This morning there are still many unanswered questions surrounding last night’s announcement of a two-week ceasefire in the Middle East conflict.

Yet if, as seems likely, it really does presage the end of the 2026 US/Iran war, one thing is clear. Iran has won it.

When the bombing commenced, many observers struggled to determine what Donald Trump’s war aims were, given the seemingly incoherent nature of the President’s objectives and the fact they changed on a daily basis. But if you strip away the bombastic – and increasingly unhinged – rhetoric, a sober accounting of the administration’s primary stated goals reveals they have failed to secure virtually any of them.

Top of the list was regime change, aided and assisted by the Iranian people. Yet as of this morning one of the most savage and oppressive regimes on the globe remains in place.

As far as anyone can ascertain, the late 86-year-old Supreme Leader has simply been replaced by his son a couple of years ahead of schedule. Yes, the Iranian people did indeed take to the streets. Though not to rise up against their oppressors, but to form human shields around the energy facilities and infrastructure Trump had threatened to wipe from the face of the earth.

A second objective was the complete obliteration of the Iranian military. But, in the hours immediately preceding and following the ceasefire, Israel, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar all announced they were having to repulse ballistic missile and drone strikes from Iran.

The Iranian army remain so potent even Trump has been forced to concede the risk of putting US boots on the ground is too high. The Iranian navy – supposedly completely destroyed – has continued to escort select vessels through the Strait of Hormuz. And Trump’s claim that Iranian air defences had been so heavily degraded ‘there’s nobody even shooting at us’ was followed 48 hours later by the downing of a US F-15 jet and an A-10 ground attack aircraft.

Then there was the Iranian nuclear programme. Trump had previously claimed this was destroyed in June 2025. Then as the war began he changed tack and sent out his aides to claim Iran was ‘probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb making material’.

As the war progressed this changed again, with the administration alternating between insisting bombing had again neutralised the threat, and briefing that plans were being put in place to seize the remaining nuclear material with special forces. As the ceasefire came into effect all Trump could say on the issue was ‘it will be perfectly taken care of’.

And of course there was the final objective, the re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz. This has indeed been achieved. But only by granting Iran the right to charge ‘tolls’ on any vessels that pass through. And so at the end of a month-long war – sorry, ‘excursion’ – that has cost the US 15 soldiers’ lives, 500 wounded, the destruction of dozens of aircraft, radar sites and other vital military facilities at a conservative cost of $800million (before factoring in the cost of the military operations themselves), what has Donald Trump actually achieved?

He has managed to turn the world’s most vital nautical artery into a glorified Dartford Tunnel.

And that only scratches the surface of the blood and treasure that have been expended to satiate Trump’s egomania.

The Iranian regime has not just been left in situ but has been emboldened.

Across the Middle East every poet, bard and street musician is currently penning new verse to commemorate Iran’s heroic triumph against the Great Satan. Words that will in turn energise a new generation of radicals, terrorists and sympathisers.

In a region where many states had previously looked at the US as its protector, former allies are now counting the cost of an alliance that has resulted in another 30 dead and hundreds injured.

In Israel, that saw this conflict as their best – and perhaps last – opportunity to eradicate their greatest threat to existence, criticism is already mounting, with opposition leader Yair Lapid announcing: ‘There has never been such a diplomatic disaster in all our history.’

Meanwhile here in Britain we are also counting the cost of a war our Prime Minister insisted we had no part of. Nato, the defensive alliance that has kept us safe for 80 years, lies in ruins with Trump now actively advocating withdrawal.

And even if it is simply another of his empty threats, it seems inconceivable that in the years remaining of his benighted presidency Vladmir Putin will pass up the opportunity to stress-test it.

Meanwhile for the first time in our history our Armed Forces have been humiliated in a conflict we purportedly did not fight.

The Royal Navy’s inability to deploy a single reliable destroyer to defend British sovereign territory as it was under attack showed the bleak status of our military. That, coupled with the total planning failure by our government and armed service chiefs, saw it take three weeks for HMS Dragon to even arrive on station.

A further intelligence failure did not predict Iran’s ability to target the other UK territory of Diego Garcia, meanwhile ministers then attempted to hide that attack from parliament and the people.

The state of our air defences is chronic and was compounded by the moral bankruptcy that saw Keir Starmer simultaneously pledging to stand back from the conflict, while allowing US bombers to pound Iran from southern England, and claiming these attacks were vital for our own defence.

Though to be fair, Starmer is not the only British politician to emerge from the past month with their reputation sullied. Kemi Badenoch showed terrible judgment by initially endorsing the US attacks, then flip-flopping when she saw the public tide turning decisively against them.

But her stance pales into insignificance when set against the sycophancy and politically myopic utterances of Nigel Farage and the Reform leadership.

Even Trump’s maniacal threat to wipe out a ‘whole civilisation’ wasn’t enough to see him break with his best mate from Mar-A-Lago.

He would, he said, consider allowing the US to use British bases for that purpose so long as Trump could provide assurances of the ‘end game’.

Today no one can be entirely sure of what the end game in Iran actually looks like. But we do know this. Trump has somehow managed to engineer a situation where he has gone toe to toe with one of the most despotic and malign theocracies in history. And has been strategically, politically and morally vanquished.

In the hours and days to come Trump’s cheerleaders will fan out across the despised MSM (mainstream media) and social media to try to spin defeat into victory. But there is nowhere for them to hide now. And there is nowhere for Trump to hide.

Across the United States, and across the globe, a debate has been raging for years about where the 47th President would sit in the annals of history.

Now that debate has ended. When he tweeted in fury and desperation: ‘Open the F****in’ Straits, you crazy b*****ds, or or you’ll be living in Hell’, it was over. Trump had been beaten. And everyone from Tehran to Tennessee knew it.

In the midst of Vietnam, Lyndon B Johnson angrily and famously declared: ‘I’m not going down in history as the first American President to lose a war’. But he did. And yesterday Donald Trump became the second to also lose one.

By DAILY MAIL COMMENT

Published: 19:06 EDT, 4 April 2026 | Updated: 20:53 EDT, 4 April 2026

Yesterday’s dramatic news that US forces were searching for the crew of an F-15 fighter jet, apparently downed by a missile over southern Iran, will serve as a brutal wake-up call to the American public.

Iranian media reports of an airborne rescue mission being mounted to locate two missing flyers are bound to trigger chilling echoes of the 1979 hostage crisis when 66 US citizens, including diplomats and civilian personnel, were seized by a mob that stormed the American embassy in Tehran.

