None of it worked.

Which is not to say it was all worthless. The overall quality of education has improved, one of the few policy success stories in England in recent decades. But as per the chart above from the IFS, the gap remains stubbornly persistent. (And since 2020 has widened a little).

In line with all recent governments, the current one has set targets to try and close the gap, and proposed various initiatives, but they won’t work either. The problem isn’t the policies, the effort from teachers and school leaders, or even funding. It’s the structure of the system itself, which is why a similar gap exists in almost every country. Ours isn’t even particularly bad by global standards.

Politicians like to talk about school systems as if their sole purpose was to give all young people the necessary skills and knowledge to succeed in life. This is a universal goal that, in theory, everyone can benefit equally from. But in reality much of the system is focused on ranking children to help sixth forms, universities, and employers select recruits. By definition, the benefits here cannot be universal as the aim is to create a hierarchy. Because this ranking process is so critical to future income and status, wealthier parents will, rationally, invest huge sums to ensure their children do well. That means however much the average performance in the system improves, the gap will always be sustained.

Yet because politicians never want to talk about this aspect of the system, most of their policy suggestions miss the point. If we’re serious about reducing inequality we need to start thinking differently about what that would really take.

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It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. But there’s a phone in the White House and it’s ringing.

Something’s happening in the world. Your vote will decide who answers that call, whether it’s someone who already knows the world’s leaders, knows the military — someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world.

It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?

This is the text of Hillary Clinton’s famous attack ad on Barrack Obama as they fought for the 2008 Democrat Party nomination. (Watch it here). The ad picked up on a regular theme of presidential campaigns: has the candidate the character, the nerve, the resolve to manage the great international crises, can they ‘lead in a dangerous world’? Just like John F Kennedy in October 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis they must be able to secure the country’s most vital interests while controlling any tendencies to escalation to major war. This requires a cool head, a grasp of the stakes, an ability to convey strength while keeping open lines of communication to allow for a diplomatic outcome.

Well anyone knocking on Donald Trump’s door at 3 am would probably find him awake, perhaps posting images of himself on TruthSocial as a super-hero, dressed to take on the world’s greatest villains. And we can be sure that he considers himself the greatest crisis manager, as tough as they come when facing down the nation’s enemies and also the acknowledged master of the deal. Yet in the most important crisis of his presidency - the confrontation with Iran - he seems to be at a loss about what to do next, paralysed by indecision, aware that the best deal currently on offer looks suspiciously like a defeat for him and his country. He has only kept the prospect of a deal alive by coming down hard on Israel, his supposed ally in this great enterprise.

In previous posts I have looked at how Trump got into this mess. In this one I want to consider why he is finding it so difficult to get out of it. We have been told regularly that a deal is imminent, with just a few matters to be finalised, only for the the agreement to be lost. In some cases the deal apparently existed only in Trump’s imagination; in other cases the Iranians also thought one was close and point to Trump’s reluctance to accept the terms. Among the reasons for this failure we can point to the inadequate negotiating team of Witkoff/Kushner, along with the lack of engagement of the Secretary of State and the Vice-President. But in the end the responsibility lies with the President. Why is it that a man who claims to know, above all else, how to make deals, has failed to conclude one?

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One of the most important questions in British politics over the next few years is whether the ongoing and substantial fall in immigration leads to a drop in public concern about the issue.

In 2025 net migration fell to 171,000 from a peak of 944,000 in 2023. As I wrote last year, we can already see in the data that it will keep falling and possibly go negative for the first time since 1993.

Small boat crossings are down 37% this year. The number of asylum seekers in hotels has fallen 32% since December. These numbers are also likely to keep dropping given that migration into Europe is well down and the government is now processing those in the system faster.

Yet in Ipsos’s long-running poll series, immigration remains the number one issue for the British public.

One possible explanation is that people just haven’t noticed it’s falling yet. According to British Futures immigration tracker, only 16% think numbers went down last year, compared to 49% who believe they increased. 62% of voters considering Reform say numbers are rising and 67% that they will go up again next year.

So perhaps there’s just a lag and the salience of the issue will fall over time, especially if net migration gets close to zero and channel crossings keep falling. As you can see from the charts below there is, historically, a reasonably close relationship between changes to net migration and how much people care about the issue. There is also some indication in the Ipsos data that concern has peaked (51% said it was a top issue last autumn, and it’s down to 41% now).

But there are big differences with previous bouts of angst about migration. For a start it is now a much more polarised issue. Back in September 2015, when concern was last peaking, 52% of Tories said it was a top issue. But so did 35% of Labour voters. A gap but not a huge one. Now 83% of Reform voters put it in their top three, compared to just 17% of Labour supporters and 16% of Greens.

This changes the political dynamic a lot. Reform isn’t quite a one-issue party but it’s not far off. On economics and public services there’s not much alignment between their voters and the leadership. It’s concern about immigration that drives their support, which is why they talk about it all the time. They, and their allied media, have an extremely strong incentive not to let the salience of the issue drop. While it has, in the past, risen and fallen with net migration that’s partly because the media have covered the issue less when numbers were dropping.

The emergence of Restore as a threat to Reform from the far right has only exacerbated this. Before Rupert Lowe’s breakaway party started picking up support Farage’s team were trying to broaden their base by focusing on some other topics. But they’re now terrified of being outflanked.

In the rest of the post I’ll look at how Reform is trying to keep migration at the top of the political agenda, and why it’s a strategy that I think will, ultimately, fail.

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When I wrote in April about how Ukraine had been able to take the lead in the ‘drone race’ I mentioned a new system that had been bothering the Russians because it appeared to be AI-enabled. They called it Martian. Its official name is ‘Hornet’ (pictured above) and it is now making an impact.

Hornet is produced by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Perennial Autonomy company. The aim from the start has been to develop a suite of drones that employs the most advanced technology yet can also be mass produced. Last July Ukraine officially announced cooperation with the company and a plan to produce hundreds of thousands of drones of various types.

The Hornet has a take-off weight of about 15 kg, including a warhead of up to 5kg. It can fly up to 150 kilometres at a cruising speed of between 100-120 km/k though it can go as fast as 200 km/h. It carries cameras, one of which is a course camera, the other is directed downwards which supports visual navigation. This enables it to be independent of satellite navigation. The Ukrainians have also attached miniaturised Starlink terminals so that they can be controlled over the distance and are impervious to Russian electronic warfare. Each costs between $5,000 to $10,000. The Kyiv Post reports Ukrainian drone pilots describing it as ‘easy to fly, resistant to jamming, and reliably able to stop and set afire any vehicle operated by Russia smaller than a tank.’

They began to be tested last year but have only been deployed in numbers since this spring and are already attracting attention. They are quite distinct from the FPV short-range systems that make the front-lines so hazardous or the long-range systems that are now regularly hitting targets well into Russia.

Critics have complained for some time about Ukraine’s deficiencies in medium-range systems. Front-line operators might be adept at taking out individual soldiers and vehicles but it is far better to attack depots, command posts, and supply lines to the enemy’s rear. This is the gap that the Hornet is now filling.

Because direct hits can be scored on trucks and tankers on major roads, they are now being used methodically against some key Russian supply lines, including those into occupied Crimea. At the end of May Defence Minister Fedorov announced this as a new stage in the Ukrainian campaign:

‘We are launching a “logistics lockdown” for the Russian army. We are scaling middle-strike operations to systematically destroy enemy logistics and supply lines, stripping them of their capacity to mount offensive actions. ….. The enemy’s rear is no longer a safe haven. We are seizing the initiative—using technology and the cold math of war to paralyze their operations.’

This campaign takes advantage of recent advances in drone technology but it is also the latest stage in an effort that began not long after the invasion, using whatever long-range systems were available, to attack vital targets behind the front lines as a means of disrupting Russian operations (as described in this excellent report by the Tochnyi group). Mick Ryan has underlined its significance:

‘What began as a covert operational experiment has now been formalised into a declared strategic programme. The mid-range strike campaign represents a maturation of Ukrainian drone doctrine. These are sustained, systematic efforts to degrade the operational capacity of Russian forces along the most important ground supply corridor of the war. The strikes hit at the connective tissue between Russia’s strategic industries and the Russian units on the front line.’

