Jawad Iqbal

Two questions dominated last night’s Eurovision Song Contest final in Malmo, Sweden. First, whether 20-year-old Eden Golan, Israel’s entrant, would defy the odds and actually win. And secondly, whether some kind of security breach involving pro-Palestinian protesters would result in the final being disrupted. In the end, proceedings passed off relatively peacefully. The eventual winner was Switzerland’s Nemo with ‘The Code’, a song mixing rap, pop and opera. A huge public vote helped lift Golan’s entry 'Hurricane' into fifth place. The winning song will be forgotten soon enough, suffering the same fate as the vast majority of entries into the Eurovision Song Contest – a competition that has always been treated as a bit of a joke, a high camp homage to musical nothingness.

The Indian chess prodigy Dommaraju Gukesh has made history by becoming the youngest challenger ever for the world chess title. His shot at the world championship comes after a sensational victory at the prestigious men’s Candidates chess tournament in Toronto last weekend. ‘I am so relieved and so happy’, he told reporters in his trademark calm and understated manner. The 17-year-old will play China’s Ding Liren, the reigning champion, for the world title later this year. The face-off between the two will be the latest twist in a growing geopolitical rivalry: a longstanding border dispute (that led to war in 1962) came to a head again four years ago, when Indian and Chinese troops clashed in the Himalayas. Both are nuclear nations and have ambitions to be the superpower in Asia.

A stake in Selfridges – the most iconic department store in the vast retail emporium of Oxford Street – is again up for grabs. It is the latest chapter in an ongoing financial crisis engulfing its Austrian co-proprietor Signa Group, the property empire built by self-made billionaire, René Benko. The original deal for Selfridges dumped at least £1.7 billion in debt onto the group, which owns four UK department stores, as well as de Bijenkorf in the Netherlands and Brown Thomas and Arnotts in Ireland. Central is now looking for ways to take greater control of Selfridges: last year, it took majority ownership of the Selfridges operating company with a £317 million debt-for-equity deal which diluted Signa’s stake.

Is that it? This is the immediate and understandable reaction in some quarters to the news that Israel has carried out a series of limited air strikes against Iran. Explosions were reported in the sky over the cities of Isfahan and Tabriz. Details are still sketchy but US officials were quick to brief that Israel was behind the attacks. The Israelis have made no public comment: it is official policy never to confirm or deny such military action. The Iranian government, which had promised a ‘massive and harsh response’ to ‘even the tiniest invasion’ was quick to play down the scale of the attack, indicating there was no ‘immediate’ plan for retaliation. Israel has carried out a strike, but it is small enough for the Iranians to brush it off.

The heart sinks at the latest thoughts espoused by David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, on a future Labour government's foreign policy. Lammy has penned a 4,000 word essay for Foreign Affairs on his vision of pursuing 'progressive realism' for Britain on the international stage. It is a less than catchy phrase that amounts to little substance. According to Lammy, Labour’s foreign agenda will attempt to meld together the policy realism of Ernest Bevin, the post-war Labour foreign secretary who helped found Nato, with the ethical foreign policy of Robin Cook, who served as Tony Blair’s foreign secretary when New Labour took power in 1997. Lammy lays it on thick, praising Bevin for making the argument for Britain to acquire nuclear weapons.

The Foreign Office has been criticised as ‘elitist and rooted in the past’ in a scathing report by some of the UK’s most senior former senior diplomats and officials. The report, entitled ‘The World in 2040: Renewing the UK’s approach to International Affairs’, has been penned by the former cabinet secretary Lord Sedwill; a former director general at the Foreign Office, Moazzam Malik; and the former Number 10 foreign policy adviser Tom Fletcher, among others. It certainly doesn’t pull any punches. The authors suggest the Foreign Office should be abolished and replaced by a new Department for International Affairs with ‘fewer colonial era pictures on the wall’ The department is ‘struggling to deliver a clear mandate, prioritisation and resource allocation.

It is now exactly a year since Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s First Minister, rose to the pinnacle of Scottish politics. Pretty much everything that has happened since entitles those who doubted his leadership skills, political judgment and basic competence to mutter 'I told you so'. Even his most diehard supporters within the SNP must be starting to wonder what his leadership is all about. The warning signs were there from the start. Yousaf quickly emerged as the favourite to replace Nicola Sturgeon following her shock resignation last February. He simply wanted the job more than anyone else, and billed himself as the continuity candidate.