Coming not long after the psychological scarring of the Vietnam war, the 444-day crisis, which included a failed military attempt to free the hostages, was a catastrophic blow to American power and prestige.

Thankfully we learned yesterday that one crewman, who had ejected from the stricken aircraft, was swiftly picked up by a rescue squad. But as darkness fell, concern was growing for the whereabouts of the other flyer.

And with the Iranian regime offering a bounty for the capture of the serviceman, the war, which began five weeks ago today, is entering a perilous and unpredictable path.

If the forces of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) detain the missing crew member first, then America could find itself plunged into a fresh crisis.

I have some experience of how this might play out after Iran seized six Royal Marines and two Royal Navy seamen on the Shatt al-Arab waterway between Iraq and Iran in 2004. As the UK’s deputy ambassador, I was despatched to the Iranian port of Bandar-e Mahshahr to negotiate their release.

There was one big difference from today – Britain was not at war with Iran. And after years of popular protest and weeks of key leaders being killed, the regime has become less coherent and less predictable.

Nevertheless, I am certain there will be some similarities in how things play out.

Central to negotiating with Iran is to recognise that the regime, despite all the damage meted out by President Trump, is single minded and fixated only on its own survival.

Despite the blood-curdling sabre-rattling that comes out of Tehran, it is not suicidal, and ultimately it is pragmatic, acting rationally in its own interests.

It also has an acute sense of the need to create leverage against its enemies, which is why it is behaving as it is over the Strait of Hormuz and firing rockets and drones at its Middle East neighbours. At the same time the Iranian regime will want to appear to the world as the wronged party in this conflict.

Which brings us on to how it might treat a captured American pilot. Might the flyer be killed? It is highly unlikely, as the Iranians will want to keep them alive for maximum leverage.

But given the unpredictability of the regime at the moment, it cannot be ruled out.

The elimination of so many at the top by US strikes makes the calculation more difficult. Authority to make decisions has been devolved to local IRGC commanders, who may take a much more aggressive and uncompromising stance towards their prisoners. This might be physical mistreatment, but more likely it will be emotional.

Twenty-two years ago, the British military detained by the IRGC I was sent to negotiate over were blindfolded, marched into the desert and subjected to mock execution.

Unable to see, they believed they were about to be shot.

They were also forced to read scripts to cameras apologising for their ‘crime’ of entering Iranian waters. All these actions by the Tehran regime were in breach of international law. With an American prisoner, similar treatment is likely, along with isolation and sleep deprivation.

Will any US detainee be tortured? Again, unlikely given the Iranian regime’s preference for occupying the moral high ground. But local commanders might be capable of committing violence against a hostage.

There will undoubtedly be tensions within the Iranian hierarchy between those advocating humiliation of their greatest enemy and those wanting to show a humane face to the watching world.

One thing I am certain of is that the Iranian regime will want to parade their captured trophy for propaganda purposes as soon as possible. My guess is they would keep the prisoner at an undisclosed location, probably an IRGC barracks, having removed anything that might identify its whereabouts to US or Israeli intelligence.

There is one other factor: the Iranian regime is patient. They will be content to let a stand-off over a hostage last for months, even years, as they extract the maximum price and grind down the will of their adversary.

Today America has a very different sort of leader from Jimmy Carter in 1979. In Donald Trump we have a highly capricious president and the Iranians will find it is almost impossible to second guess what he might do.

In the meantime, the memory of the crisis nearly 50 years ago and former president Carter’s bungled rescue mission will haunt every hour until the flyer is brought home.

• Matthew Gould was deputy and acting ambassador to Iran between 2003 and 2005.

I don’t know for certain what really happened to Morgan McSweeney’s mobile phone. But after another day of obfuscation, deflection and outright deceit from the Prime Minister and Downing Street, this I do know for a fact: Keir Starmer is lying his posterior off about what happened to his former chief of staff’s mobile.

Yesterday Starmer made his first comments on the mysterious – and from his perspective, highly fortuitous – disappearance of the device that likely held numerous messages capable of ­shedding light on the scandal surrounding Peter Mandelson’s appointment as Washington Ambassador.

‘It was stolen. It was reported at the time and the police have acknowledged and confirmed that that is what happened’, he opined. Then added, ‘the idea that ­somehow everybody could have seen that sometime in the future there would be a request for the phone is, to my mind, a ­little bit far-fetched’.

It’s that second observation, the ­widely-quoted ‘far-fetched’ line, that has Sir Keir bang to rights. If, as we were initially told by Government ministers on Sunday, McSweeney’s mobile had been snatched a full year before the Mandelson scandal broke, Starmer would have been correct. Nostradamus himself would have struggled to foresee the subsequent chain of events.

But as has now been proven, that initial claim was false. McSweeney’s phone was actually reported stolen on ­October 20, over a month after Mandelson had been forced to step down from his role as Ambassador over the saga. And by that stage, the potential significance of McSweeney’s messages was apparent to everyone. Including Keir Starmer himself.

On September 17, six days after Mandelson’s sacking, the Commons rose for the Autumn recess.

But within Downing Street, over the parliamentary break, anxious officials were trying to develop a strategy to contain the fall-out from the political crisis. Specifically, several meetings were held to ‘game-out’ what would happen if the Tory Party opted to submit a ‘Humble Address’, a parliamentary procedural device that could be used to force the Government to release documents and messages relating to Mandelson.

Yesterday I spoke to a former government adviser with ­knowledge of those meetings. They told me explicitly ‘one of the things that was discussed was ‘what to do if they come for Morgan’s messages’.

So Starmer didn’t need Nostradamus to foresee the future. His aides were already doing that for him. And desperately looking at ways to stop McSweeney’s messages falling into the Tories’ hands when parliament returned. With Sir Keir’s full knowledge and consent. According to one official, ‘Keir knew everyone was worried about Badenoch pushing for the messages. He was briefed on it in case she asked him straight out if he would release them’.

On October 13, the House of Commons reconvened for its new session. And seven days later, McSweeney’s mobile vanished into the night. So yes, there are indeed many aspects of this case that are ‘far-fetched’: the increasingly ludicrous and incredible excuses being proffered by the Prime Minister, his Ministers and his advisers.

Take, for example, Downing Street’s explanation for how the theft of McSweeney’s mobile was dealt with. Initially the line No.10 had spun was that, upon ­receiving the 999 call detailing the ‘theft’, the Met had simply ticked their boxes, handed out their crime ­reference number and declared the case utterly unsolvable.

