He’s dead. Finally. Iran’s Supreme Leader, the sinister and brutal octogenarian Ali Khamenei, has met a well-deserved end at the hands of a joint US-Israeli strike.

But beyond the welcome demise of one of the longest-serving – and most vicious – dictators in modern history, what does this actually mean?

In and of itself, his death is not decisive. Khamenei was already nearing the end of his life, and the regime had long been preparing for succession. 

The reported death of his son Mojtaba alongside him would be more significant still. Mojtaba was widely seen as his father’s likely heir.

The crucial point – and it is one I keep repeating – is that without a coherent and organised opposition, and without a credible opposition leader to rally around, any successor is almost certain to come from within the regime itself.

So who might that be?

During the 12-day conflict with Israel last June – which I refuse to call a war, because as we are now seeing, it never truly ended – Khamenei reportedly identified three possible successors: the head of the judiciary, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i; his chief of staff, Ali Asghar Hejazi; and Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of the Islamic Republic’s founder. 

All are regime insiders. All are senior clerics. This matters, because under the constitution the Supreme Leader must be a cleric appointed by the Assembly of Experts.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (pictured) died in joint US and Israeli strikes in Tehran in the early hours of Saturday

Yet I have never found these names entirely convincing.

To my mind, a more plausible figure has always been Ali Larijani, the Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and one of the most experienced operators in the system. 

During recent internal unrest, Khamenei increasingly entrusted Larijani with the day-to-day running of the state, sidelining President Masoud Pezeshkian in the process.

True, Larijani is not a cleric. But Iran has long functioned less as a pure theocracy than as a praetorian state, heavily shaped – and in many ways dominated – by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. 

Nor should we forget that Khamenei himself lacked the senior religious credentials traditionally required for the role when he was elevated in 1989. The Assembly of Experts simply fudged the rules.

In recent months, Larijani’s influence has only grown. He has overseen the suppression of protests, managed relations with key partners such as Russia and Qatar, handled sensitive nuclear diplomacy, and helped prepare Iran for confrontation with Israel and the United States.

He will undoubtedly be high on any Israeli or American target list. Given Israel’s extraordinary penetration of Iran’s security apparatus, his survival is far from guaranteed. Were I in his position, I would be keeping my head well below ground.

But Khamenei’s death could trigger something even more consequential than succession: defections.

Ali Larijani (pictured), chair of the Supreme National Security Commission who, in recent weeks, Khamenei had given increasing power to 

Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi (pictured), the son of the Shah overthrown in 1979, is a potential successor to lead Iran

As long as the regime remains internally cohesive – above all, as long as the Artesh and, more importantly, the Revolutionary Guards remain loyal – the system will endure.

But moments like this create uncertainty – uncertainty breeds calculation. Simply put: senior figures start to hedge. They start to consider their future beyond the regime.

Donald Trump understands this dynamic well. He has spoken openly about offering immunity and inducements to insiders willing to break ranks.

If Khamenei’s death triggers a wave of elite defections, it could represent the first genuine crack in the Islamic Republic’s foundations – and the beginning of the end for a system that has endured for nearly half a century.

Should that happen, space could open for a genuine opposition movement to emerge.

In that scenario, one figure may loom large: Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Shah overthrown in 1979.

Pahlavi has lived in exile for nearly five decades. He is, in many ways, more American than Iranian. 

I am sceptical that he possesses the political skill required to rule. But there is no question that he has become a powerful symbol for many Iranians. During recent protests, demonstrators across the country chanted his name.

He may yet serve as a rallying point if Iran enters a true transition of power to a more western-facing and, frankly, saner regime.

Either way, one thing is certain: Khamenei’s death is not the end of all this, merely the beginning.

It has started. After weeks of formal talks, warnings and military positioning, including the deployment of roughly a third of the US Navy’s deployable fleet, the pre-emptive strike against Iran has begun.

As its codename suggests, Operation Epic Fury has unleashed air strikes against military, political and infrastructure targets.

