Interception

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has promised to support Lebanon "with all our means", and he has told Benjamin Netanyahu that, "Like Hitler, you will be stopped sooner or later." But he could cut off much of the oil supply to Israel whenever he liked. He has not done so.

Elsewhere in NATO, "The Iranian regime has launched over 200 ballistic missiles at civilian targets in Israel," says Keir Starmer. Not according to the Israelis, who say that although several air force bases were hit, there was "only minor" civilian damage, caused by shrapnel from Israel's own interception missiles. When it comes to war in the Middle East, Starmer is as dangerous a liar as Tony Blair was.

In at least one way, Starmer is even worse than Blair. There never were Iraqi weapons of mass destruction capable of deployment within 45 minutes against the British bases on Cyprus. But the participation of those bases in this war means that they are now the potential targets that they were not then. Note that those are sovereign bases. They are British territory. And if the RAF can protect Israeli military targets, then why can it not protect Palestinian civilian targets?

There is also the question of the SAS in Gaza, where heaven knows what Robert Jenrick thinks that it is doing. Jenrick has the air of someone who tried to join the Armed Forces but who was rebuffed. He is infatuated with the idea of them, but embittered against the reality. Having insulted at least one and possibly two of them with his allegation against the Special Forces, he has today completed the set by regurgitating an old piece of tabloid trash about the RAF. Sadly, the Conservative Party's MPs and members alike are largely that sort of never-served but militaria-obsessed Walter Mitty.

Irate at the world's failure to recognise their genius, they are also the type that truly believes Kemi Badenoch's assertion that universities are marking down students that she may have called conservative or Conservative, since either would have done for her audience. Liz Truss, who has tetchily never disclosed her class of degree (mine was a 2:1), wants universities to be defunded if they did not toe the conservative or Conservative line, defined as agreement with her. The extension of a conference pass to her proves that she has not gone away.

But while the groundlings lapped up Jenrick and Badenoch, the grandees were visibly less impressed. And in any party, a Leadership Election, whether among members or among MPs, is really only advisory to them. The eventual Leader will be whoever they had always wanted. Where is Peter Mandelson's protégé, Wes Streeting?