But then the Met released the call log. And it revealed Morgan McSweeney had provided the wrong location for the theft.

When the Met call-handler repeated the wrong location back to him, he failed to correct her. In addition, he failed to mention he was the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff. He failed to mention the mobile that had supposedly been snatched was one of the most sensitive phones in the British government. When the police followed up on the case with not one, but two, calls in the following days, he failed to respond to them.

Most fantastically, when the ‘theft’ was reported, the Government security team reportedly did not even bother to contact the Met. On Wednesday I spoke to a former Government official who had been subject to the street theft of their mobile. And they explained the process.

First, they contacted the No.10 security team. The team disabled the phone, and began to monitor the tracking device within it. They then contacted the Met on the official’s behalf, explained the significance of the offence, and provided tracking information.

The official then contacted the Met, who reassured them they had been informed about the sensitive nature of the device, and confirmed the details of the incident. Then – and this is crucial – they dispatched an officer to the device’s location. In the end it was a block of flats, and they were unable to narrow down the phone’s precise position. But as the official told me ‘they took it really seriously, and continued to follow up over the next few days’.

The person I spoke to was senior in government. But nowhere near as senior as the Prime ­Minister’s Chief of Staff. Yet, as they said, ‘the security team and police wanted to try to make sure it was a random theft, not a ­targeted operation by the Russians or Chinese’.

As I wrote earlier in the week, Keir Starmer and his government are taking us all for fools.

Because this is the story that they genuinely want us to swallow: Peter Mandelson resigned in the midst of one of the biggest domestic and international political scandals for a generation.

Downing Street strategised over how to contain the crisis, including how to manage a demand for the publication of the McSweeney/Mandelson emails. A couple of weeks after those strategy sessions, McSweeney’s mobile happened to be snatched, and the messages lost for good.

What’s more, at the moment of the theft, the police were given the wrong location for the crime. The victim didn’t even bother to explain he was the Prime Minister’s most senior adviser. Or that the device contained some of the most sensitive information in Government.

Even though the phone contained a tracking device, no attempt was made to monitor it, or identify the location of the phone. No police officers were deployed in pursuit of it. Indeed, the Government’s own internal security team did not even bother to liaise with the police in an attempt to secure its recovery.

And despite the fact MPs had passed a specific motion ordering the publication of all messages relating to Peter Mandelson’s appointment, this incident was withheld by Keir Starmer from Parliament for over five months. It was withheld from the Press. And was withheld from the British people.

The Prime Minister would have us believe this is all one massive coincidence. In the days and weeks to come will we be asked to believe it is all a coincidence other sensitive phones have vanished, other crucial messages have been deleted and other vital emails have been eaten by the dog?

Far-fetched? What’s far-fetched is that Britain is currently ­governed by a Prime Minister who seriously believes people will actually fall for this rubbish.

This past weekend, the Cotswold Set has been positively buzzing with concern and intrigue following hints that the six-year marriage of a local couple may have hit troubled waters.

According to The Mail on Sunday, there has been a notable ‘distance’ between Princess Beatrice and Edo Mapelli Mozzi of late, as Edo tries to protect his luxury interior design consultancy from the toxic fallout of the Epstein Files.

The claim was underlined by a flurry of snaps on Edo’s own Instagram feed that showed him living it up in the luxury hotspots of Palm Beach, Florida, on a business trip recently.

Like the flamingo pink suit and loafers he was wearing, it wasn’t a good look for the Italian aristocrat. Not when his wife – and mother of his two young daughters – is enduring the toughest time of her life.

I wasn’t surprised though. I’ve had some experience of Edo myself. At a church service, I found Beatrice and Eugenie and their husbands seated behind me.

Edo was laughing loudly and generally behaving like a disrespectful teenager so that, at one point, I turned round and gave him the evil eye that only a woman my age – and a mother – can bestow.

To his credit, he got the message, pronto. But there was an arrogance there that smacked of immaturity.

‘He needs attention, he’s one of those men,’ a source told the MoS. That figures, I thought when I read it yesterday.

Of course, one could legitimately ask what marriage wouldn’t hit a rocky patch with all Beatrice and Edo have been through of late.

The collapse of the House of York, her father’s arrest and the sustained humiliation over her parents’ links to a convicted paedophile; the fact that Beatrice herself is mentioned hundreds of times in the Epstein Files. And perhaps, most brutally of all, the isolation of herself and sister Eugenie from the wider Royal Family – it has been reported that they will not attend some of this year’s most illustrious public events.

Then there is the pressure on both girls here and in the US to tell all about their own association with Epstein. All of this would surely take its toll on the strongest of marriages.

But this is no ordinary pairing. When Edo married Beatrice in 2020, neither she nor her sister were strangers to scandalous headlines generated by their parents over many decades.

From toe sucking to cash for access and dodgy business deals, Edo – whose own parents were long-time friends of the Yorks – knew exactly what kind of family he was marrying into.

Of course, none of the numerous sins of the parents can be held against the girls. But some might say that for Edo to suddenly decide that his business is in danger of being tainted by the ongoing scandals, just as Beatrice needs him the most, is a bit rich.

I’ve met Beatrice, too, and she strikes me as a very sweet and earnest young woman.

People who know her well describe her as ‘incredibly kind, if a little naive’. No doubt she’s making the best of it by trying to navigate the ‘distance’ Edo is reportedly creating in their marriage with his various work trips while loyally supporting both her parents. She wants to keep the show on the road.

The truth is that, her children aside, Beatrice is a far better person than those she loves and supports but who appear to let her down repeatedly.

A friend of mine sat next to her and Edo on the train from Paddington to the Cotswolds late last year as they worked on the guest list for the Christening of their youngest daughter, Athena.

‘They seemed very together, as they compared names and numbers from their phones. But it was Beatrice doing the work.

‘Neither looked like they had had a good day,’ my friend added. ‘But she was stoically cracking on with the job in hand.’

Those who know the Princess appear to have little time for Edo.

‘Beatrice herself is very likeable and a kind person but, Edo, he’s smarmy,’ says one.

‘He’s a little p***k,’ says another bluntly.

It seems to me that Beatrice has two choices. The first is to make her marriage work and for that to happen, she should follow in the footsteps of her sister – Eugenie is based in Portugal with her husband Jack Brooksbank and their two sons – and leave the UK.

Their daughters are young and if Edo’s business interests are mainly in the US, then that should be the destination. If the marriage is hard-going now, then it is only going to get trickier if they are apart for long periods.

