Iran

What’s one woman’s life worth as the great battles about Brexit rage? Nothing at all, apparently, as Boris Johnson’s indifference towards the fate of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe shows. The British mother is, you will recall, being held in an Iranian prison on trumped up spying charges. She says she was just visiting Iran, and there is no reason to disbelieve her. Johnson took it upon himself to risk provoking the country's religious dictatorship into extending her sentence when he told a parliamentary committee that she had been in Iran to train journalists. He later apologised in the Commons, retracting ‘any suggestion she was there in a professional capacity’.

Given the way her Cabinet ministers are behaving at the moment, Theresa May is really rather used to dealing with fragile egos. This will come in handy over the next month when the Prime Minister has to go from what promises to be an extremely tricky Nato summit straight into Donald Trump's visit to the UK. As James says in his politics column this week, the challenges of these events, along with the ongoing problems both in the Cabinet and Parliament over Brexit, will make July one of the hardest months of May's premiership to date. But trying to tell her warring ministers to shut up seems easy compared to the foreign policy challenges that the Prime Minister is facing. They would not be easy for any leader.

In this week’s episode, we talk about Italy’s new coalition – what will the Five Star and Lega partnership mean for Italy and for Europe (00:35)? Journalist Peter Oborne and politician Stephen Crabb also get in a fiery debate about whether Conservative Friends of Israel are a little too friendly (12:00). And, on a slightly different note, we get a dominatrix to explain why powerful men loved to be spanked…(26:30) Italy is forming a government. In the March elections no single party received more than 40% of the vote, leaving the most successful party – the Five Star Movement – forming a strange coalition with the party Lega.

America, meet your European allies in the effort to contain Iran: Emmanuel Macron of France, Theresa May of Britain, and Angela Merkel of Germany. Think of them as the Three M’s. Or perhaps the Three Wise Monkeys. Or even, as the Wise Monkeys are sometimes known, and would probably prefer to be called, the Three Mystic Apes. For each of these three European leaders is affecting a posture of simian ignorance about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and presenting this unwillingness to accept reality as philosophical wisdom.Emmanuel Macron sees no evil in the Iranian regime’s anti-Western, terrorist-sponsoring Islamist millenarianism, because global security must come second to getting the French economy into gear.

If any further evidence was needed about the disingenuousness of Jeremy Corbyn and the dangers a government led by him might pose internationally – not just for Britain but also for Britain’s Nato allies – it is worth watching Corbyn’s interview on Iran with the BBC’s Andrew Marr yesterday. ‘You've been very reluctant to condemn the government of Iran. Can I read you what Amnesty International has said about Iran… ?’ began Marr yesterday, to which Corbyn interrupted him with the extraordinary response: ‘I think that actually, if I may say so, you're spending too much time reading the Daily Mail, do you know that?

It's happened. Jeremy Corbyn has finally broken his silence on Iran. To be fair, he was rather forced into doing so when Andrew Marr raised the topic live on air this morning. Marr put to the Labour leader – who says ‘to stay neutral in times of injustice is to side with the oppressor’ – that he had gone rather quiet on Iran after over 20 people died and more gone missing following clashes between protesters and security forces.   https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/957555007414444033 Corbyn started of by saying Marr had been reading the Daily Mail too often. “I did some programmes for Press TV”  he said. “I ceased to do any programmes when they treated the Green Movement the way that they did.” This is flatly untrue.