This can be seen in a number of sectors, but in this post I want to concentrate on the threat posed to the Russian position in Crimea. This is not because immediate problems with supply are going to force the Russians to withdraw but as a way of showing just how much has changed in our assumptions and expectations about what this war is about and how it can be fought since the invasion of February 2022.

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In the run up to the 1997 election, Tony Blair’s Labour had a clear political strategy: winning over aspirational middle class voters in marginal constituencies. They could focus on that because their existing seats were genuinely safe. Neither the Tories or Lib Dems were going to threaten in city centres, northern industrial heartlands, Scotland or Wales.

In 2026 things look very different. There are no safe seats. Those city centres are shifting Green and the northern heartlands Reform. Nationalists are winning in Scotland and Wales.

Which is one reason many Labour MPs were somewhat frustrated by Blair’s latest intervention. His much discussed 6,000 word essay didn’t acknowledge this change in context at all. As party leader he was able to pursue a centrist platform (albeit one to the left of his new manifesto) because it fit with a viable political strategy. The challenge now is far harder. Asserting that the party just needs to identify “the right answer” and then persuade people of it is disingenuous because it assumes agreement on underlying values between voters with different worldviews. Governing reactively, without any guiding principles, is a terrible idea. But so is ignoring the interests of the people you need to vote for you.

The challenge for whoever leads Labour next will be to pursue a coherent governing project that also acknowledges this very different political context. To help them do that I teamed up with Convergent Opinion to poll 10,000 people about how they voted in the local elections and why. This allowed them to build an MRP looking at the shift in voting behaviour between 2024 and 2026 in every council that held elections, down to ward level. Unlike most MRPs this isn’t trying to predict the future but looks back at something that’s happened, so it can be calibrated against actual results.

As well as looking at how people voted compared to 2024, we asked why those who switched party did so, which other parties they considered, and what would make former Labour voters switch back. It’s the most comprehensive dataset available on voter shifts between parties and the reasons for them.

I’m going to start by looking at three very different councils Labour lost. Doing so makes it clear that simply trying to appeal to one type of lost voter isn’t going to work. But it also shows that there are ways to frame an agenda that would deal with real problems facing the country, while also appealing to different groups of defectors. In the second half of the post I set out what that might look like.

At the end of the post is a link to a dashboard which lets you look at detailed voter movement analysis for every council and ward that held elections.

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Bozorgmehr began his journalism career in Iran, rising to editor-in-chief of the most popular youth political magazine in the country. In 2008, he left Iran for the BBC in London. He moved to Reuters in 2015, where he shared a National Press Club Award. He joined the Persian-language news service Iran International in 2023.

Yeganeh is an award-winning reporter at the New York Times with fifteen years of experience covering Iran, US national security, business and immigration. She was part of a Reuters team that uncovered the financial empire controlled by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in 2013. The series received numerous awards. She was born in Oklahoma to Iranian immigrants.

We discussed Iran’s recent history and how it helps explain today’s events, as well as what might happen to the regime once the war is over.

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Lawrence: Obviously, lots has happened in Iran since you completed your book. How difficult is it to follow events at the moment? How good are your sources inside Iran, and are you able to communicate with them?

Bozorgmehr: Yeganeh and I were discussing this last week: if we wanted to do our book now it would be impossible because the internet is shut down. Getting connected to people inside the country, even via phone, is extremely difficult. Some basic research like going through government websites from outside the country is also impossible these days, so I think we got lucky. We used one of the last open windows to gather a lot of information.

Yeganeh: In terms of day-to-day news coverage, we have a sense of what’s going on. And we are able to reach some sources. People don’t have very robust internet right now, but we can send them written questions or voice memos, and they can answer back that way. But in terms of being able to really get deep with sources and understand more about like what their lives really feel like, that’s been a huge challenge, and just takes a ton more effort than it normally would.

Lawrence: We’ll come back to the present day. But let me go back to the start. One thing that struck me reading the book, and struck me at the time, was the speed with which Ayatollah Khomeini made Iran an Islamic republic after the revolution of 1978-9. All the other groups, the Tudeh party, the liberal intellectuals, and so on, that were part of the revolution, the speed with which they were excluded. Do you think that explains the longevity of the regime: they embedded themselves very quickly?

Yeganeh: One thing that really came out of researching the book is the meaning of the revolution has always been contested. From the very beginning, when people revolted, Khomeini had to form a broad coalition, so there were leftists, there were right-wing Islamists, there were liberals, nationalists. Once he came to power he systematically set about eliminating those critics. But that contestation has never really gone away. It’s gone dormant for times, especially during the Iran-Iraq War, during times of great repression, but in the late 1990s there was a re-emergence of this idea that maybe the revolution wasn’t exactly what Khomeini said it was. Maybe we can reinterpret it in different ways, and I think the conflict at the heart of the Islamic Republic for 47 years has been that whatever faction was ascendant, which generally has been the conservative Islamic side, they’ve never really been able to fully vanquish that.

There was a chance in the 1990s for another interpretation, but they completely refused to do that and instead sought to totally expel that from the system. In our view that ends up weakening the regime over time, sapping away its popular support. If even leftist clerics, as we show with the story of Karroubi, are considered enemies of this political system, then your base of support gets narrower and narrower [Mehdi Karroubi was a close ally of Khomeini, who became a reformer and ended up under house arrest after supporting protests in 2009 - he is one the main characters in the book].

Bozorgmehr: Just to add to that: the Islamic Republic has shown that when it comes to gaining power it always takes a maximalist approach, but when it comes to sharing power it takes a minimalist approach. So, Khomeini, before the revolution took that maximalist approach. He tried to appeal to nationalists, to communists, to leftists, and to Islamists. His victory was the result of combination of all these forces who were worried about Western influence, US influence, Israel, and modernization and economic situation, but after the revolution, when it came to sharing power, they were very strict about sharing it with anyone but Islamists. Another point is that the Islamic Republic has gone through phases of self-cleansing, or vaccination, as they phrase it. Usually those who cannot conform with the new needs of the ruling elite will be eliminated. So in the first decade of the revolution, it was nationalist, communists, and leftists who were gradually excluded. Then we can see that this self-cleansing happened through the ruling elite itself, and the clerics started sidelining other clerics as well, and this process has continued until now.

Sam: I’m interested in this point about the 1990s. There’s a strong sense in the book that there was this moment when the reformists had a lot of electoral support. Mohammed Khatami won the presidency in 1997 and there was this opportunity to change things. But it was squandered by an overly cautious approach from Khatami and others. Do you think there was a moment where things could have gone very differently had the reformers acted differently, or would there always have been too much pushback for that to really change things?

Bozorgmehr: Absolutely. The reform movement in Iran was a pure accident. Khatami’s election victory was a big shock to the conservatives but also the reformists. They didn’t expect to win the election. By nominating Khatami in the election, they were testing the waters. They thought they could win a few millions votes, create a base, and then plan for the next elections. But as we said in the book, quoting a reformist politician, they expected rain but woke up to a flood. They were not ready for that. Khamenei used all tools in his power to limit the reformists, and after that we don’t see elections that produce shocking results [the first supreme leader Khomeini died in 1989 and was replaced by Ayatollah Khamenei].

The Islamic Republic corrected that bug in the system. For my generation, there was this once in a lifetime opportunity. We hacked the system from an angle that it didn’t expect, but that chance was wasted, I believe, by the timid approach of the reformists.

Lawrence: The portrait of Khatami is very telling. He appears as extraordinarily cautious, given the possibilities of the moment. Is this because he was still enthralled to the original idea of the revolution? He couldn’t quite bring himself to break as much as he had an opportunity to do, because the influence of Khomeini lingers, even though he was long dead by this point?

Yeganeh: With Khatami it’s a combination of his loyalty to Khomeini and to the revolution, and his personality traits. So he doesn’t like conflict. He’s a very amicable person. When people meet him in person, they’re charmed by him. He has a way with people and a great personality by all accounts. But when it comes to hand to hand combat, the kinds of things you need to do in a system like Iran to come out on top, he was not the right choice for that moment.