As for her parents, it is possible for Beatrice to love them and to hold onto the fond memories of her childhood, whilst cutting herself free from their toxic influence. She should, as her sister has reportedly done, let them go.

Not with rage – from everything I hear, that is not Beatrice’s style. She is an emotional individual who wants everyone to be happy. But she needs to understand that if her marriage is her priority, that she and her family deserve better.

She can step away and begin to reconcile what she has been through whilst understanding that she is not accountable for the behaviour of others.

I think I understand enough about Beatrice now to know she’ll put her family first, herself last.

There isn’t a person I have spoken to who isn’t rooting for her. The time has now come for her to start doing the same for herself.

The leaders of the West are not doing their duty. It may already be too late, but everyone with an ounce of clout or influence must now use it to end the US-Israel attack on Iran. And let us not forget that those two countries started this war. They attacked, an action which all through history has put the attacker in the wrong.

If the war is not soon stopped, then an economic and political crisis worse than anything since 1945 may well be triggered. It will be accompanied by yet another mass movement of countless refugees into Western Europe. And for what?

Will we never grow out of the Utopian fantasy that we can go stomping round the world, telling other countries what to do? It is as if we have been hypnotised. All someone needs to do is to talk of Winston Churchill or of ‘appeasement’, and grown men and women lose their minds and start howling for war. Some seem to long for it.

In the early moments of Donald Trump’s current spasm, the leaders of Reform UK and the Tory Party instantly piled in to endorse the Trump-Netanyahu assault. They had time to think before they spoke. But they couldn’t be bothered. Like so many modern ‘conservatives’ and ‘patriots’, they have fallen in love with foreign war, quite unaware that war is the enemy of conservatism and the ally of the Left.

For instance, has it still not sunk in that the vast waves of migration from Africa and the Middle East are the direct results of the wars we kept starting or fuelling, in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Syria? Even now, there are people amid the ruins of their former homes, in their demolished cities, all over Iran, preparing for the long trudge westwards that ends with them struggling aboard a rubber dinghy on the French coast, headed for Kent or Sussex.

You may meet them, sooner than you think, in an English suburb. If you do, it will be a poorer, bleaker place than it is now.

The rising price of oil and gas is hugely dangerous to our tottering economy, threatening the same deadly combination of inflation and unemployment that hit us after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, only much worse, for we are so much weaker and so much more indebted now.

Those politicians who began by backing this attack, and urging closer British involvement in it, must have known that the war was an act of aggression.

Nobody has ever come up with any serious evidence that Iran was preparing its own attack.

On the contrary. Informed Americans admit that there was no urgent threat.

One key Trump aide, Joseph Kent, last week resigned from his job as the director of the President’s National Counterterrorism Centre. He said he had done so because Iran was not an imminent threat to the United States and that the US entered the war amid ‘pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby’.

The President, a small man, always tries to belittle his critics.

And he did so again, saying he ‘always thought [Kent] was weak on security, very weak on security’. But it will be hard for him to brush aside this criticism.

Mr Kent is more Trumpist than Mr Trump. He is an ultra-loyalist who has defended some of the President’s most questionable actions. But he still holds to what used to be Mr Trump’s position – of opposition to stupid foreign wars.

He has an impressive record of military service, and of sacrifice for his country. His wife was killed while serving with the US Navy in Iraq. Let them try to say his word does not count.

And if Mr Kent, all alone, can now stand up to the most powerful man on the planet and say that he is wrong, so can the leaders of what is left of the civilised world. It may not work, though it may. Mr Trump has a long record of chickening out if his blustering aggressions turn bad on him.

For certain, there is no point in doing nothing, or muttering among ourselves. It is positive folly to flatter Mr Trump with obedience and praise. The attack on Iran is an outrage against common sense as well as a breach of all civilised rules of behaviour.

It won’t do to justify it by saying what a vile regime Iran has. This is a pretext. Lots of countries have vile regimes. Many of them are our allies. Mr Trump is not attacking Iran because he can’t stand despots or leaders who kill their own people.

He’s fine with Egypt, which has a military junta that massacres pro-democracy demonstrators on its streets. He gets on well with Saudi Arabia, which actually cut up one of its dissidents with bone saws. He’s cool with Nato Turkey, which is rapidly turning into a rather nasty dictatorship.

There is certainly a good precedent from history, which gives Britain a special right to tell Mr Trump to grow up and behave.

In the midst of the Suez crisis in 1956, when Sir Anthony Eden was equally madly invading Egypt, the phone in his office in Downing Street began to ring insistently. Eden was elsewhere, so a civil servant, William Clark, lifted the receiver, only to hear the infuriated tones of President Dwight D. Eisenhower yelling across the Atlantic ‘Anthony, you must have gone out of your mind!’ The President was enraged. ‘It was some time before I was able to persuade him that I was not Anthony,’ Clark recalled.

There is little doubt that Ike got through to Eden later. The US threatened us with economic ruin if we did not call off the invasion. In the meantime, the US Navy were sent to harass and obstruct British ships in the Mediterranean, fouling our radar and sonar and flying their aircraft aggressively low over our fleet.

The US Navy’s then chief, Admiral Arleigh Burke, explicitly discussed opening fire on the Royal Navy with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

So Mr Trump can keep his sentimental appeals to a non-existent soppy relationship between London and Washington. And we can feel free to tell him to stop before he wrecks the world.

Donald Trump is discovering the hard way that it’s usually wise to treat allies well – for if you treat them badly they’re less likely to help when you need them.

Despite several vainglorious boasts that he’s already scored a famous victory in Iran, Trump has been imploring America’s Nato allies to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz, through which a substantial chunk of the world’s seaborne oil and natural gas passes – at least it did until ‘defeated’ Iran closed it.

The longer the Strait stays closed, the more the global economy will be disrupted by soaring energy prices, with the risk of widespread recession growing by the day. So there’s a whiff of desperation in Trump’s request. But the Nato allies are hardly queuing up to lend a hand – for a list of very understandable reasons as long as your arm.

President Trump wants the allies to join in a war he started without even going through the motions of consulting them about why he was doing it or what war aims he hoped to achieve.

But now that he needs them, they’re expected meekly to fall in line. Unsurprisingly, none is prepared to oblige.

Almost three weeks into the US-Israeli attacks on Iran, Trump has yet to articulate what he sees as the endgame. The allies fear getting dragged into an open-ended commitment in which Trump alone will have the power to declare victory, whenever the mood takes him.

