Stephen Daisley

You can tell a lot about a leader by the diplomats they choose to represent them. Brezhnev had Anatoly Dobrynin, Nixon had Henry Kissinger, and Benjamin Netanyahu has Regina George. The queen bitch of North Shore High, fictional setting of the 2004 teen comedy Mean Girls, is blunt, conniving and vicious with a mid-hallway putdown. Played by sweetness personified Rachel McAdams but scripted by the acid Tina Fey, Regina is not someone you'd like to encounter in double French -- or at Camp David. That is no doubt why the Israelis selected her as the latest face of digital hasbara. Ayatollah Khamenei -- probably not a connoisseur of high school chick flicks -- had a run-in with Regina on Monday.

On Sunday, thousands of demonstrators will gather outside the Saudi Arabian embassy in London for the annual al-Quds Day march. From there, they will proceed through the capital chanting 'from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free' – which is to say, the State of Israel will be destroyed. Alongside the Palestinian tricolour, many will be waving another flag: the banner of Hezbollah.  In doing so, none of them will be breaking the law. Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation with a bloody rap sheet but the UK Government only proscribes its paramilitary wing, not the group as a whole. As such, the Hezbollah flag, which depicts an assault rifle and the legend ‘The Islamic Resistance in Lebanon’, can be freely flown on the streets of London.

Are you considering a career in Labour politics but fear you may be left behind amid all the exciting changes the party is undergoing? Maybe you want to be a part of the Jez revolution but can’t get your head around the ever-developing terminology. Perhaps you are eyeing up a safe seat but aren’t sure which paramilitary cell’s endorsement would most impress the selection panel.  Help is at hand with this guide that takes you through the key terms of Corbynspeak.  Gammon: Self-righteous middle-aged man who voted Leave, thinks everything was better back in the Seventies, and doesn’t get along with ethnic minorities. Deployed, boldly, by fans of Jeremy Corbyn. Prosciutto: Blairite gammon.

When it became clear that Labour had fallen far short of its overhyped expectations in the local elections, I tweeted this: https://twitter.com/JournoStephen/status/992317867004657664 I would now like to retract, but only in one instance. Adam Langleben, councillor for West Hendon in Barnet, lost his seat on Thursday. Given Barnet's sizeable Jewish population, and Labour now being the Hampstead Hezbollah, in all likelihood his party's antisemitism cost him re-election. Which is perverse since Langleben has been one of the bravest partisans in a counter-insurgency of Jews determined to expose and expel antisemites from Labour's ranks.

Theresa May's tragicomic run of rotten luck continues. Amber Rudd has self-deported to the backbenches and the Prime Minister will have to find a credible replacement at a moment of acute strife. Why anyone would want the job is a mystery to most of us, but then we lack that combination of ambition and self-delusion essential to political life. The Home Office is where potential is thrown on the rack and brutalised, where careers go to die slow, ignominious deaths; it is Whitehall's ultimate hostile environment. (Ministers disagree and began speculating about a Rudd return with unseemly haste. They may be right but they could at least feign a bout of reflection and contrition.) Home Secretaries enter the office with one of two mindsets.

What's Nicola Sturgeon playing at on Brexit? Quick answer: politics. Longer answer: politics.  The SNP leader has rejected a deal to resolve the impasse between Westminster and Holyrood over the repatriation of powers from Brussels. She accuses the Tories of a 'power grab' because some areas of responsibility will initially go to the UK rather than Scottish parliament and threatens to deny consent to the government's Brexit Bill. If she does so – and her SNP holds a majority of seats at Holyrood with unofficial junior coalition partners, the Greens – it will fix a procedural wheel clamp on Brexit. At which point, the only way the Bill could go ahead is if Westminster explicitly overruled the Scottish Parliament.  You see where I'm going with this?

The best that can be said for Jeremy Corbyn’s response to air strikes against the Assad regime is that he is at least consistent. Why did he assert that the smart cuff meted out last night risked ‘escalating further… an already devastating conflict’? Because in Corbyn’s worldview, it is the felling of chemical weapons factories, not the extermination of children with the chemical weapons those factories produce, that escalates conflict. Why did he echo Syrian state media in questioning the legality of military action? Because Corbyn is a cynic who calculates that feigning concern for the global rules-based order -- something he believes in only intermittently -- is useful for stalling, deflection and water-muddying.