It is time to wake up to the growing international threat posed by Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K), the group believed to be behind Friday’s terror attack on a Moscow concert hall that left more than 130 people dead. For far too long this Afghanistan-based offshoot of Islamic State, formed in 2015, has been underestimated. Ignoring it is no longer a safe or wise policy option. Alarm bells have been sounding for some time now about the growing threat posed by IS-K IS-K has been growing in strength in Taliban-led Afghanistan ever since the Americans pulled out of the country in 2021. It has been successful in attracting a growing number of jihadis to its cause through a series of deadly attacks.

Vaughan Gething, the victor in the Welsh Labour leadership contest, will now become Wales’s first black First Minister. It is both a historic moment and a huge personal achievement. Gething, born  in Zambia and raised in Dorset, was also the first black person to become a cabinet minister in one of the UK’s devolved governments, and is the first black leader in any European country. His rise is part and parcel of a wider, equally remarkable, transformation across the political landscape. Once Gething takes up his post (after a formal vote in the Senedd), three of the United Kingdom’s four governments will have non-white leaders.

The contest to be the next leader of the Welsh Labour Party, and more importantly First Minister of Wales, has been something of a snooze fest. The race kicked off in December, when Mark Drakeford, first minister since 2018, announced that he was stepping down. There are two candidates – Vaughan Gething and Jeremy Miles – vying to succeed him. Voting, which began last month, has now closed, with the result due tomorrow. Only Labour members and those who belong to an affiliated organisation, such as a trade union, are allowed to choose, with an estimated 100,000 people allowed to vote. Everyone else, in a country of three million people, doesn’t get a say. Is it any wonder there is such widespread public indifference?

Mr and Mrs Sunak of Downing Street have given a joint interview to Grazia magazine in which they give answers to the most pressing questions facing the country. They don’t bother sweating the small stuff like the state of the economy, the upcoming Budget, or the election prospects of the beleaguered Tories, but instead share their carefully considered thoughts on dividing up the household chores. Akshata Murty gushes that Rishi’s ‘special skill’ is tidying the bedroom. Rishi is not to be outdone when it comes to spilling the secrets of their home life. He confesses to breaking away from his day job (just the small matter of running the country, lest we forget) to go upstairs to the Downing Street flat and make the bed because of his wife’s habit of leaving it in a mess.

The record low turnout for parliamentary elections in Iran, which took place on Friday, is another blow to the regime’s attempts to pretend that all is well in the country. Early reports suggest a turnout of just under 41 per cent nationwide. Iranians in their millions have rejected the regime by choosing to stay at home rather than vote. The elections were never really about the final results (victory is pretty much guaranteed for the motley crew of religious hardliners and social conservatives endorsed by the ruling clerics), but about how many people would actually bother to vote. Turnout matters to the mullahs because the election process exists to give the regime the veneer of democratic legitimacy.

Why would the producers of a new West End play think it a good idea to put on select performances for all-black audiences, effectively telling white theatregoers they’re not welcome on those nights? The idea of Black Out nights (as they have become known) amounts to segregation by race and skin colour. Yet this is exactly what will take place when Slave Play, written by American playwright Jeremy O Harris, starts its run at the Noël Coward Theatre this summer. Is he suggesting black people can only feel safe with other black people? Two nights – 17 July and 17 September – have been allocated to all-black audiences to watch the play 'free from the white gaze'. What does this phrase even mean?

Bayern Munich’s decision to part ways with their coach Thomas Tuchel is a rather bizarre form of managerial sacking. Tuchel is leaving the job but will be allowed to stay in charge until the end of the season. This can only make a team that is in free fall more unstable. In a statement on the club’s website, Jan-Christian Dreesen, the Bayern chief executive, said: ‘In an open, good conversation we came to the decision to mutually end our collaboration in the summer.’ This is the same Dreesen who told reporters hours earlier that Tuchel would not be dismissed anytime soon. Tuchel was singing the same tune about an end to collaboration, but promising to do everything he can ‘to ensure maximum success’. It’s difficult to see how this can work.