistic missile programme, undoubtedly its launch capacities have been severely battered in the course of the last month. Still, Iran (and its Lebanese, Yemeni and Iraqi allies) are launching drones and missiles at Israel, US targets and US Gulf allies. No less importantly, the capacity to produce missiles and drones and the relationships (with Russia and China) which underlie Tehran’s capacities in this arena are intact. It can therefore be expected that at the conclusion of the present round of fighting, the regime will quickly set about seeking to repair and replenish its damaged but not destroyed missile and drone programmes.  

On the matter of Iran’s network of client and proxy organizations across the region, this element of power projection has not been seriously damaged in the last month. Elements of this network account for the three additional fronts in the war, alongside the direct confrontation between the US, Israel and Iran. The three additional fronts are south Lebanon, where Israeli forces are operating in response to Hizballah’s decision to enter the war on 4 March; Yemen, where the Houthis have begun ballistic missile attacks on Israel; and Iraq, where Iran’s client militias are engaged in ongoing attacks on US and allied facilities.  

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Realistically, these three key elements can only be comprehensively defeated by the destruction of the Iranian regime itself. The nuclear program will always be subject to revival for as long as the regime possesses the will to revive it and Iran has the native scientific knowledge necessary for this. The same goes for the missile and drone programmes. The various proxies can plausibly be challenged by local actors, but the removal of the Tehran regime would at a stroke reduce them to their natural dimensions as local players. It is Iranian backing and capacities alone which turn, for example, Lebanese Hezbollah or the Houthis into a danger for their neighbours, rather than merely a negative presence in their own countries.  

But given the likely survival of the regime after this round, the remaining question will be whether the Iranian regime emerges from the current fighting weakened and diminished, or strategically strengthened, despite the undoubted serious physical damage it has suffered. This depends on whether Iran’s current de facto seizure of control of the Strait of Hormuz can be reversed or whether the fighting ends with Tehran still in effective control of the waterway.  

If Iranian control of Hormuz can be broken, then the US administration and the government of Israel will be able to make a plausible case that a dangerous foe has been significantly weakened at manageable cost. It will not be the end of the long contest with Iran and will not be available to be presented as such (particularly given the hollow claims of that type made after the ’12 Day War’ last June). But Iran will have been shown to have no real defences against the superior conventional power of its enemies. If its Hormuz gambit is reversed, it will similarly be clear that its undoubted abilities in the asymmetric warfare field cannot be translated into real strategic gain, except against less powerful local enemies.  

If, however, the war ends with Iran still in de facto control of Hormuz, then the implications are profound. Iran will have demonstrated that its long investment in irregular capacities has conferred on it means of response to more powerful enemies which can be leveraged into real power. By imposing potential economic consequences on the United States and its allies, alongside the potential physical costs of action to regain control of Hormuz, Tehran will have forced its enemies to blink first. This fact will be apparent to all regional forces. The likely outcome will be efforts by both regional and global players to reconcile with Tehran.  

Already, a number of countries dependent on use of the strait for their energy needs have reached separate accommodations with the Iranians to ensure the safe transit of their ships. This is a sign of what is to come if Iranian control is not broken. The list of countries predictably includes Russia, China and Pakistan. But Greece, the Philippines, Thailand and India have also reached pragmatic accommodation with the current de facto custodians of the strait. More countries are likely to follow if the current situation holds.   

To the region, it will be clear that the will of the US was thwarted by Iranian action. The fact that the conventional Iranian navy is largely at the bottom of the sea won’t offset this. Everyone in the region knows that Iran never predicated its power on conventional sea power. Rather, the asymmetrical methods of the Revolutionary Guards Corps will be understood to have carried the day.  

The build-up of US military power in the Middle East is not yet completed. When the second Marine Expeditionary Unit arrives later this month, the choice facing the US and its allies will be clear: action to open Hormuz or accepting a significant Iranian strategic achievement in the current round of fighting. 