There were others who maybe had the personality for that. For instance, Karroubi is a little bit more stubborn and willing to fight. Mousavi might have been that person, and that’s why he was seen as such a threat and thwarted in the 2009 elections [Mir-Hossein Mousavi was, like Karroubi, an ally of Khomeini, and Prime Minister of Iran during the 1980s but became a reformer and stood for election as president in 2009. Protests followed his dubious loss and he also ended up under house arrest.]

There were millions of people who genuinely wanted change. But the leaders were men who had helped institute the system, had helped build it to begin with, and so perhaps asking them to lead more fundamental demands for change was a bit unrealistic, a fatal flaw at the heart of this project of reformism.

I will say, though, that the reformists get a lot of criticism, that they’re just part of the same system, and they were never really going to fight for change. I think Karroubi’s career shows us that we can’t paint with that broad of a brush. He and Mousavi, in particular, paid a really severe price for holding fast to their ideals, and that tells us they really did believe in these things, like civil liberties, and having kind of a greater say for the people within this system.

Bozorgmehr: Two anecdotes from meeting Khatami at that time. I remember once he made a joke in our gathering that we people from Yazd, he’s from the city of Yazd, we are known to be cautious and timid, so he was aware of this criticism that he wasn’t doing enough with his 20 million votes. But another time in a gathering of students, during a very heated debate, he said that ‘look, if I, if we confront them, the streets of Tehran will be full of blood. There will be blood flowing in the streets, and I don’t want to push the push towards that confrontation.’ Khatami and his allies wanted to keep the price low by being non-confrontational.

Lawrence: The tragedy is that if you can’t make the direct political route work, then you force people onto the street. It’s a reflection of the failure to provide an outlet at the top.

Bozorgmehr: Yes we saw that in Arab uprising, Tahrir Square, many Eastern European countries. That’s been the usual formula. Maybe the failure of the Green Movement leaders [in 2009] was that they failed to keep people on the street. But then look at what happened in January 2026. People came to the streets and were killed in tens of thousands. That puts Khatami’s view into perspective, if you know there is a system that won’t blink in killing thousands of people, then the concept of the street as a tool might not be as strong as in other countries around the world.

Lawrence: How well organized, by the late 1990s, was the system of repression against mass demonstrations. The regime now clearly know what to do, they’ve done it a number of times, and they have no hesitation about killing their own people, but was a system of repression as well organized at that point as it later became?

Bozorgmehr: Nowhere close to where it is now. We now have special units within the police, within the Revolutionary Guards, trained for that. They use technology and surveillance cameras. That was almost non-existent back then. We see the evolution of an oppressive system in the in the Islamic Republic, which means creating change is becoming more and more difficult.

The same thing is happening with Iran’s nuclear file. The file was much simpler when Iran could only enrich uranium to 3% (far from what is necessary for a nuclear weapon), but when you can enrich above 60% (close to the levels required for weapons) then it makes the nuclear negotiations very difficult, because the breakout time becomes very short, some say just over two weeks.

Lawrence: On the nuclear issue, the 2015 agreement was famously was torn up by President Trump, and many people would say that things got an awful lot worse as a result. There’s a sense in the book that there was a moment just before that when things looked like they might open up. Not because of political change within the country, but because of economic change and entrepreneurs coming in as a result of the nuclear deal. What you show is the regime saw that as a threat immediately.

Yeganeh: We felt this was a really important contribution of our book: to examine what happened after the nuclear deal and what possibilities they were and how those were stolen. We found that almost immediately after the deal, Khamenei started working to limit its effects. Iran needs a vast amount of investment in its infrastructure and economy to get it to where it needs to be. We’re talking trillions of dollars, and that has to come from outside the country.

For the first time that was available to Iran, if it was open enough to allow that. For Khamenei, the idea that there would be foreign money and with it foreign influence coming in was threatening. Then there’s a whole apparatus around him of financial conglomerates that he controls. The security forces have their own investment funds and their own companies that don’t want competition. They don’t believe that they could compete with the likes of Siemens or Amazon, or whoever, being able to come in and build businesses inside Iran. So they used ideology to limit these companies.

Khamenei gives a speech where he talks vaguely about not wanting this nuclear deal to lead to a lot of infiltration in the country. Then, well before Trump is even elected, much less ends the deal, the institutions underneath Khamenei go about systematically destroying this new startup sector, the tech sector, which had really flourished as a result of the nuclear deal. They make accusations of them being agents of the West and spies. They start arresting people, they interrogate people, and these tech companies are faced with this onslaught, this terrifying phenomenon that they didn’t quite understand. Why are we being attacked?

Then, they start getting approached by people close to the regime, and get this offer of, ‘give us some of your shares and we’ll protect you’. Some of them take that offer and we show how very systematically the regime has figured out how to take over a sector and today that project is very much complete.

Sam: One of the through lines of the book is the way the Revolutionary Guards have taken control of very large parts of the economy, step by step, over this whole period. So now it’s quite difficult to untangle what’s about ideology and what’s just about economic self-interest. What was the process by which that happened?

Bozorgmehr: That’s exactly the core of this book. Six years ago, Yeganeh called me with the idea of a book about how the Revolutionary Guards gained economic advantage in the Islamic Republic. The thesis of the book gradually evolved into how a revolution that came to power with a promise of forming an egalitarian society turned to its exact opposite by becoming a mafia state. We wanted to show what went wrong, what were the turning points where people could have stood firm to prevent that.

Because interestingly, when you go to those turning points, you see that many of those decisions were made with good intentions. One example is when Karroubi establishes a foundation to take money from the wealthy and distribute among the poor. That’s in line with the idea of the revolution. So far so good, but then they see that, oh the bureaucracy is slowing us down, they can’t help the poor as fast as we want. So they avoid auditing, they avoid regulations passed by the parliament. They try to separate these foundations from the government bureaucracy, and that’s how these foundations later turn into conglomerates that owned the majority of Iran’s economy without being accountable to anyone but the Supreme Leader.

The Revolutionary Guards got involved in the economy after the Iran-Iraq War. President Hashemi Rafsanjani [1989-1997] thought that there are these people who are unemployed, let them run some state industries, let them get into construction projects, maybe they can become independent in their budget. Another decision with good intentions, but then this military organization started devouring big chunks of the Iranian economy. Because it had access to guns, it used its military muscle to take over economic projects. Then it establishes its own intelligence department as well. As a result of that, we are in this situation that if you combine the share of the Iranian economy owned by the Supreme Leader’s foundations and the Revolutionary Guard, it would be the majority share.

Yeganeh: Some people say 80%. So the true private sector in Iran is maybe 10% to 20% and that’s largely folks that operate under the radar, your local bakery, things like that. A big lesson of this book is that military forces and business really don’t mix. If your business competitor can throw you into solitary confinement, your business will fall apart. Rafsanjani had good intentions, perhaps, but it was a huge, huge misstep, and it paved the way for a lot of what we see today.

Lawrence: One of the consequences of the foundations and Guards controlling 80% of the economy is it’s wholly dysfunctional. They’re not a productive entrepreneurial force. By the end of last year the country was falling apart. The banking system couldn’t cope. People were not getting properly fed, there were water shortages, and so on. How much of that was actually the cause of the of the uprising we saw in January?

Yeganeh: Since 2017 there have been multiple rounds of protests, four at this point, and all them, except the “Woman Life Freedom” round were sparked by explicitly economic grievances. This issue of the economy is one that the Islamic Republic has faced basically since it was instituted, because Khomeini made a lot of promises about all the things he would do for the poor, and once they were in power, they found out that things were much more difficult than they had promised, and Khomeini really wasn’t actually all that interested in economics. He used that rhetoric of the oppressed and the oppressors to unite people and widen his coalition. then once he was in power, he did a bait and switch, and said, ‘we didn’t revolt for economics, we revolted for Islam’.

