Jawad Iqbal

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.

A senior official in Pakistan has publicly confessed to vote-rigging in the country’s general election earlier this month. It is an unprecedented admission of malpractice that raises fresh questions about the legitimacy of the electoral process and whether the final results were manipulated by the country’s all-powerful military. Commissioner Liaqat Ali Chattha claimed that authorities in Rawalpindi, Punjab province, changed the final voting numbers so that the candidates who were ‘losing’ the elections ‘were made to win’. Chattha says there was so much ‘pressure’ on him to manipulate the results that he contemplated suicide, before opting to make a public confession: ‘I take responsibility for the wrong in Rawalpindi.

The Labour party has a problem with Muslims. A new poll suggests that British Muslim voters, who have traditionally supported Labour in huge numbers, are deserting the party over its handling of the Israel-Gaza war. Backing for Labour from the Muslim community has fallen massively since the 2019 general election from 86 per cent to 60 per cent, according to a poll conducted by Survation. It was commissioned by the Labour Muslim Network (LMN), which promotes British Muslim engagement with the party.