Why the Met police went soft on crime

After months, years and even decades of dismay about the state of law and order in this country, a leader of one of Britain’s most renowned retailers has intervened to make the simple plea most have been making for ages: can the police, and the authorities charged with overseeing law enforcement bodies, just focus on their job of preventing, stopping and punishing crime?

Those in charge of businesses don’t intrude on politics lightly. Their main job is to sell produce, not change the world or potentially alienate customers with their opinions. So it tells us a great deal about the state of crisis in Britain now that in the wake of the disturbances in Clapham, south London, in recent days, Thinus Keeve, Marks & Spencer’s retail director, has felt obliged to make an intervention.

The scenes of mayhem in Clapham that have reverberated throughout the nation – not least because they seem so distressingly familiar to the inhabitants of the towns and cities of this country. Referring to this, Keeve has launched an attack on London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan, urging him to get a grip on the lawlessness and violence that is putting his staff and the public at risk. He urged Khan, who only a few days ago dismissed the ‘lies’ people were telling about the capital, to ‘prioritise effective policing’ as ‘more brazen, more organised and more aggressive’ attacks escalate across Britain’s high streets

It’s a most welcome intervention. Keeve has articulated what small retailers, and what the voiceless and powerless ordinary people of this country, have been reporting and witnessing in the past few years: the seemingly inexorable collapse in civic society and the breakdown of our formerly high-trust society. While London is not the dystopian cesspit some depict it to be, there can be no doubt that the public sphere throughout the land is in a parlous state. The exponential increase in shoplifting – done openly and with barefaced swagger – and the epidemic of phone thefts, are the most glaring symptoms of a country on the brink.

Perhaps an even more worrying cause for concern is the fact that most people no longer bother to confront or report thieves anymore. There is now the perception that the police will not make any attempt to pursue and prosecute wrongdoers. A sense of passivity and fatalism now pervades. Khan’s boast, to the effect that ‘at least you’re less likely to get murdered in London’, feels very perverse indeed, itself even having a strangely dystopian ring to it.

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In a grim circular irony, the road to this current nadir began some time ago with the emergence of the notion that we were no longer autonomous citizens and responsible human beings, but instead passive cogs in the machine of something called ‘society’. This conceit, one of the most fundamental shifts in the postwar consensus, dictated that people weren’t responsible for their own behaviour. They were passive victims of circumstances – first poverty, later racism and ‘low self-esteem’. This ideology fully insinuated itself into all our institutions, not least into our police forces themselves.

Over subsequent years, the police made the fatal mistake of drawing their numbers no longer from the ranks of working-class men who could spot, and knew how to deal with, a miscreant, but from a graduate class who subscribed to this new ideology. They refused to judge or blame anyone. For this well-meaning, naïve coterie, there were no good or bad people in the world. For them, the only crimes left were ‘being judgemental’ or ‘blaming the victim’.

The politicisation of the police at the hands of this detached liberal class bequeathed us the hugely destructive 1999 Macpherson report, the principal legacy of which was to instil the fear of God into any white officer who even thought of apprehending a black suspect. It gave us the nebulous concept of ‘hate crimes’, which effectively made hurting people’s feelings an offence. It also gave us the only recently-abolished ‘non-crime hate incident’, a measure introduced on the understanding that this country consisted not of rational individuals, but one in which no part should behave to the detriment of another. The notion that we are all cogs in a machine has also been responsible for our ‘two-tier’ justice system and this year, ‘anti-Muslim hostility’: what punishment you receive now depends on how bad your words affect ‘community cohesion’.

It gave us the spurious notion that police forces should ‘reflect’ the community they serve. Yet most people would prefer their police to simply protect the community it serves. They want a police force to stop crime from happening and punish those who commit it – and with no excuses. As the hugely successful Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, Sir Stephen Watson, put it in a recent Spectator interview: ‘Here’s a novel concept – arrest bad people.’

