Tim Shipman: the rift between No. 10 and Richard Knighton. Tim Shipman reveals the ‘fracturing of relations’ between Keir Starmer and the head of the armed forces, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton. In a National Security Council meeting on the eve of the Iran war, Knighton was asked by Jonathan Powell whether Britain should send warships to the eastern Mediterranean. Knighton replied: ‘We don’t need the navy. We have an aircraft carrier – it’s called Cyprus.’ The ‘disastrous political judgment’ not to send any ships has led to a ‘collapse of confidence’ in Knighton, who, according to a defence source, is ‘a process man, not a war fighter’. Pressure is also building on Ed Miliband. Doubts about the Energy Secretary ‘are shared at the top of government’, a No. 10 source tells Shipman. With energy price shocks from the war, the cost of Miliband’s ‘net-zero crusade’ has never been under greater scrutiny. The PM realises energy bills won’t come down, as promised, by £300, and ‘is convinced that a new deal with the EU is his get-out-of-jail-free card’ to alleviate cost-of-living pressures. Nick Thomas-Symonds will be in Brussels next week to lay the groundwork for negotiations on food, emissions and defence cooperation.

Freddy Gray: could Trump’s Iran war turn out to be an epic fail? ‘Operation Epic Fury,’ Freddie Gray argues, ‘has exposed once again the limits of American power, as well as the shortcomings’ of Donald Trump’s ‘madman approach’. The President ‘gambled on the Islamic Republic collapsing’, but ‘so far that has shown no sign of happening’. Trump has ‘backed himself into a corner’, says one Washington defence anaylst; ‘if America and Israel cannot cause regime change’ then the strikes will amount merely to what the Israelis call ‘mowing the grass’. But, Gray points out, ‘the trouble with fanatical Islamists in hot countries is that, similar to lawns, the harder you mow, the stronger they grow back’. Soon ‘Trump will declare victory’ and bring his armada home. But ‘even his powers of persuasion might not be sufficient to stop Epic Fury going down in history as an epic fail’. According to one MAGA insider, ‘the feedback loop’ to the President’s base has been broken and he listened instead to Republican hawks. Trump has reportedly been asking Mar-a-Lago guests who would be a better president, J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio; insiders worry he is ‘losing enthusiasm for the job’ as his plans of a triumphant 2026 go up in smoke.

Madeline Grant: Lammy’s depraved new world. On Tuesday, Madeline Grant laments, we had an insight into what the House of Commons was like in a ‘simpler’ and ‘better’ time: ‘Sir Geoffrey Cox rose to speak on the subject of the government’s abolition of jury trials.’ His speech, Grant reflects, ‘made you believe that MPs came to the House with learning, real passion and… impressive lives and careers’. What a contrast he made to David Lammy, the Lord Chancellor, who is piloting the Courts and Tribunals Bill through parliament. Most people ‘wouldn’t want Lammy to be in charge of choosing the constituent parts of a Boots meal deal, let alone which rights they get to keep in court’. It must be a ‘galling and alien experience for the average Labour MP to have to listen to somebody who actually knows what they’re talking about’. The 2024 Labour intake ‘don’t really believe experience matters’; one exception is Charlotte Nichols, who ‘waived her anonymity to reveal she had been raped’ and took the government to task for suggesting that critics of the bill lacked sympathy for victims. Her intervention was a reminder that occasionally, the Commons can still ‘produce moments worthy of its history’.

Max Jeffery and Michael Gove: Sir Stephen Watson on how he turned Greater Manchester Police around. Max Jeffery and Michael Gove believe Sir Stephen Watson is ‘an atypical public servant: he quotes Kipling, he backed Brexit, he is running a large institution well’. When he took over Greater Manchester Police in 2021, Britain’s second-largest police force had just been placed into ‘special measures’. Since then, GMP has doubled the number of suspects it arrests annually and lowered its average attendance time for ‘priority calls’ from 29 hours to 58 minutes. Watson’s method is ‘back-to-basics’: ‘Be compassionate, be diligent, look like you give a damn, record crime, investigate crime and… arrest bad people.’ He has a ‘major problem’ with ‘any sergeant who allows himself to be called “mate” by the troops’. He believes there is ‘an element of anti-Semitism’ to pro-Palestine marches and would not have banned Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from attending a football match. The British people are ‘losing faith in institutions’, Watson says, and ‘the police must accept they are partly at fault’. As a child in Rhodesia, he witnessed the collapse of the rule of law, and criticises ‘complacency’ here about what Britain could lose.

Adrian Wooldridge: remembering the 1930s is the best way to avoid returning to them. According to Adrian Wooldridge, the ‘similarities’ between the 1930s and ‘our own dismal decade are now too numerous to ignore’. They include: ‘the rise of strongmen’, like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi; the ‘collapse of the political centre’ with the rise of outsiders, from National Rally to Reform UK; and ‘the intellectual organisation of political hatreds’. Carl Schmitt is ‘back in fashion’; the ‘West’s growing polarisation is a gift to the authoritarian world’. The international order is disintegrating; today ‘the US is not so much a ghost at our feasts as a drunk and disorderly guest’, destabilising up the world order. ‘Historians,’ Woolridge suggests, ‘will no doubt find numerous reasons for the return of the 1930s,’ but the crucial two are ‘our tendency to forget lessons with the passage of time’ and our ‘over-willingness to take things for granted’. The ‘return of extremism’ will only be resisted by ‘the vigorous application of liberal principle’ rather than dithering before strongmen.