Yesterday Israel hit Iran’s South Pars gas field, the biggest such facility in the world. Tehran immediately vowed retaliation against oil and gas facilities in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. The closure of the Strait may be the least of the world’s worries if both sides are now going to take out vital energy infrastructure.

The whole Iran adventure seems to have been contrived by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Steve Witkoff, a Trump business crony, in cahoots with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Kushner and Witkoff know much more about property development than war or geopolitics. Israel has its own agenda. No wonder the Nato allies are reluctant to get involved.

Nor does Trump’s conduct over the war to date inspire allied confidence. He began hostilities without giving much (if any) thought to how to keep the Strait open, even though it was clear that Iran would retaliate by closing it.

Washington sources tell me Trump was so convinced of US military superiority that he thought the tyrants of Tehran would topple before the regime ever got round to attacking the Gulf States or closing the Strait.

Why would the Nato allies now want to align with such epic stupidity? Especially since there still isn’t even the glimmer of a plan from Washington about how to reopen the Strait.

Trump is also paying the price for poisoning the well of allied goodwill. It’s only recently that he was disparaging and misrepresenting the role of allies who fought alongside the US in Afghanistan, their forces suffering many fatalities and life-changing injuries in brutal conditions (no ally more so than Britain). Why would they now rush to the side of someone so ungrateful and ungracious?

Moreover it was only in January that Trump and his MAGA bully-boys were musing aloud about invading a Nato ally if Denmark didn’t do as it was told and hand over Greenland to America.

Only in Trump World can you threaten allies with forcible seizure of their territory and still expect them, only a month or two later, to be loyal and supportive when you suddenly need them on the high seas.

Nor has it helped that Trump, bizarrely, sometimes treats America’s closest allies worse than its adversaries. Less than a year ago penal US tariffs were being slapped on friends from Europe to Canada to Japan while enemies like Russia were getting off scot free. Trump’s tariff obsession has been somewhat sidelined since. But allies were needlessly alienated.

For all these reasons and more there has been no allied rush to America’s side. Nor is there likely to be.

I take no comfort from writing these words. Ever since I studied American history and politics at university, worked as a White House correspondent for The Economist and bought a flat in New York where I still stay on regular visits, I have regarded myself as the epitome of the pro-American Brit.

It’s not always been a popular cause. As editor of The Sunday Times in the 1980s I was one of Ronald Reagan’s few fans in the British media. When Margaret Thatcher authorised US bombers to take off from England to launch air strikes on Libya in 1986 – a deeply unpopular decision – my newspaper was one of the few to back her.

I incurred the wrath not just of the Left but of High Tories sniffy about Reagan’s America. But I never regretted it.

So if even I can understand why the Nato allies are not now rushing to America’s side in the current conflagration, it’s fair to conclude Trump really has lost the room.

There will be a price to pay. Europe will suffer more from the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz than America, which is largely self-sufficient in oil and gas.

And Trump will seek his revenge. He has a long memory and he will not quickly forget that when he snapped his fingers the Nato allies did not come running.

It will turn out to be a significant step on the road to a post-America Nato in which the US contribution is much reduced or even, eventually, non-existent.

The European allies, as they reject US overtures to help in the Gulf, need to brace themselves for all that will follow and what it entails.

Some European powers already get it. France’s advocacy of the need for ‘strategic autonomy’ in military matters has been vindicated. Germany is in the throes of a massive military Keynsianism, with over €500billion being spent on rearming and related infrastructure investment to create by far the biggest land forces in Europe. Even peace-loving Scandinavia is rearming fast.

But Poland is ahead of everybody. It now spends almost 5 per cent of its GDP on defence (twice the UK rate) to create armed forces of 300,000 regulars and 200,000 reservists. It is buying hundreds of K2 Black Panther tanks from South Korea plus M1A2 Abrams tanks from America. Its airforce is being modernised with F-35 fighter jets, South Korean combat aircraft and the biggest fleet of Apache helicopters outside America.

Before long, the combined might of Polish and German armed forces alone might be enough to deter any westward Russian adventurism. As for Britain, we have been reduced to the role of increasingly irrelevant spectator.

For most of the past 70 years we were Nato’s biggest military spenders after America. Now we are 12th and slipping further. Under the dead hand of Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, both of whom know nothing and care even less about military matters, the rise in defence spending has been pathetic.

They have committed to increase it to 3 per cent of GDP but refuse to publish a roadmap to show how or when we will get there.

Meanwhile we struggle to send one warship for the defence of Cyprus and have next to nothing to offer even if we wanted to help America reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump and know-nothing blowhards around him started this war without Nato allies. They can finish it on their own. If they can. Nato has bigger fish to fry.

The beginnings of a post- America Nato can be discerned. In years gone by you would have expected Britain to be in the driving seat of such a venture. Instead we have opted to be on the sidelines, irrelevant and ignored – to the everlasting shame of Starmer and Reeves.

Welcome to Whitechapel. I exit the Tube and the words hit me in both English and Bengali.

I walk on to the street – and into the ­subcontinent. Headscarves, chadors and niqabs throng the pavement.

Whitechapel Market is a line of stalls by the kerb: traders and customers haggle and chat, selling everything from clothes to household items and curries.

As I pass, I hear bursts of Bengali, Turkish, Urdu and Arabic but little English: an enclave of Babel in central London. Most of the shops have Bengali signage. Hung on lampposts are blue posters wishing people Ramadan Kareem (Blessed Ramadan) to mark the month in which ­Muslims believe the Koran was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. It draws to a close tonight. I’ve come here because Whitechapel hit the news when footage emerged of a police officer attempting to reason with a group of Asian men enraged by a Christian man preaching the gospel just yards from East London Mosque.

The video shows a tense scene. Some shout at the preacher. One bearded man roars at him: ‘Your God is a Jew!’

One of them shoves him in the back, causing him to stumble. Addressing the group, the officer tells them firmly: ‘In this country we have freedom of speech.’ She continues: ‘I understand that you guys don’t want to hear it, so I would just recommend that you walk away and don’t listen to him.’

A man wearing a facemask ­interjects. ‘This is Whitechapel – this is a Muslim area.’

Days later, a teenage Christian and Right-wing social media influencer who goes by the name of Young Bob – and who calls for the ‘remigration’ (that is, the mass deportation) of ethnic minorities –claims he was attacked outside East London Mosque when he tried to conduct ‘some interviews and debate’. All things considered, his presence was unlikely to be welcomed by the local faithful – which may have been the point.