From the beginning that took people aback, and that anger has only grown over the last few decades. You know, the 1999 protests and the 2009 revolts, those were very much political, but since 2017 the economic situation in Iran has gotten so bad, because of sanctions, but also the Iranian government’s own mismanagement and hoarding of wealth. Iran is a wealthy country. There’s a great deal of opportunity, but that is more and more limited to a small group. People can see that, and they resent it, and that pushes people out into the streets, and that’s going to continue. The prices have only gone up since December when those protests started. Now we’re seeing job losses as a result of the war. Those grievances have not been addressed at all. They’ve gotten worse, and that portends more unrest to come.

Sam: So does the war that’s going on at the moment make it more likely that the regime will hang on for at least a good while longer, because it gives them more opportunity for repression and unites more people behind a nationalistic, anti-American, position? Or because it makes the economic position even more perilous, does it make the regime weaker and more likely that it’s going to fall sooner?

Bozorgmehr: The war has made the Islamic Republic weaker than before. But that doesn’t mean the regime is close to collapse anytime soon. We should not underestimate the resilience of totalitarian regimes. Economic hardship is one reason for revolt, but we’ve seen many examples, including in Iraq after the Gulf War, where people are very hungry, but Saddam had a grip of power. That didn’t lead to the fall of Saddam, despite all the sanctions and all the economic troubles.

I have no doubt that Iranians will stand up, they will try to push for change. A big part of our book is that, despite all the obstacles, the Iranians try to innovate and reinvent themselves and find new methods to stand up against the Islamic Republic and voice their demands. We will see a more energized democratic movement, and people will push for change after the war, but it’s very difficult to see how that will be translated into tangible changes in the near future.

Lawrence: One of the ways regimes like this fall is because of divisions within the elite, and there’s been some talk of that. The first layers of leaders have been killed. But you also get a sense that the Guards have just used the war to consolidate its power, and those actually trying to run the government, including the President, are a bit marginalized at the moment. Is that fair? At some point you have to govern the country. You can’t keep the internet off forever, and there’s not very much income coming in at the moment. I don’t think the Strait of Hormuz will provide a saviour in that regard. So are there any signs of divisions within the leadership, or are they all so much in it together that all they can imagine is clinging on to power as ruthlessly as they’ve done in recent years?

Yeganeh: I don’t see any signs of significant division within the Iranian elite. There’s always some contestation, and so there will be people who disagree with each other and maybe criticize, but only a really unified regime can carry out what they did in January. There were no defections. There was no one that we know of saying, “I’m not going to do this”. If there was it clearly wasn’t an obstacle. It’s true the elected government is more marginalized. The guards are more ascendant, although that’s just an acceleration of a long trend. But I don’t see significant divisions, and I think the war is helpful for the regime in that regard, because there is a larger enemy to worry about.

Bozorgmehr: The Guards are running the country and are in full control of the government and the negotiations. In that sense, I agree that the Islamic Republic is much more unified when it comes to governance, but there are huge obstacles ahead. For example, to give a sense of continuity, they made much about appointing Mojtaba Khamenei as the new Supreme Leader. But that will come with a cost. You can’t appoint the son of the previous Supreme Leader in a system that claims that it’s against hereditary forms of governance without pushback.

Also you can’t run a country from a bunker. Hassan Nasrallah, the former leader of Hezbollah, was living in hiding for years, but at least we could see some video broadcasts from him. We don’t see any, even audio messages, from Mojtaba. Nasrallah had established legitimacy before going underground. Mojtaba has started his leadership in the underground. He doesn’t have any legitimacy. These are the big challenges for the new leadership. Despite all the unity, it’s going to be very difficult for them to run the everyday affairs of the country and to keep their support base connected to them.

Lawrence: We’ve talked a lot about managing the Iranian economy, the politics, society. Another key feature of the regime has been the axis of resistance, Hamas, Hezbollah the Houthis, Assad’s Syria. As of last year that whole project had almost fallen apart. It has been seen as a complete waste of money in some respects, yet it’s part of the demands of the current regime in the negotiations that this can continue. Do you see a similar effort being funneled into Hezbollah and Hamas in the future, has this strategy run its course?

Bozorgmehr: I think even the Islamic Republic can see that was a bad investment. They invested a lot in the proxies as a deterrent, but when it came to the moment of the war, those proxies didn’t help. They were one of the main reasons why the war happened. This is why the Islamic Republic is so fascinated with the control of the Strait of Hormuz. The regime thinks it has discovered a new deterrent.

Sam: Has the unity of the elite been helped by the fact that there’s been so much emigration from Iran of educated people who in other countries have been so critical to overthrowing totalitarianism. Are there enough people left in the country to lead an opposition, or would people come back if there was a real moment of opportunity?

Yeganeh: There’s such a hunger among the Iranian diaspora to come back and rebuild the country. To help it catch up to where it should be economically and its integration with the world, I think that there’s an enormous store of energy there. But every time there’s been a possibility of change, those people have been under great threat from the government itself.

Bozorgmehr: We have had the waves of emigration in the history of the Islamic Republic. The first wave started at the beginning of the revolution, and those who were absolutely shocked with an Islamist regime left the country. The second wave of emigration was during the Iran-Iraq war, people who didn’t want their children to go to the battlefield started sending them abroad in order to not go to the military service. During the Reform movement and Green Movement, we had a new immigration wave by people who gave up hope for any change.

Now we see emigration by the children of the ruling elite as well, so that is another sign of collapse. We saw this with the Soviet Union, and it’s one of the signs that the current Russian government is weak. Because when even the children of the ruling elite do not believe in this idea that their parents are preaching, that shows the foundations are becoming weaker and weaker.

Across Westminster thoughts are already turning to life under a new prime minister. Senior civil servants are calling up their contacts in the north west and reading pamphlets about “Manchesterism”. Labour MPs are suddenly taking more interest in devolution and social care. The poor souls trying to run Starmer’s government are left wondering what they can do in a time horizon that’s shrunk to a few months.

Of course, Burnham still has to win a difficult by-election. But he’s the favourite, and if he does the leadership is there for the taking. So it’s inevitable that preparations have begun.

Different parts of the media have launched various caricatures of Burnham. To the more fervid members of the right-wing press he’s a spendthrift socialist determined to trash what’s left of Britain’s economy. For sceptics on the left and centre he’s Starmer with a northern accent, a terminal vacillator with no fixed beliefs, already trimming his liberalism to win Makerfield.

In reality he’s neither a Marxist nor a charlatan but someone who has become an adept politician during his nine years as mayor of Greater Manchester, which often means letting people hear want they want to hear while keeping options open. At the same time he has developed the broad outlines of a political philosophy, built around investment in infrastructure, localism, and a less combative political culture. As mayor these adaptable principles have served him well, but whether they would work at a national level is a different question.

In any case, ideas aren’t enough to be a successful prime minister. Character matters too, and even Burnham’s allies worry about his propensity to duck difficult decisions. As mayor he tried to back off an unpopular planning strategy that proposed using greenbelt land, and he did scrap a proposed clean air charging zone (unlike Sadiq Khan who took the political hit for a policy that has led to environmental improvements in London).

Perhaps even more important is context. If he does become PM, he’ll have only a few months before facing a very tricky budget that will force a lot of trade-offs of the kind mayors don’t have to make. He would also inherit a whole raft of major reforms in mid-flow that will limit the scope for any agenda he might want to pursue. In the rest of the post I’ll look at how all this might play out. Starting with the initial decisions Burnham would have to make about the cabinet and political set up; then looking at a potential policy platform; and the big choices he’d face in the first six months.

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Sam posted his answers earlier in the week - including ones on whether Andy Burnham is overrated, why the Tories seem so sanguine about their dire election results, and whether the BBC goes too easy on Nigel Farage.

I’m afraid that I didn’t have the space to deal with all of my questions, but I covered all the most commonly asked topics. Including:

• Problems with US negotiating team of Witkoff and Kushner

• The potential for Ukranian victory

• European countries replacing US as mediators between Russia and Ukraine

• Whether Putin is getting accurate assessment of the war

• The impact of Ukrainian attacks on oil structure

• Whether Putin fears assassination attempts and the prospects of one happening

• The role of Palantir in supporting Ukraine’s armed forces

• Whether a European/Canadian force could support Ukraine’s future defence

• How can the UK government encourage national resilience like the Nordics?

