Jawad Iqbal

The Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Ed Davey, has come up with a novel way of ensuring his party gets greater coverage during the long weeks of the election campaign. His wheeze is to ensure that, each and every day, he is pictured doing something silly.  It doesn’t help that the party’s leader appears to think that the election campaign is best treated as one big joke On Tuesday, he was pictured repeatedly falling from a paddleboard on Windermere in Cumbria – a stunt to highlight the issue of sewage dumping, apparently. On Wednesday, he was on a bike, peddling down a steep hill, ostensibly en route to the party’s Welsh campaign launch. ‘Having a wheelie great time,’ he tweeted.

Plaid Cymru’s sudden decision to end its co-operation deal with Labour in Wales piles even more pressure on the First Minister, Vaughan Gething. It caps a tumultuous week for Gething, who on Thursday sacked one of his ministers in a row over a leaked text message. The collapse of the deal with Plaid leaves Welsh Labour reliant on other parties in the Senedd to push through vital legislation. The first minister has been in post for barely two months, but the controversies have been coming thick and fast. His political honeymoon period has been brief, at best. Why has Plaid chosen to walk away from the deal with the government at this point? The agreement was due to run out at the end of the year anyway, so why the sudden rush?

A suggested government ban on rainbow-coloured lanyards in the civil service has, perhaps unsurprisingly, proved divisive at the highest reaches of government. The idea for the ban came from Esther McVey, officially a minister without portfolio but more widely known as 'the minister for common sense'.  In a speech on Monday, McVey suggested that permanent secretaries in government departments would take action against staff wearing anything other than officially branded lanyards as part of reforms to stop 'the inappropriate backdoor politicisation of the civil service'. She accused civil servants who used messaging on lanyards of engaging in 'political activism in a visible way'. Any offenders would be provided with new ones by their civil service bosses.

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.