I want to ask some of the people here about integration, Islam and Britishness. I want to understand what they think and what they make of charges that Muslim ­communities in areas such as Whitechapel have failed to properly assimilate into the country that’s opened its doors to them.

Opinions here are often conservative. By one of the market stalls I meet local businessman Prith and ask him about the Christian preacher. ‘I believe in freedom of speech and respect all religions,’ he tells me. ‘But people must understand there is a large Muslim community in Whitechapel and no one’s religion should be disrespected.’

I point out that no one was ‘disrespecting’ Islam; the preacher was simply spreading the gospel. ‘Well, that’s OK then,’ he replies, but he doesn’t sound convinced.

Several other people on the street don’t want to talk. One lady in Islamic dress smiles sheepishly and mimes that she doesn’t understand what I’m saying.

In the borough of Tower Hamlets, which includes Whitechapel, 40 per cent of residents are Muslim – the highest proportion in England and Wales.

Muslims form an outright majority in some parts of Whitechapel, while the East London Mosque, with capacity for up to 7,000 worshippers, is one of Europe’s largest. According to the 2021 Census, fully 56 per cent of Whitechapel residents are Asian, with 40 per cent being Bangladeshi. Fewer than 30 per cent are white.

Billionaire tycoon Sir Jim Ratcliffe attracted controversy recently when he claimed that parts of ­Britain had been ‘colonised’.

He later apologised. But it is places like Whitechapel that are causing more and more people to draw similar conclusions.

This is an area with a long history of cultural diversity, with successive waves of migrants drawn by the docks and proximity to the City of London. The 19th century saw a large influx of Irish following the Great Famine.

Around the turn of the next century, 120,000 Jewish refugees arrived. Then, from the 1950s onwards, migrants from Bangladesh – especially the highly conservative region of Sylhet – became the dominant group. By the late 20th century, Whitechapel had become one of the largest Bangladeshi communities in the world.

In the local Subway, a lady in a black chador – a full covering with only the face exposed – is serving. The menu is halal, like those of more than 200 Subway branches in the UK. There is no ham on the menu, only turkey ham.

Outside, 22-year-old Riya is scrolling on her phone. She’s heavily made up under a headscarf.

I ask her about the lack of English speakers in the area. ‘I’m basically a translator for my grandparents when they need to do official stuff,’ she tells me, proudly, ‘which is weird because they’ve been here longer than I’ve been alive.’

I walk on. A lady in a niqab – a long garment leaving only the eyes showing – shuffles past a Paddy Power: gambling is, of course, forbidden in Islam, but not every ­Muslim is equally devout.

J ust down the road, the minarets of the East London Mosque loom skywards. The institution has courted much controversy over the years. It has opened its doors to speakers who have called for the death penalty for gay people and apostates; to speakers who have expressed support for Hamas; and to men linked to Jamaat-e-Islami, the Islamist movement that has left a trail of violence and repression across Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Last autumn the mosque organised a fundraising run in nearby ­Victoria Park which caused outrage because women were banned from taking part – something the ­Government’s Communities ­Secretary Steve Reed declared was ­‘absolutely unacceptable’.

Nearby, two bearded youths wearing white skullcaps are handing out flyers. They are raising money for the British Islamic charity, Ashaadibi, to convert the historic East London Central Synagogue on nearby Nelson Street into a mosque, education and community centre. (Jews have lived in the area for centuries, although their numbers are dwindling.) ‘We’ve paid the deposit,’ says one, ‘but we need to raise the rest.’ The flyer tells me there is £3.5million outstanding.

I enter a bookshop owned by Islamic Relief, one of the UK’s largest Muslim charities, which has faced repeated allegations of links to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood (proscribed as a ­terrorist group in a number of Middle Eastern countries, which it denies).

I buy a copy of From Monogamy To Polygyny: A Way Through, which promises to ‘help and advise women experiencing polygyny [a form of polygamy in which a man has multiple wives], in a loving and truthful manner’. The practice is supposed to be illegal in Britain, of course.

In nearby Brick Lane, a Welcome To Banglatown sign stretches across the street.

I pass shops advertising remittance services, a big part of life here. Britain is one of the most significant sources of remittances – money sent overseas – flowing into Bangladesh, accounting for roughly £2billion annually. It seems possible, to say the least, that British taxpayers’ money, paid in benefits to immigrant families, goes straight out of the country to fund relatives back home.

What about integration? I want to know – and soon have my answer. A barber walking out of his garishly decorated shop snaps ‘Me no English’ when I start to ask him, though I suspect he understands me fine. In a mini market, the man behind the counter says politely: ‘I don’t know about this.’ An elderly man in traditional South Asian dress walking with a cane smiles and says: ‘Speak someone else.’

At Amar Gaon, a Bangladeshi restaurant and takeaway, Tayib Ali is serving garrulous customers and over the shiny counter we ­discuss Whitechapel, Britain and integration.

Tayib has been in the UK for 25 years. His English still isn’t great but he’s positive about things. ‘Yes, I feel British,’ he tells me.

He has the same complaints as most people. ‘Living costs are very high now. Crime and drugs have increased. The police need to improve locally.’ What about criticisms that the community here can be too insular? ‘Yes,’ he agrees. ‘It’s good for the community to open up more.’

I make my way to another restaurant, Preem, to meet Ajmal Hussain, a 74-year-old local businessman with much to say about the problems within Whitechapel’s Bangladeshi community.

‘Many cannot even read or write,’ he says. ‘One of my friends, when he wants to write a cheque, he comes to me to get me to do it. And then he checks it with ten people because he doesn’t trust me! He can’t even read and write Bengali, let alone English.’ ­Hussain has a longstanding feud with the Brick Lane Mosque, which to me encapsulates many of the problems within the community.

‘I am one of its biggest donors,’ he says. ‘I tried to get on the board, but they won’t let me because I’ll scrutinise their accounts. I am a very strict man.’

He continues. ‘One day they invited me to a public meeting and I told them that I would pay for a professional to manage the mosque properly. They said: “This is a village mosque, so it should be run in the way a village mosque in Bangladesh is run.” I knew then that it was pointless to continue.’ He’s into his stride now. ‘Most of the imams at the mosque can’t speak ­English. The head imam, who’s very talented in Arabic, told me he can’t speak English. I said: “You are smart: can you please try to learn to speak some English?”’

Hussain has also had longstanding issues with Lutfur Rahman, the highly controversial mayor of Tower Hamlets. Rahman was mayor from 2010 to 2015 until being found guilty of electoral fraud and disqualified from office.