• Whether Europe can manage without the US and alternative leadership for NATO

• The US and challenges of adopting drone technology

• Is the strategic defence review already out of date?

• Whether NATO can help open up the Strait of Hormuz

• The prospects of a conflict over Taiwan and whether China could play a mediating role over Ukraine and Iran

• Whether things can go “back to normal” post-Trump

• How Israel can afford all its wars

• The US position on the Falklands

  ---

Anon How much damage do you think placing a complete amateur like Steve Witkoff in charge of key diplomatic negotiations is causing?

There are two problems with the team of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. First they are amateurish in their methods and grasp of the issues at stake (Witkoff is probably worse in this regard than Kushner). They do not get proper records of their conversations which has led to misunderstandings and allows the Russians to claim that agreements have been reached when they have not. They travel light so do not have the expertise to hand when it comes to working out the practicalities of any proposals. In the end they treat these encounters as transactional real estate deals without understanding the history or the meaning of key issues for the belligerents.

They don’t push back when the Russians make outlandish claims. Witkoff has regularly said that he sees no reason to assume that Putin is lying (for example in providing military support to Iran). Other than with Gaza they have shown little creativity in framing potential solutions (and here they did not to do the main work). And then, including with Gaza, the follow up has been poor. This may not be entirely their fault because their boss is only interested in the impression he makes and has little interest in detail.

This article from Reuters describes a quite astonishing level of dysfunction in the Trump foreign policy apparatus, including the loss of so many knowledgeable professionals, he lack of ambassadors, and so on. And then the very special dysfunction of Witkoff, including his ignorance of essential facts.

One senior European diplomat said that during last-ditch talks in Geneva, the U.S. team struggled to grasp the significance of different uranium‑enrichment thresholds and other elements of Iran’s nuclear program, forcing European officials to explain. “How can you negotiate when you don’t understand the fundamentals?” the diplomat said.

’On February 28, after the Geneva talks failed, the U.S. and Israel started bombing Iran. On that day, and again on March 3, Witkoff briefed reporters on the talks. Those briefings suggested he had misread Iran’s proposal, exaggerating Iran’s nuclear threat by conflating limited enrichment of uranium with its near‑term weaponization.’

With both Ukraine and Iran the record is one of failure and a loss of credibility. The question is whether in the context of a generally dysfunctional administration anybody else could have done any better. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State/National Security Advisor, who in principle might have been expected to lead vital negotiations, clearly decided that discretion was the better part of valour when it came to talking with the Iranians, and was content to let Vice-President Vance own the failure instead.

Walter Stahr: How do we get from where we are to victory for Ukraine? Not necessarily taking back every square mile of territory occupied by the Russians but a lasting peace along the lines of North and South Korea?

Read more

Apologies to those of you who didn’t get a response this time, but some of those questions will be covered in future posts. Dad’s answers will be posted later this week.

Topics covered include:

• Why am I confident Andy Burnham will win in Makerfield?

• Why are the Tories seemingly happy with losing hundreds of councillors? Have they given up on being a party of government?

• Am I surprised that Keir Starmer has struggled so much?

• Is Burnham overrated? Or has his time as mayor changed him?

• How will a Labour leadership contest work? And how might it play out?

• Could more new parties emerge before the next election? Where might the spaces for them be? Do Restore and Advance UK pose a real electoral threat?

• Will we have proportional representation for general elections in the next decade?

• Should MPs elect leaders rather than party members?

• Is Labour just a middle-class liberal party now or can they build a broader coalition?

• What will a lot of inexperienced Reform and Green councillors mean for local government?

• Does the BBC give Farage an easier ride than left-wing parties?

• Is there a crisis in the quality of politicians?

• Who’s best placed to lead the Democrats?

• Is cabinet government working?

• Why don’t big regeneration projects win votes?

  ---

  

Anon: Why are you so confident Andy Burnham will win in Makerfield?

If the Labour candidate was literally anyone else, Reform would win the seat comfortably. They took the wards making up the constituency by 50% to 27% in the local elections. But there are two reasons to think Burnham is likely to win. First, he is just very popular in Greater Manchester. Nationally, he is the only politician with a consistently positive approval rating, but in his mayoral region his numbers are off the scale. His first campaign video was well judged in reinforcing the reasons for this: Manchester’s relative success but also the sense that he’s fought their corner, particularly during Covid.

If he was just relying on his personal popularity, though, Reform might still be marginal favourites, given how well suited the demographics of the seat are for them. The other big factor is the context. Places like Makerfield are full of deeply disillusioned anti-system voters who want to register a desire for more substantive change. This by-election is giving them the power to replace a deeply unpopular prime minister, and they know that. That’s a much more powerful lever to pull than voting Reform.

All that said, I’m not 100% confident he’ll win – I’d put it at more like 75%-80%. Reform have chosen a popular local candidate who got one of their highest votes in 2024, and Burnham could make missteps during the campaign. But the idea that Starmer would just stay put if Burnham does lose is fanciful. If Labour can’t win a seat like Makerfield with this candidate, in this context, then MPs will feel even more panicked and keen to force change.

Alex Potts: Why are the Tories so content with last week’s election results? Has “Britain’s natural party of government” given up on ever again becoming the government?

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Over the past few weeks there has been a definite shift in the narrative surrounding the Russo-Ukraine War. This is the result of problems with the Russian economy, irritation with restrictions on everyday life, including use of the internet, Ukraine’s success with long-range drones, and a sense that a war supposed to be over quickly four years ago still has no obvious end in sight. It was hard not to miss the symbolism of the truncated 9 May parade, the annual celebration of the victory over Nazi Germany. This used to be a grand and intimidating affair, full of the most advanced military equipment, showcasing an army ready for battle. This year’s demonstrated the opposite, a lack of military confidence and a paranoid Vladimir Putin. Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy took some delight in giving him permission for the event to take place without disruption.

Nonetheless, for reasons that are well known, not least his personal commitment to the cause of returning Ukraine to Mother Russia, Putin is reluctant to scale down his maximalist objectives. He seems to be aware of the negative economic and domestic political trends, and he knows all about Ukrainian long-range drones, as his anxieties around the 9 May parade demonstrated. But he relies on what he is told by his General Staff on the state of the fighting, and they have been relentlessly optimistic and boastful.

In his short speech at the parade, Putin blamed Ukraine’s western supporters for its resistance while promising that this would be to no avail.

‘They are confronting an aggressive force armed and supported by the whole bloc of Nato. And despite this, our heroes move forward.’

According to the Financial Times

‘Russia’s top commanders have convinced Putin their forces could seize the whole of the Donbas by autumn, according to two people in contact with the Kremlin leader, two others familiar with the matter, and a Ukrainian intelligence assessment shared with the FT. Putin then plans to raise the price of any ceasefire by escalating Russia’s territorial demands, three of the people said.’

…

‘Putin has grown increasingly fixated on capturing the Donbas despite privately expressing a willingness to freeze hostilities on the current front lines at various earlier points in the war, according to two people who speak to him. “I have been pushing him to end at the current front lines. But he keeps saying, “No, I can’t compromise on this,” one of the people said.’

Putin’s response to the victory parade fiasco and media suggestions that the Russian position was weakening was typical. Propaganda was stepped up and he looked for ways to assert Russian power. The Russians broadcast a meeting between Putin and Sergei Karakayev, Russian Federation Strategic Missile Forces commander. Karakayev reported on a successful test launch of Russia’s most advanced ICBM, called Sarmat. A video showed its launch from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in the Arkhangelsk region. Putin congratulated Karakayev. ‘This is the most powerful missile in the world,’ he gushed, ‘The total yield of the warheads delivered is more than four times greater than that of any existing most powerful Western analogue.’ Whenever Putin worries that western countries may think Russia weak he seeks to reinforce deterrence by reminding them of Russia’s nuclear strength.

