Pro Bono?

Iran will go to whichever of three contenders gave Donald Trump total control over where the oil and gas went. One of his suitors is the absolute monarchist but fake royal, Reza Pahlavi, who is almost a complete stranger to Iran. Another is the Mojahedin-e-Khalq of Islamo-Marxist terrorists whose collaboration with Saddam Hussein was up to and including fighting for Iraq in the war with Iran, a country where it, too, has now been almost completely unknown for two generations. And the third is the present regime, just as Trump kept the regime in place in Venezuela, where it is not doing too shabbily.

Intervention in Iran would make Afganistan, Iraq or Libya look like a recreational activity. Yet after all these years, characters like Phil Shiner are still reappearing. The Daily Telegraph's story about his activities with Keir Starmer and Lord Hermer would have landed a major blow at tomorrow's Prime Minister's Questions in a week when Starmer had not been in China. Hermer would have been lucky to have survived in office last week or next week. Acquisition by the Daily Mail is going to put a rocket up Buckingham Palace Road. In November, Mike Wood, who as the Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office would not ordinary have been an active participant in PMQs, used it to call for the Telegraph to be nationalised. He had been Parliamentary Private Secretary to Liam Fox, Priti Patel and Dominic Raab, so that was what the Right openly wanted. Where would this story have been then? Mind you, where is it now, when Starmer is five thousand miles away?

Is Starmer kowtowing to Xi Jinping? Yes, of course. As did the last Government. Oppositions are Sinosceptical because they can afford to be. But last week, even the Trump Administration gave up on that one, because it cannot. The world is now more than a quarter of the way into the Asian Century. Today, Ursula von der Leyen of the Christian Democratic Union signed "the Mother of All Deals" with the twelfth worst country in the world for the persecution of Christians. Christians there are arrested on sight under anti-conversion laws, with ownership of a Bible serving as evidence of having forcibly converted someone, with the Government's supporters desecrating churches systematically, and with pro-Government politicians placing bounties on the heads of Catholic priests. That country is not China, it is only 14.2 per cent Muslim, it accounts for 50 per cent of the world's missing female births, and last July Britain signed a comprehensive free trade agreement with it. Where was the outrage then?