The 2015 Election Court Judgment makes striking reading. Election Commissioner Richard Mawrey QC found Rahman guilty of corrupt and illegal practices in the 2014 mayoral election, removing him from office and barring him from standing for five years.

The findings included vote rigging, false statements about opponents, treating (providing food and drink to influence voters) and – most strikingly – illegal ‘undue spiritual influence’, where imams told ­Bengali Muslim voters it was their religious duty to vote for Rahman and a sin to do otherwise. Mawrey described Tower ­Hamlets under Rahman as resembling a ‘banana republic’. After his ban expired, he ran again in 2022. He’s been mayor ever since.

Hussain is characteristically direct. ‘He’s [Rahman] not a good man. He says to the community he is helping them but he’s not. Tower Hamlets council has not improved under him.’

Finally, I move on to the recent video ­controversy. Again, Hussain doesn’t mince his words. ‘If you don’t like something, don’t listen. This is a free-speech country. The idea that this is a Muslim place is wrong.’

H e tells me that many years ago Rahman gave permission for the Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary (now serving life imprisonment with a minimum term of 28 years for directing a terror organisation) to hold a procession through Whitechapel on the basis that it’s a Muslim area.

‘Choudary came and I told him he couldn’t go any further. I said: “I’m Muslim but my restaurant is not: we sell alcohol here. This is not a Muslim area but a business one. Go to Saudi Arabia or Iran. Don’t stay in England.’”

I tell him he’s brave. ‘A lot of Bengalis don’t like me for it,’ he says with a grin.

Lorenzo Vidino is Director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University and an expert on some of the forces operating in places like Whitechapel.

‘First, you have an insular community from a specific part of Bangladesh that has kept itself apart,’ he says. ‘Second, you have political actors, often Islamists, that exploit this to push for separation and ­cultural isolation.’

These ‘actors’, Vidino continues, ‘have held sway in Whitechapel since the 1970s’ and ‘created an infrastructure that has moved its influence from grassroots into ­politics. Mainstream politicians have done little to address the problem,’ he adds. ‘So it has metastasised dramatically.’

The sun sets. Men in Islamic dress break their fast with grilled meats and rice in small, brightly lit cafes. Veiled women beg for alms for Ramadan.

I’m a foreign correspondent, used to reporting from far- away places. Yet as I walk down Whitechapel Road to catch the Tube for the short journey to my flat in north London, I feel as if I’m thousands of miles from home.

To all those mourning the demise of the Duchess of Sussex’s Netflix series With Love, Meghan – fear not!

For the modest sum of £1,400 per person (plus the cost of a flight to Australia) you can recreate the unique joy of that event by signing up for a ‘girls’ weekend like no other’, a three-day retreat in Sydney organised by the creators of Her Best Life podcast at which the Duchess will take part in a ‘fireside chat’ Q&A.

Promising an ‘unforgettable weekend for women ready to reconnect, recharge and have some serious fun’ (nothing like the prospect of ‘serious fun’ to make the heart sink), a select few prepared to stump up £1,700 for ‘VIP’ tickets will have a front-row seat for this momentous occasion, as well as a chance to be in a group photo with the Duchess and take home a goodie bag possibly containing – gasp – Meghan’s famous jam and flower-sprinkles.

Not for the first time I find myself mourning the passing of the great Dame Edna Everage. As Australia’s most iconic and incisive interviewer, who knows what nuggets of wisdom she might have enticed from the Duchess’s fair lips had she been engaged to lead the conversation.

After all, Dame Edna was on close personal terms with many members of the British Royal family, having often reminisced about her friendship with the late Queen (‘Some nights, the little corgis and the Sovereign, wearing a somewhat stained brunch coat, would visit’) and her even more intimate relationship with Charles himself, which she ascribed to his Highness’s deep appreciation of the more ‘mature’ woman.

Alas, Dame Edna is no longer, and neither is the great Mrs Merton. ‘So, Duchess,’ the latter might have inquired in those soothing North-Western vowels of hers: ‘What was it that first attracted you to the son of the future King?’

Instead, the interview is slated to be conducted by the podcast’s co-founder Gemma O’Neill, who describes herself as ‘just a mum from Sydney with a podcast that started as a passion for those trying to live their best lives’. The humility is touching.

Indeed, when O’Neill was initially approached by the Duchess’s long-time fixer, Markus Anderson (who famously organised that first date with Prince Harry at Soho House back in 2016), she was unsure whether to accept because, as she puts it: ‘I felt like I didn’t deserve her.’

I dare say there are some members of the Royal Family who feel similarly about the Duchess, although perhaps for rather different reasons. Either way, having overcome her misgivings, O’Neill gave in, saying: ‘She’s risen above everything and I have so much respect for that.’

But now it seems O’Neill may have her own struggles to overcome, as yesterday it transpired that her ‘talent management’ business, Gemmie Agency, had collapsed owing more than half a million Australian dollars (more than £250,000), most of it to the taxman.

O’Neill says she cannot pay her debts due to a lack of savings and her ‘limited income’.

Oh dear. The best-laid plans of mice and Meghan, eh? Personally, with or without the Duchess’s gracious presence, I can’t think of anything worse than spending three days inhaling the scent of fake tan and HRT while being instructed on how to clear my yoni or take part in a ‘sound healing’ experience or whatever new wellness fad is trending on TikTok.

It’s not that I object to a bit of Pilates or yoga; it’s just that if I’m going to take time out to spend a weekend with other women it’s not going to be some random group whose only commonality is the ability to spend thousands on woo-woo but my own actual friends, whose company I can enjoy for free.

I’m always amazed at how many women fall for this stuff. I’m often urged – sometimes by people who should really know me better by now – to take part in this or that ‘retreat’, inevitably at vast expense in some inconvenient location where some smug hippie (usually some retired acid casualty with a threadbare ponytail who’s clocked that there is more money to be made selling snake oil than there is from actually working) wangs on about the importance of gut biome and kombucha infusions while secretly sneaking off for a quick vape in between Himalayan nose-flute workshops.

As to sisterly support, it’s always just a bit more White Lotus than you anticipate. If you think men can be a bit competitive, you’ve clearly never been to an all-woman hot yoga class. Put it this way, most women would rather dislocate a hip than admit they can’t keep up (and have done).

In recent years this stuff has migrated online, spawning an army of unregulated ‘wellness influencers’ who’ll promote anything for the right price.