And then after an attack with 139 drones the previous night, on the afternoon of 13 May to remind the Ukrainians of their vulnerability a massive attack using 753 drones was launched against cities across the country. Although 710 were shot down many were killed and injured. The next day 56 missiles were used in an overnight attack, along with 675 drones. A residential building in Kyiv was struck, leaving 24 people dead, including three children.

The intention was to convey strength but these moves could as easily be interpreted as weakness. They do not represent a new strategy for winning the war. Moreover in its response Ukraine underlined one reason for Russian anxiety. Large number of drones are now flying from Ukraine into Russia and they are more strategically targeted. Strike after strike has hit Russian oil refineries and military industries. In recent days they have struck a massive chemical plant, making raw nitric and acetic acids used to forge high-explosive artillery shells, motor fuel assembly lines at Gazprom’s Astrakhan gas processing unit, and the Rosneft oil refinery. Last night in one of their largest coordinated drone operations of the war they reached the Moscow region, triggering fires at the Moscow Oil Refinery in Kapotnya, the Solnechnogorsk oil terminal, and the Elma electronics technology park in Zelenograd.

For now Putin is sticking with the same formula that has not worked for over four years. What if this approach continues to fail? Will there come a point in the coming year when he is compelled to accept that the goals of the special military operation will never be met?

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So here we are again in another protracted leadership contest. The most likely outcome is that Andy Burnham becomes prime minister at some point over the summer. He’s the clear favourite of Labour MPs and members, and now has the opportunity to get back into Parliament via a by-election in Makerfield.

I doubt Starmer can block him from running again, as that would set off another round of resignations and an even messier endgame. Presuming he is allowed to run he has to win a tricky seat. Any other Labour candidate would lose heavily to Reform, who won the wards that sit within the constituency by 50% to 27% in last week’s local elections. The unique context, though, means Burnham should win. If he does, in some of the most friendly territory for Reform, it makes him a shoo-in to replace Starmer. Perhaps the biggest risk is that he will now be considered presumptive prime minister and everything he says will be subject to a lot more scrutiny than he’s used to.

Whatever happens to Burnham it’s hard to see how Starmer remains in number ten beyond the next few months. Which leads to the question I want to focus on in this post: given we’re likely to be on our seventh prime minister in a decade very soon, why do they keep failing?

One theory, popular with those who still defend Starmer, is that parties have got into the habit of binning leaders at the first sign of trouble, hurried into action by a press that became addicted to chaos during Brexit, and unwilling to acknowledge that it takes time to fix the intractable problems facing the country. This impatience, they argue, is making Britain ungovernable.

Another, is that we’ve just had a really bad run of leaders who either lacked basic political skills, were temperamentally unsuited for the job, or were Liz Truss.

I’m more inclined to theory two, after all plenty of other countries have managed to keep a leader in place for more than two years. They also have political journalists who enjoy drama. Nor are Starmer’s troubles due to a lack of patience from his MPs. Most were desperate for him to succeed and, if they had felt he was making difficult decisions that would pay off over time, would have backed him through bad polling and miserable election results. They supported planning legislation, many enthusiastically, despite the inevitable nimby backlash, and controversial reforms to special needs.1

The problem has been his refusal to make big calls on too many issues, to try and delegate decisions about trade-offs that only he can make, and an almost total absence of overarching strategy.

Having said that, there are some deeper structural problems that are undoubtedly making it harder to be prime minister. Poor economic growth since the financial crash, combined with higher immigration, has triggered a surge in ethnonationalism, particularly in deindustrialised areas that have been hit hardest. This is affecting leaders across Europe. Emmanuel Macron may have held on for a decade but he’s also on his seventh Prime Minister and has dreadful approval ratings. Friedrich Merz has quickly become almost as unpopular as Starmer. In all three countries the radical right lead the polls. Of course, leaders have some agency to deal with these problems but they are new and difficult.

Alongside these broader issues, there are some uniquely British challenges with being prime minister that make it harder than necessary. The role has evolved in a typically haphazard way over the decades, without much thought as to its purpose. Given the complexities of governing in a polarised multi-party system with a struggling economy, it is essential to make the job as manageable as possible. It’s within the PM’s power to make the necessary changes because there are few constitutional limits. Whoever replaces Starmer will improve their chances of survival by rethinking what it means to be prime minister. In the rest of the post I’ll look at three things they could do to make the job easier, if not easy.

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If you want to ask a question anonymously you can email it to samf@substack.com (but please use the comments otherwise).

We’ll post our responses next week, we can’t promise to answer everything, but we’ll do our best and often questions we don’t answer immediately inspire later posts.

If you’re a new subscriber do have a look at some of our posts from the last few months:

Sam has written on:

• Seven things we learnt from the elections last week

• Fascinating new polling about where the centre really is now in British politics

• The rise of antisemitism on right and left

• The fall of Viktor Orbán and what it means for the global radical right

• Understanding MAGA

• The consequences for Britain of the Iran war

• Why Trump will struggle to rig the midterms

• The problem of prediction markets

• Special needs reforms in England

Lawrence has written on:

• The Iran crisis - latest post here

• And a very widely read series on how Trump made such a mess of things in the Gulf (here, here, and here)

• Is time running out for Putin?

• Is Ukraine winning the drone race?

• Why the Russian offensive in Ukraine is stalling and the issues they’ve had with Starlink and other technology

• His new book on “Strategy and Strategists”

If you’re not a paid subscriber yet we paywall most of our posts so if you want access to all this sign up below. It’s the price of a coffee a month, or less if you go for an annual subscription. We’re recommended by 580 other substack writers and have almost 90,000 subscribers (free and paid) - including politicians from all the main parties; political journalists from across the media; and diplomats from around the world - so we must be doing something useful.

If you’re already a paid subscriber, thanks so much for your support, which allows us to do all this. We’re entirely reliant on word of mouth for marketing so please do share posts and spread the word if you like what we do.

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This was initially posted on 7 May when the Iranian response to the latest American proposal was unknown. We now know that the Iranian response was uncompromising, so I have added an update explaining why they had the confidence to do this and Trump’s consequential predicament, which can be found at the end of the post.

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There was a famous moment during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis when news came through to President Kennedy and his advisors that the Soviet ships they feared were about to challenge the US blockade of Cuba had turned away. Recalling a childhood game when he and his friends would try to outstare each other, Secretary of State Dean Rusk observed: ‘We’re eyeball to eyeball and I think the other fellow just blinked.’

As it happens the blinking had occurred sometime before. Almost as soon as Moscow learned of the blockade it ordered Soviet ships to stay clear. Contrary to the apprehensions of Kennedy and his advisors, by the time Rusk made his comment all Soviet ships were far away from the quarantine line. Nor was that the moment of greatest danger. There was more blinking to be done before the crisis was over. The big test was getting the Soviet missiles out of Cuba. Nonetheless, this moment showed that the crisis was potentially manageable and that the Soviets were wary about escalation.

There is not one but two blockades currently in place in the Strait of Hormuz. The first, imposed by the Iranians in response to the initial US-Israeli strikes, effectively shut the Strait. They did, however, intend to allow their own and favoured ships through, as well as those prepared to pay a toll to Tehran. This led to the second blockade, this time imposed by the Trump administration, intended to deny Iran these benefits. Both blockades are being enforced, with merchant ships fired upon and Iranian vessels seized.

In 1962 the world watched the developing crisis in the Caribbean with anxiety. Everything was dependent upon decisions being made by a few people in Washington and Moscow. If the crisis got out of hand then all would suffer the consequences of what could be a nuclear war. In 2026 the world watches a contest of wills between Tehran and Washington, also with anxiety. Much economic damage has already been done: the longer the standoff the greater the prospective chaos.

For the standoff to end both sides must blink together to end their respective blockades. That might have happened on 17 April when Iran announced that the Strait was open. Trump welcomed the move but still decided to keep his blockade going to demonstrate that the US had the upper hand. Iran immediately reimposed its blockade. Trump appeared to think that it would add to the pressure on Iran if it could not export its oil. It would have to keep more in storage tanks, which would soon fill up, and shut its oil wells. This has not happened.

