Frankly Frankland

From Ali Khamenei to Ian Huntley, it is still wrong to murder a murderer. Huntley's was already serving a whole life order for having murdered three people and for having raped a pregnant woman. But they will find a way of punishing him, because they will have to.

If JD Vance has doubts about the war in Iran, then no one has told his London point man, James Orr, who expressed no such reservations as a panellist on this week's Moral Maze despite being a senior adviser to the Leader of a political party, although Nigel Farage shows no sign of having taken or even sought that advice on any issue except this one.

But it is Labour that is the only British party with a member on Donald Trump's Board of Peace, and Tony Blair accordingly says that Keir Starmer was wrong to go only as far as he has into this war, thereby provoking an admittedly minor attack on a British base, rather than all the way, which would have provoked heaven only knows what.

Many an old Blairite is opposed to this war, albeit while pretending that Starmer had valiantly kept Britain out of it, because they find Trump so distasteful. They are determined to insist that he is different from previous Presidents of the United States. Every Republican or Democratic nominee this century would have waged this war at this time, but that is by the by. This is Blair. Get out of that one.

There is certainly no such thing as a British overseas base, and arguably no such thing as a British base in the United Kingdom, since the American military and intelligence machines always have the run of the place whenever they want it here, and at all times everywhere else. Would the Americans have been unable to wage this war without either Diego Garcia or RAF Fairford? Evidently not. Yet has Starmer "stood firm" in denying the use of those outposts? Evidently not, with Fairford, at least, a veritable Grand Central Station of the sky.

While no Palestine Action defendant has ever been convicted of anything yet the remaining ones languish on remand or under draconian bail conditions, Peter Mandelson has had all conditions lifted and has been given back his passport, so expect him to fly out of Gloucestershire's Epstein International Airport in the very near future. Yet Mandelson, Blair and the rest of the Epstein Class are about to be given a significant new protection with the redaction of the register of MPs' staff interests. Believe in Iranian spy rings when anything had been proved, but even then they would be the least of our worries.

Just as Iran's retaliation to an existential assault has established that it was obviously nowhere near well-armed enough to justify that attack. One wonders why Reza Pahlavi could be bothered to "accept" the position of Transitional Leader. Quite apart from the fact that no one had offered it to him, the Transitional Leader of what? Trump is not even all that keen on Pahlavi, openly preferring someone from inside the present regime and regretting his own tendency to kill the contenders. If they are lucky, then both Pahlavi and the commanders of the Mojahedin-e-Khalq will end their days in HMP Frankland.