What the death of my beloved son taught me about Easter

The hawthorn hedges are white with blossom; the countryside looks set for a wedding. Even in the small garden of my hospital, spring is inescapable. Cherry and magnolia bloom. Viburnum scents the air, young leaves come to the trees. Hospitals are where most lives begin, and where many end. Hospices shepherd only a small minority of deaths, about one in 20, often those of the middle aged whose diseases are more predictable. Frailty is less orderly, and the fitful hazards of age bring many to the general wards where I work. More of us die in hospital than anywhere else.

In the Emergency Department I met the woman who became my wife. I recall meeting an impressive colleague who made the world feel more open, more various. She remembers meeting a man who persuaded her to order Chinese during a long shift, then, when she was summoned to a cardiac arrest, ate her crispy duck. Later our children were born in the same hospital.

When our son died he was brought to a cubicle in the Emergency Department where, as a young man, I had seen and stitched a hundred people. I saw him for the last time in the mortuary. His fringe, a mild but cheerful adolescent quiff, had been flattened. “But he hated it like that!” his sister cried out in despair. He was a corpse, and our son no longer.

A man, radiant after the birth of his son, was punched without warning by someone in so much pain they found another’s joy unbearable. Pilate released Barabbas and sent Christ to His Cross: the drowned and the saved. Bede said Easter was named for the pagan goddess of spring, of renewal. The Gospels tell us Christ died and rose again during Passover, which was always a spring festival. Winter is gone and a dead world has risen, but not all of what mattered most has returned. What sort of spring wakes the hedgerows and the weeds, but not my boy? In agony, faith fails. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

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A reader once commented, beneath a piece in which I mentioned my son, that, after the death of his wife, he had slowly come to feel that it was he who had died, and that the world he lived in without her must be hell. His words stay with me. Christ’s cry on the Cross echoed the opening of Psalm 22. “Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?” If God did not suffer in His Son’s agony, He merits something other than worship.

In a corridor outside the lecture theaters I saw a man, grateful for quiet, sit and weep. A few moments later, doors opened, and out tumbled a hundred students, fresh from being told they had passed their exams, and become doctors. Their voices rang with elation. The sound must have been painful for him, but perhaps it helped. When my son was a baby he gave voice lustily just as I was on the phone to an elderly uncle, commiserating with him on the death of his wife, my aunt. I apologized for my baby’s cries and was shushed, and told the sound of new life brought comfort. The strength and pain of being young can’t come again, yet are for others undiminished.

Strange, to have built a life of memories in hospitals, in surroundings so ugly: scented by decay and long boiled food, packed with suffering, fretted by kindness. Life in hospital infects my thoughts long after shifts have ended, keeping my mind in stale corridors and viewless wards. But the work can also help. We are lost when we aren’t useful, and in times of despair, work is a sea anchor in a storm.

Slightly to my regret, I have grown out of the chocolate eggs I once loved, and which were what Easter meant to me when I was a child. The sun shines, the wards flood with light, the beds are always full of the old and the frail. We don’t get to choose. Whether we welcome it or not, whether we deserve it or not, Easter is here again, and spring with it. Somewhere children are feeling the joy that chocolate eggs once gave me. Good. I have watched a thousand deaths and seen many die content, knowing spring still comes for those they love. Macbeth, in what he knew was his final fight, said that while yet he lived the gashes looked better on others. Life without my son in it makes no sense to me, but the world is full of sons who gladden their fathers’ hearts, and it is good that this is so.

This is what Trump means by ‘victory’ in Iran

President Trump has now told us something very important about the war with Iran. Ponder his address to the nation this week and you discover how he defines victory. Nothing that happens from here on out will change that.

As Trump sees it, he is the winner, having achieved all his goals. He has accomplished regime change in Iran by eliminating the men who led the regime when the war started. America has so damaged the country’s military infrastructure that it will not be able to produce or deliver a nuclear weapon for at least a decade, by which time it will be up to a future American president to take the needed action. So, no need to cart away or destroy Iran’s enriched uranium. The Strait remains closed, but that is a problem for the EU to solve, by force if necessary, or by buying oil and LNG from the US, where they are in ample supply.

