Geoffrey Cain: Trump is rapidly dismantling China’s anti-western axis. When the United States and Israel killed Ayatollah Khamenei, ‘Xi Jinping’s decade-long project to build an alternative to the American-led order died with him’, says Geoffrey Cain. China’s ‘network of dictatorships’ – a coalition including Russia, North Korea, Venezuela and Iran – was ‘designed to blunt American power’. With the death of Khamenei following fast on the capture of Nicolas Maduro, China’s coalition has been ‘devastated’ by Trump. Xi will be under no illusion who has the upper hand when the US President visits China in three weeks for talks. Iran provided China with cheap oil and ‘kept Washington bogged down in the Middle East’. Xi has lost an ‘extraordinarily useful’ way of distracting Washington from the Pacific. Invading Taiwan is now a far more dangerous prospect for China: ‘After what happened to Khamenei, Beijing knows that escalation does not end with sanctions.’

Tim Shipman: How Keir Starmer alienated Britain’s allies over Iran. The US operation against Iran may have been called ‘Epic Fury’ but, says Tim Shipman, ‘it is Britain’s handling of the war which provoked that reaction’. As one member of Donald Trump’s administration told a Labour peer in Washington: ‘Britain used to not contribute that much, but you were a good ally. Now you’re contributing nothing and you’re not even a good ally.’ Shipman reveals the initial refusal to allow the Americans to use British bases was more a story of Keir Starmer’s ‘weakness’ than his belief in international law. The PM had in fact been in favour of granting the request – but ‘when the crunch came in a National Security Council meeting’ last Friday, Starmer was ‘not able to carry his cabinet’, hobbled by Ed Miliband, Rachel Reeves and Yvette Cooper. Miliband, according to security sources, took a ‘petulant, pacifist, legalistic and very political’ approach. It wasn’t only Washington that was enraged: Starmer and his ministers ‘were shocked by the undiluted fury of their Middle East allies that more had not been done to protect them’. According to one former Downing Street adviser: ‘The way we’ve behaved towards our allies in the last week means no one cares what we think and we have zero capacity to shape things.’

James Heale: Labour’s capital losses. James Heale looks at London where Labour will likely ‘lose half of their 1,100 councillors’ in forthcoming local elections. With 48 MPs in the capital, the party is watching the Green surge with mounting fear. The Greens have found new allies in an organisation called the Muslim Vote, which will use its community networks across the capital to get Green candidates elected. The party has also selected Lorna Jane Russell to stand in a potential by-election in Hampstead if Labour’s Tulip Siddiq is forced to quit. It all comes at the expense of Jeremy Corbyn’s hapless Your Party, which may fail to field a single candidate in May – ‘They’ve gone straight from the People’s Front of Judea to the dead parrot,’ says one supporter. They’re not the only ones struggling: while door-knocking, Conservative party chairman Kevin Hollinrake couldn’t even persuade Nigella Lawson to vote Tory. Reform is eyeing six authorities in the ‘doughnut’ of outer London as the Lib Dems mop up suburbia. ‘Faced with threats on all sides,’ according to Heale, ‘7 May looks set to be the Prime Minister’s capital punishment.’

Freddy Gray: Does Donald Trump have any real idea what he’s trying to achieve in Iran? ‘When President George W. Bush invaded Mesopotamia,’ recalls Freddy Gray, ‘everybody laughed at Comical Ali.’ These days ‘the comedy communications come from the American Commander-in-Chief’. Speaking to reporters, Trump ‘launched a devastating range of pre-emptive strikes against any media narrative that threatened to make sense’, making wildly contradictory statements about who might replace the Ayatollah and how long the war might last. ‘Team Trump usually delights in the President’s ability to set the media’s hair on fire,’ Gray notes, ‘but in the belly of Trump-world, loud grumblings could be heard.’ They are ‘completely freaking out’, notes one administration source: ‘This could easily lead to nuclear war. Soon.’ What Trump knows but won’t say is that ‘if the conflict cannot be resolved quickly’, the Republicans will suffer at the mid-term elections – ‘and Trump 2.0 could fall apart’.

Matt Goodwin: Lessons from my by-election defeat. Four weeks after Matt Goodwin decided to ‘upend’ his life by standing as the Reform UK candidate at the Gorton and Denton by-election, he found himself ‘listening to Nigel Farage give a lecture on war medals’ to a bemused constituent whose collection he’d spotted in his living room. There were a number of ‘subtle hints’ on the doorstep that Goodwin wouldn't win, with one ‘middle-aged cat lady’ branding him a ‘total wanker’. But the campaign ‘also offered lessons in love’ after Goodwin revealed his ‘blossoming relationship’ with Eilidh Hargreaves, Tatler’s features director. Despite the mockery of ‘incel lefties’, commentators insisted having ‘an attractive and successful girlfriend will increase Goodwin’s popularity’, even if he was ‘clearly punching’. Following ‘family voting’ allegations, a ‘Reform government will have to prioritise electoral reform’; Goodwin is confident that one ‘of those future turquoise MPs might be a battle-hardened GB News presenter’.

Also in this issue: Isabel Oakeshott explains why, despite the bombs, she’d still rather live in Dubai than London, Matthew Parris wonders if this is actually Keir Starmer’s finest hour and Charles Moore suggests Tracey Emin should remake her bed. Alex Diggins highlights the abject failure of plans to repair the Palace of Westminster, and Melanie McDonagh laments the tyranny of niceness.