The vast majority are, like most influencers, peddling fake lifestyles to gullible – and often rather vulnerable – punters.

Events like this one in Sydney are an opportunity to further monetise the insecurities of women fuelled by a culture of vanity, in this case dressed up as ‘health and wellbeing’.

Truth is, the only people this stuff benefits are the ones taking down your credit card details – and the only person who can heal you (assuming you need healing in the first place) is you. After all, wellness begins at home, not at the box office.

The body lies mutilated in the street. The wounds are savage but calculated. This is more than sadism. It is a message.

At first glance, it’s just one more ­Iranian who has lost their life amid the state’s promiscuous violence. A tragedy – as death always is – but in the Islamic Republic, sadly a part of daily life.

But this is different: it’s not an Iranian protester lying in the dirt for all to see but an officer of the regime’s first and last line of defence: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Since the US-Israeli strikes on Iran began on February 28 I have been in ­contact with a source who is across western intelligence inside the country.

And what they have revealed to me is something extraordinary: that amid the chaos and fury of the war in Iran, the state’s most brutal security forces are not only penetrated by enemy services and in disarray – they are turning on each other. ‘Over the past four days, reports have painted a picture of an ­Iranian security apparatus under severe and accelerating internal strain,’ says my source.

‘More than 60 incidents have been ­documented across virtually every branch of the regime’s ­military and security apparatus, spanning multiple regions simultaneously.

‘That body turned up in the street just the other day,’ they add. ‘And it’s not an isolated incident by any means. There are many reports of IRGC soldiers being executed for desertion,’ he continues. ‘It’s happening constantly. IRGC leaders are also regularly executing subordinates for refusing to carry out orders.’ This is ‘not isolated turbulence but a nationwide condition,’ they add.

Executions are reportedly occurring throughout Iran’s military and security forces, with personnel from multiple branches being put to death – sometimes on the spot at their own bases.

The killings are often carried out under ­secret orders so tightly classified that even fellow officers are kept in the dark.

At the same time, bodies of regime officials showing signs of torture have been turning up dumped in streets and other public places. The victims come from across Iran’s security apparatus – including intelligence officers, naval personnel and members of the regular army. Opposition groups are believed to be responsible for some of the killings.

The message is clear: the regime is under attack from all sides.

Even Iranian missile teams are penetrated, with their equipment reportedly ‘breaking down’ mysteriously on occasions. Authorities suspect sabotage and the incidents are followed by investigations, arrest – and yet more executions. The security forces are so widely compromised that they are being turned inside out. Paranoia is at an all-time high.

The Iran War has sparked outrage among many critics. Even those more sympathetic to the need to take out this vicious regime have questioned what appears to be an absence of clear objectives or planning in the war.

Regime change beyond the state’s inner circles seems, for the moment, impossible – as we have just seen by the replacement of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei by his son Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei.

But it remains the goal.

In a video message released on February 28 as the strikes began, Trump called on the Iranians to seize the moment.

‘The hour of your freedom is at hand,’ he told them. ‘When we are finished, take over your government. Now is the time to seize control of your destiny.’

So far, there is little sign of that. People are mostly confined to their homes while US and Israeli airstrikes continue to pound Iran.

Trips out into the street and shops are few and mainly for basics and retribution for those who step out of line is swift.

‘If anyone comes forward in line with the wishes of the enemy, we will no longer see them as merely a protester, we will see them as an enemy,’ said national police chief Ahmad-Reza Radan in comments aired by state broadcaster IRIB. ‘And we will do to them what we do to an enemy… all our forces are also ready, with their hands on the trigger.’

My source confirms this. ‘On the street the atmosphere remains bleak,’ they say. ‘Across the board there is extremely heavy repression. There are checkpoints ­everywhere in Tehran. People are being beaten, investigated and detained.’ But as the days roll by, a clear plan – tactically at least, is starting to emerge.

The first wave of strikes took out Iran’s now former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and as much of the leadership as ­possible. Then came wider strikes aimed at IRGC facilities and Iran’s potent ballistic missile capability. In recent days strikes have moved on to hitting the Basij, the IRGC’s street-thug enforcers – and the checkpoints.

What is now evident is that a central plank of the American and Israeli plan is to do whatever they can to help the people rise up after the bombing stops.

Even now, amid the relentless pounding, there are still signs of opposition. ‘Last week there was an attempt to organise a large rally in Tehran,’ says my security source. ‘But it collapsed because the city was saturated with security forces. And yet the regime does not have complete control.’

Attacks from the limited opposition that is able to function mean security officials are on their guard. ‘Regime forces are more scared of a mobilised population than air strikes for these reasons,’ says my source.

For now, the bombing is relentless; swathes of Iran are an inferno and the people are terrified. A friend I will call Mahmoud, who lives in Tehran, was blunt. ‘It’s terrifying,’ he told me. ‘The bombs are very loud and we hear them through the night. I gather with my family and try to tell them we will be OK. We are very afraid. It’s a terrible war. But we hope the Americans will succeed.’

Will regime change happen? I ask Baqer, a 45-year-old office worker. ‘Right now, it seems little has changed,’ he says, referring to Mojtaba’s accession to the leadership. ‘But we hope the regime will be much weaker when this war ends. One day Trump and Netanyahu will finish the job. Then, believe me, our time will come.’

If this might once have seemed fanciful, intelligence assessments are becoming more sanguine, despite the soaring costs of oil and gas caused by Iran’s chokehold on supplies.

Not least because another growing source of chaos is the regime’s failure to pay its thugs. Across Iran, soldiers and security personnel from multiple branches have reportedly staged protests, threatened to abandon their posts – and, in some cases, deserted after months of unpaid salaries and pensions. Critically, the anger cuts across the ranks, from ordinary troops to senior officers. Instead of addressing the mounting financial crisis, authorities are doing what they always do: lash out. The result is more surveillance, more intimidation, more punishment.

The effect is merely to breed yet more resentment among the very forces the regime relies on to keep it wedged in place. ‘Personnel across multiple branches [of the Revolutionary Guard] have fled or attempted to flee. Manhunts have been launched for missing members, and families of those who fled have been placed under house arrest. Resignation requests across multiple provinces have been rejected outright, in some cases under explicit threat,’ reports my source. ‘The idea is that all this paves the way for uprisings in the future,’ they conclude.

‘When the smoke clears, people will be surprised at how degraded the regime’s machinery of terror is. It’s only a matter of time before it starts breaking down.

‘No one seems to understand just how much trouble the regime is now in.’