Iran sees things differently. The aim of the Iranian regime has always been survival. And despite Trump’s claim to have achieved regime change, in a policy sense the regime remains quite the same as it was before the bombs fell.

That regime will retain its enriched uranium, enough for 11 nuclear bombs. Despite major damage to its missile sites, Iran retains the ability to rain death on Israel and reach Berlin if it chooses. It retains control of the Strait of Hormuz, with little fear of the EU, which has neither the will nor the means of prying the Strait open as French President Emmanuel Macron has made clear. It can allow transit to nations of its choosing, probably excluding any that play host to American installations or continue to trade oil in dollars. Perhaps most important, Sunni domination of the Gulf is now shifting to Shia Iran, free to destroy its neighbors’ energy, water and other infrastructure without fear of retaliation by American forces that will soon be returning home.

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Yes, Iran faces a major rebuilding program, especially of its military and weaponry. But note: it has not abandoned its claim for reparations from nations within reach of its missiles and/or desperate for access to the Strait. This might not mean winning in the sense of the second world war, when the winners walked off with signed surrender documents, but it doesn’t look like losing.

Other winners include Russia, a steadfast ally of Iran, which supplied it with vital intelligence that helped it locate American bases and with an apparently limitless supply of drones. In an effort to rein in politically damaging gas prices resulting from the war, Trump attempted to increase supply by removing sanctions on Russian oil. Sales increased, and the price obtained jumped from about $50 per barrel to $100. The resulting windfall enabled Putin to cancel plans for unpopular tax increases.

There are losers. Prime among them is Israel. It remains exposed to an enemy that is sworn to destroy it and has the weaponry to do it serious damage, while its own ability to ward off death from the skies is not what it once was. It faces an enemy in Lebanon – Hezbollah – that continues to take guidance and receive aid from Iran, and an enemy in Yemen – the Houthis – who swing into action against Israel when Iran directs them to do so. And it remains sufficiently dependent on America to worry that its political support there is not what it once was.

The next major losers from a war they insisted was not their war, and in which they loudly proclaimed they would not get involved, are Europe and the UK. Both refused to allow Trump to use American bases operating from their territory or to transit their airspace and then doubled down by refusing to provide requested help in clearing the Strait, at least until the shooting stopped.

Trump considers it bizarre that the EU and Britain – “cowards” – should expect him to continue to help them in their struggles against Putin in Ukraine and who knows wherever next.

If we can no longer use those bases to defend America’s interests, then NATO is a one-way street; then NATO is about us keeping troops in Europe to defend Europe… Then why are we in NATO?

So asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio during an interview with Fox News this week. If Trump does redeploy military assets now in Britain, Prime Minister Miliband, oops, Starmer, can convert US air bases in Britain to wind farms.

So done and dusted and back to domestic affairs in triumph, with share prices rising and gas prices falling, to shore up the fading chances of Republicans emerging from the midterms with control of congress.

Ignore the propaganda war

Prediction: by the time you read this, the joint US-Israeli operation in Iran will be all but over. In fact, it had mostly ended by the start of April. The Kool-Aid-dispensing press has been telling us since the conflict began that Iran was winning. They wanted it so badly to be true. Being adept at magical thinking, they also believe that what they wanted to be the case would suddenly, hey presto, become the case. A cover story in the Economist declared “Advantage Iran.” “A month of bombing Iran,” that once-sober publication announced, “has achieved nothing… For now, at least, the advantage lies with the Islamic Republic.”

Not to be outdone, the Financial Times weighed in with “Iran could emerge from the war stronger and more dangerous.” Right. Iran’s navy? Sunk. Its air force? Destroyed. Its stockpiles of missiles and drones? Incinerated. Ditto its military infrastructure. Its leadership? Eliminated down two or three levels, not just the turban-sporting mullahs but also the IRGC commanders, Basij thugs and senior scientists: all gone to their 72 virgins.