The formal positions of the two sides in terms of peace negotiations still seem to be far apart. Yet Trump on Tuesday suggested that ‘tremendous progress’ was being made towards a deal. Now we have been here many times before with Trump claiming some imminent breakthrough only for it to turn out that the progress has largely been in his imagination. From the start Trump’s utterances on this war have sown confusion and got in the way of serious peace-making. (The Washington Post has a useful compilation of his many and inconsistent claims on the timeline of the war and the likely prospects for peace).

But this latest burst of optimism from Trump has been combined with statements to the effect that the active stage of the war is over. After looking at whether Trump has now started blinking, I’ll consider in this post the incentives for the Iranians to do some blinking of their own, and the possibility that the Strait might be opened soon

Read more

Hopefully Comment is Freed readers will have felt a sense of familiarity as election results came in over Thursday night and Friday.

While I certainly didn’t get all my predictions right, with a few exceptions all the contests played out along the lines set out. I forecast the correct result in 107 out of 136 English councils, and close to the exact Welsh Senedd results. If you’re interested in a more detailed analysis of what I got right and wrong I’ve included an appendix at the end.

In my last post I said there was no plan from any of the main candidates to challenge Keir Starmer for the Labour leadership after the scale of their losses became apparent, but that these things can spiral when MPs and members are at their most angry and frustrated. Yesterday’s intervention from backbencher Catherine West, who has said she will challenge Starmer tomorrow if no one else comes forward, it a perfect example of this. It seems unplanned and, in part, a response to a friend losing their council seat.

Whether she succeeds in forcing a challenge will depend on how others react. 80 MPs are required to trigger a contest, and there are many more than that who want Starmer gone. But lots want Andy Burnham to replace him and so need a longer timetable while he finds a way back into Parliament. Others, who support Wes Streeting or Angela Rayer, will be waiting for a signal. Plenty who are uncommitted will be spending the day furiously WhatsApping each other and trying to figure out what to do. If it doesn’t happen now, it will happen at some point. Starmer’s authority has been gone for some time.

The purpose of this post, though, is not speculation on Labour’s leadership but to look at some of the broader trends and shifts that have become apparent during these elections and have long term significance for the future of British politics.

I’ve discussed some of the more obvious ones before. We’re experiencing a transition into a more fragmented European-style multi-party system. Labour and the Tories are facing competition for their core vote in a way they never have before. As a result they are struggling to identify strategies that allow them to retain previously loyal voters, while appealing to the centre, as Reform and the Greens hoover up the right and left bloc votes. The result is a paralysis of indecision and an increasingly dissatisfied electorate. And so the cycle continues, made worse by an electoral system unsuited to our new politics that encourages a narrow tactical approach from parties.

In the rest of the post I’m going to focus in more detail on how this is all playing out in practice. How do we assess results in such a messy system? What are the strategic challenges facing all the main parties? Is Reform on track for a majority? What can the Greens realistically achieve? What are the best options for the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems? What can we learn about PR from what happened in Wales? Most of all – is there any route out of the paralysis induced by a fragmented system?

Read more

There was a famous moment during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis when news came through to President Kennedy and his advisors that the Soviet ships they feared were about to challenge the US blockade of Cuba had turned away. Recalling a childhood game when he and his friends would try to outstare each other, Secretary of State Dean Rusk observed: ‘We’re eyeball to eyeball and I think the other fellow just blinked.’

As it happens the blinking had occurred sometime before. Almost as soon as Moscow learned of the blockade it ordered Soviet ships to stay clear. Contrary to the apprehensions of Kennedy and his advisors, by the time Rusk made his comment all Soviet ships were far away from the quarantine line. Nor was that the moment of greatest danger. There was more blinking to be done before the crisis was over. The big test was getting the Soviet missiles out of Cuba. Nonetheless, this moment showed that the crisis was potentially manageable and that the Soviets were wary about escalation.

There is not one but two blockades currently in place in the Strait of Hormuz. The first, imposed by the Iranians in response to the initial US-Israeli strikes, effectively shut the Strait. They did, however, intend to allow their own and favoured ships through, as well as those prepared to pay a toll to Tehran. This led to the second blockade, this time imposed by the Trump administration, intended to deny Iran these benefits. Both blockades are being enforced, with merchant ships fired upon and Iranian vessels seized.

In 1962 the world watched the developing crisis in the Caribbean with anxiety. Everything was dependent upon decisions being made by a few people in Washington and Moscow. If the crisis got out of hand then all would suffer the consequences of what could be a nuclear war. In 2026 the world watches a contest of wills between Tehran and Washington, also with anxiety. Much economic damage has already been done: the longer the standoff the greater the prospective chaos.

For the standoff to end both sides must blink together to end their respective blockades. That might have happened on 17 April when Iran announced that the Strait was open. Trump welcomed the move but still decided to keep his blockade going to demonstrate that the US had the upper hand. Iran immediately reimposed its blockade. Trump appeared to think that it would add to the pressure on Iran if it could not export its oil. It would have to keep more in storage tanks, which would soon fill up, and shut its oil wells. This has not happened.

The formal positions of the two sides in terms of peace negotiations still seem to be far apart. Yet Trump on Tuesday suggested that ‘tremendous progress’ was being made towards a deal. Now we have been here many times before with Trump claiming some imminent breakthrough only for it to turn out that the progress has largely been in his imagination. From the start Trump’s utterances on this war have sown confusion and got in the way of serious peace-making. (The Washington Post has a useful compilation of his many and inconsistent claims on the timeline of the war and the likely prospects for peace).

Yet this latest burst of optimism from Trump has been combined with statements to the effect that the active stage of the war is over. After looking at whether Trump has now started blinking, I’ll consider in this post the incentives for the Iranians to do some blinking of their own, and the possibility that the Strait might be opened soon.

Read more

Part one looked at the overall situation in England – including predicted vote shares and seat losses/gains – as well as the parliamentary elections in Scotland and Wales.

Part two split the 104 councils up for election across England into five battlegrounds, with predictions for all of them.

Part three split the 32 boroughs in London into ten zones to show how politics in the capital is evolving, with predictions for each council.

Today’s post offers a guide on how to follow and interpet the results as they come in over Thursday night and Friday. Later in the week Lawrence will be back with a post on the Iran crisis.

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This Thursday’s elections across Britain are important in their own right, deciding who will be responsible for billions in government spending and providing key services.

In England we will see a lot of councillors with no experience, who have largely campaigned on national issues, winning seats and suddenly having to deal with the reality of managing social care and children’s services on inadequate budgets. Reform’s stumbling attempts to run the councils they won last year shows the scale of the challenge. To take one example, in Staffordshire they’ve already been through three leaders and broken most of their pre-election promises. (I wrote about their struggles in local government last year).

Much of the media focus, though, has been on the national implications of these elections, and particularly what it means for Keir Starmer’s future. There’s no doubt that plausible leadership candidates like Wes Streeting and Angela Rayner have been preparing for a possible contest for months, so there’s inevitably speculation that one of them will pull the trigger once the scale of Labour’s losses become apparent.

I’m sceptical that there is a definite plan for any candidate to do this. If anything happens it will likely be more chaotic and opportunistic, which is how these things tend to play out. Labour’s leader in Scotland, Anas Sarwar, already called for Starmer to resign earlier in the year, and if he were joined in doing so again by their Welsh leader, Eluned Morgan, and various disappointed senior councillors it could create momentum for others to join in. There is talk of a backbench letter calling for Starmer to go and resginations from junior ministers. Downing Street will be particularly nervous about interventions from Rayner and Andy Burnham who both have the luxury of speaking out without having to quit their jobs.

All of this means the narrative around the results will matter a lot. As ever there will be an arbitrary quality to how this narrative develops. It will depend on which areas declare earlier and how results vary against expectations. So in this post I’m going to look at the timeline for Thursday night and Friday, when we’ll get the results, and how to interpret them as they come in.