I loved this exchange between Donald Trump and a reporter:

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REPORTER: “The Iranian government threatened a bunch of US companies in the region today.”

DJT: “With what? What did they threaten them with? BB guns? They don’t have much left to threaten.”

REPORTER: “My question for you is –”

DJT: “You made a statement. What did they threaten them with? I don’t know. Tell me. How did they threaten them?”

REPORTER: “All I know is that they threatened them, sir.”

DJT: “They said something nasty?”

Mean tweets, possibly. One theme that the propaganda press has wheeled out time and again is that Operation Epic Fury has no clear strategy or goal. They say this on the tried and true totalitarian gambit that repeating a lie often enough makes the lie come, or seem to come, true.  When President Trump first announced the operation, on March 1, he clearly laid out his goals. Prime Minister Netanyahu did the same. Spokesmen for both governments have periodically reiterated those goals to an obstinate press that, like a patient suffering from Tourette syndrome, keeps yelling “quagmire,” “exit strategy,” “endless war.” They just can’t help it.

Repetitio mater memoriae. Iran, the world’s biggest exporter of terrorism, must not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons.  In order to prevent that, President Trump said on March 1: “We are going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. We are going to annihilate their navy. We’re going to ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has frequently recapitulated these themes. Just the other day, he made explicit something that has typically been lurking only half said in the background. Some people would say it has to do with religion. In fact, it has to do with the lunatic deformation of religion that is Shia Islam. “Under no circumstances,” Rubio said, “can a country run by radical Shia clerics with an apocalyptic vision of the future ever possess nuclear weapons, and under no circumstances can they be allowed to hide and protect that program and their ambitions behind a shield of missiles and drones that no one can do anything about.”

To those who keep asking “Why now?”, Rubio was as clear and bracing as a mountain stream. “We were on the verge of an Iran that had so many missiles and so many drones, that no one could do anything about their nuclear weapons program in the future. That was an intolerable risk. This was our last best chance to eliminate that conventional threat, that conventional shield that they were trying to build, and the President made the right decision to wipe it out now.”

From the very beginning of this operation, President Trump has emphasized that there were two dimensions to Operation Epic Fury. One was military. The goal of that part of the operation was to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, smash its offensive military capability and eliminate the personnel carrying out its repressive agenda of destruction. That goal has been accomplished.

The second dimension involved a direct appeal to the Iranian people, the 90-odd percent of the population that loathes the Islamic regime and has suffered under its theocratic repression for the past 47 years.  “When we are finished,” President Trump urged, “take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations.”

This was not a military effort aimed at regime change. It was a military effort to clear the way, to make it possible for the people to choose the government that best suited their needs.

Throughout the last month, we have been told time and again by the putatively omniscient press that Epic Fury was not about the things that President Trump said it was about. Really, we were told, it was about oil, or China, or Israel. But the 18th-century philosopher Joseph Butler was wiser than our know-it-alls. Everything, that canny bishop noted, “is what it is and not another thing.”

Butler was arguing against the selfishness theory of man, the idea that whatever someone says he is doing something for, “really,” “at bottom,” he is doing it for selfish reasons. Butler made the inestimably important distinction between doing something out of an interest which is one’s own – who else’s could it be? – and doing something for self-interested reasons. Trump has been warning about Iran’s nuclear ambitions at least since 1987. But the reflexively anti-Trump media can’t abide the thought that he might be acting out of principle for the reasons that he stated.

A final thought from the great translator of Plato, Benjamin Jowett. “Precautions are always blamed,” Jowett observed, “because when they are successful they are said to have been unnecessary.”

A rational person shudders at the prospect of a nuclear-armed Islamist Iran. Then, on the contrary, there are the carping chihuahuas of the anti-Trump press. Expect an abundance of blaming as Trump takes his victory lap. How different the world would have been had Trump not exercised precautions so robustly.