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On the 6^th April the temperature in Paris suddenly jumped six degrees before falling back over the next hour. The same thing happened on the 15^th, except this time it jumped nine degrees. Given this is not a normal weather phenomenon and no one in Paris noticed it getting rapidly hotter, it led to much speculation about what was going on. Then somebody noticed suspiciously timed trades on prediction markets about how warm it was going to get on those days. It looks like a trader was making thousands of dollars by tampering with the equipment used to measure the temperature at Charles de Gaulle airport, possibly with a hairdryer.

Last month also saw the first arrest in America for insider trading on prediction markets. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a master sergeant with US special forces involved in the raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, made $400k “predicting” when the operation would take place. Something similar happened last year in Israel when a soldier, working with a civilian friend, was caught making bets on the timing of air strikes against Iran and Yemen.

There has been plenty of other suspicious activity that hasn’t led to arrests. The day before the 28^th February attack on Iran, 150 people made trades of at least $1,000 predicting an imminent strike. CNN identified one anonymous account that has made $1 million with a series of unerringly accurate bets on military action in the Middle East. It’s not just wars and weather, there have been suspicious trades on everything from the launch of OpenAI products, to Google searches, to posting on Mr Beast’s YouTube channel.

Insider trading is not, of course, a new phenomenon, there have been plenty of financial and sporting scandals over the years. But the explosion in gambling via prediction markets since 2024 has dramatically increased the risk over a much wider range of activities. Trading volume on the two largest – Polymarket and Kalshi – was $50 billion in 2025, up from $16 billion the year before, and will be much higher again this year.

The potential risks go well beyond insider trading. The more lucrative these markets become, the more predictions about the future will affect decision-making and behaviour, creating perverse feedback loops. Particularly when political actors are directly involved in the companies running the markets, as the Trump family are. In the rest of the post I’ll look at why there’s been such growth in this form of gambling, how it works, the risks that are starting to manifest, and what governments can do about them.

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‘I am waiting for something to turn up.’

Wilkins Micawber in David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens

The New York Times recently quoted Claudia Major of the German Marshall Fund arguing that the Europeans ‘lack a theory of victory for Ukraine.’ The previous idea, she suggested, was to put enough pressure on Russia to change its calculus, ‘but we never gave the Ukrainians enough to do that.’

‘Now we just try to keep the Ukrainians in the game until something in Moscow changes — someone dies or is thrown out the window or the economy collapses. But it’s not a strategy.’

I disagree. Keeping the Ukrainians in the game is a strategy. If the Ukrainians were unable to do so it would be calamitous. As the allies were never going to fight side-by-side with the Ukrainians, it was never likely that they could put enough pressure on Moscow to get it to abandon its war aims. Once Putin decided in September 2022 that he was prepared to fight a long war, the Ukrainians had to make the same determination. All they could do was to hope that over time they would be able to change perceptions inside the Kremlin about whether the war was being won or was even winnable. The fact that this has yet to happen does not mean that the strategy was wrong. Only that it required patience.

The literature on strategy encourages the expectation that it is all about providing a route to a winning position. But many strategies are about efforts to retrieve a losing position – for example after being invaded. In the first instance avoiding defeat can be a demanding enough objective. So it is not unusual for a country to find itself at war without a clear concept of how to bring it to an end. And this can be true, as we have seen with the US/Israeli attack on Iran, even with a war initiated with confidence in an early victory.

Keeping the Ukrainians in the game confirms the failure of Russian strategy. Putin has also had to discover patience as an operation he expected to be over in matter of days has dragged on for years. When one considers the resources Russia has committed the fact that it is no closer to victory now than it was in 2022 is quite staggering.

Continuing to deny Russia a victory is therefore a necessary condition for future Ukrainian success but of course it cannot be sufficient. There is no simple way to persuade the Kremlin to change course when Ukraine cannot yet deploy overwhelming military power. There are other factors that might shape Putin’s view of the war and his expectations of success, some of which the Ukrainians and their partners might be able to influence, but many of which they cannot.

This is why there is an unavoidable element of wait and see in Ukrainian strategy. But this need not be simple Micawberism, which is, after all, passive. It is still possible to work on those aspects of the Russian situation that they can affect.

Russia’s economic problems have long been seen as the most likely source of a Kremlin rethink and these problems are starting to become more severe. There are also the first cracks appearing in the political consensus supporting the war. Past experience warns against optimism when it comes to assessing the weaknesses in Putin’s position. He operates a system geared to protecting him from challenges to his rule but also from bad news. Yet at least the choices that he faces are now becoming more difficult. In this post I’ll consider whether – at last – something has turned up?

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Sometimes it refers to the ideological centre, usually seen as a Blairite mix of economic liberalism tempered by redistribution and a focus on social equality. Or it can mean the median voter, who holds the most common set of views. Right now that person is distinctly un-Blairite; being suspicious of big business and AI, very concerned about immigration and deeply distrustful of politicians.

A third option is to define the centre as swing voters, people willing to vote for parties of left or right. For the purposes of political strategy this seems like the most useful approach. And it turns out that when you look at this group, they’re not who most people in Westminster seems to think they are.

To get a better sense of who these swing voters are I ran a poll with Peter McLeod, the founder of Hold Sway Insight and Strategy. Previously Peter ran the London office of GQR Research, a Washington DC-based campaigns pollster, for five years, and worked on Labour’s 2024 and 2015 General Election campaigns.

We asked 3,000 people not only who they would currently vote for but who they’d seriously consider voting for.

This allowed us to split the electorate into three groups: a left bloc who will only vote for a progressive party; a right bloc who will only vote Conservative or Reform; and a centre bloc willing to consider at least one party on the other side from their current preference. As you can see this produces three roughly even segments.

We wanted to work out who is in this centre bloc – their demographics and beliefs. One might assume they are median voters with the most commonly-held opinions - after all they’re in the middle. But they’re really not. This is perhaps the most counter-intuitive aspect of British politics at the moment. On many issues left and right bloc voters are more similar in their views than either are to the centre bloc.

For Labour and the Tories this is particularly problematic. Both parties used to be able to rely on solid support from their ideological bloc, but now they face sustained competition from the Greens and Reform. This means they have to fight for within-bloc votes. At the same time they are more dependent on the centre than their competitors. Zack Polanski and Nigel Farage are quite happy hoovering up votes within their main ideological bloc through left/right populism. Keir Starmer (or whoever replaces him) and Kemi Badenoch need to find a way to appeal to the centre too. If the voters making up the centre bloc are really quite distinct from either left or right, that gets much harder.

In the rest of the post we’ll look in detail at who these centre bloc voters are, and why they’re so different from the median voter. Then we’ll consider what this means for Labour and Tory strategy and what both parties are getting wrong at the moment.

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One of the most important tasks of political leaders at times of crisis is to explain to the public the seriousness of the situation and possible courses of action. Perhaps the government assumes that the nature of the current crisis is self-evident, that it is understood that so long as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed the conditions of life not only in the UK but around the world will worsen.

The future of US-Iranian negotiations remains clouded in uncertainty but even if an agreement on the Strait is reached soon, it will take months before the backlogs are cleared and supply lines get back to normal. The crisis however goes much deeper, because the current situation is the result of a catastrophic set of errors by the Trump administration. We have been witnessing the astonishing picture of one of the greatest powers the world has ever known wilfully weaken and undermine itself so that it no longer is either willing or able to play its accustomed role in the international system.

This is not an easy aspect of the current crisis to address for governments closely allied with the United States. They do not want to give up on the multitude of defence and security arrangements, including NATO, that have bound them together and have led them to look to Washington for leadership. It is even more awkward to acknowledge that one reason for this is that the President is unhinged, uninhibited in launching insults at foreign leaders, including the Pope, and with no coherent agenda other than servicing his own ego.

His ‘MAGA’ coalition is already fracturing, as its hero has blundered into exactly the sort of Middle Eastern war he was pledged to avoid. Perhaps the current dramas will become too much even for his own party and cabinet to bear, although there are no signs of that happening yet. Eventually he will leave office but by the time he does so the world will be a different place.

However difficult it might be to talk about this aspect of the current crisis candidly it is essential that ways are found to do so, because only then can the full implications for the UK and its European partners be appreciated.

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