The scale is game-changing. The military execution, by all accounts, formidable. But what happens next?

Generals like to ask one question before committing force: what does victory look like? Bombing is the easy part. What follows is far less predictable.

Perhaps that explains reports that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Caine, pressed for clarity before the operation began.

To approve kinetic force without understanding the end state is not bold leadership, it is negligence. Overwhelming force is not a substitute for a political plan.

This uncertainty explains why some Western allies did not line up unquestioningly behind Washington.

That hesitation should not be misinterpreted as sympathy for Tehran.

Tobias Ellwood, former minister for the Middle East, says President Trump has ‘opened a Pandora’s box’ in Iran

The regime’s toxic influence across the Middle East, sponsoring Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, suppressing its own people and destabilising neighbours for decades, is well understood.

Since the 1979 revolution, Iran has tested every American president.

The fall of the Shah, the 444-day hostage crisis, the export of revolutionary ideology, the steady expansion of proxy networks, and the long dispute over nuclear enrichment have defined four decades of confrontation.

For years, Iran operated just below the threshold of decisive response.

When intelligence suggested Tehran was approaching nuclear breakout capability, the US and Israel acted last June, striking Fordow and other sites in a 12-day campaign.

Yet the regime endured. Enrichment resumed. The ambition remained.

This time it’s different. Donald Trump’s message to the Iranian people – ‘When we are finished, take over your government’ – signals that this is not simply another limited series of air strikes.

It hints at regime change. Iran’s air defences may be degraded, but it retains formidable missile and drone capabilities.

US Central Command released this image as part of Operation ‘Epic Fury’ on Saturday, when it attacked Iran in partnership with Israel

Retaliation has already begun. Expect its proxies in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen to widen the theatre.

Disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and cyber operations are likely.

The Middle East is not a closed system; energy markets and global security will feel the effects. Then comes the harder question: what happens inside Iran?

It is tempting to assume that recent civilian uprisings suggest the country is ready to cast off this despotic regime.

But two uncomfortable truths intervene. First, there is no unified opposition waiting in the wings.

Iran is a mosaic of peoples, Persians, Azeris, Kurds, Arabs, Baluch and others, with deep ethnic, linguistic and regional identities.

Shared anger does not equal shared vision. There is no leadership structure prepared to assume control.

Second, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is not simply a military force. It is an embedded power structure.

President Trump claimed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed in Saturday’s attack

Israeli air defences worked to intercept Iranian missiles headed for the country after Operation ‘Epic Fury’ on Saturday

Beyond its elite units and missile programmes, it holds economic clout across construction, energy, telecommunications and banking.

In any vacuum, it is the most organised and well-armed actor in Iran.

Trump will hope that in the event of the regime’s collapse, the IRGC will be open to a bargain, immunity from war crimes prosecution in return for a quiet disarmament, perhaps.

Without that, no international ‘stabilisation force’ – similar to that proposed for Gaza – will dare tread on Iranian soil.

Decapitating the government without structured transition planning could just as easily yield a military-dominated despotism.

Is that the outcome we want?

Trump has opened a Pandora’s box. Calls for de-escalation are understandable, but the threshold has been crossed.

In 50 years there has never been a greater opportunity to shape a different chapter for Iran.

This is how democracies unravel. 

Long after the Green Party’s victory in the Gorton and Denton by-election has been forgotten, the campaign and the precedent it set will continue to disfigure our politics.

We are Balkanising our country, moving beyond citizenship as our primary political identifier and instead relating to one another as members of antagonistic tribes whose territories happen to overlap.

The Green Party’s behaviour in the run-up to yesterday’s by-election should place that party beyond the parameters of democratic decency.

Divisive, sectarian and ready to stoke Muslim grievances against Israel and India, the former eco-activists have dropped any pretence of appealing to voters as British citizens.

At one point, their candidate, Hannah Spencer, told her Reform opponent, Matt Goodwin, that the Manchester Arena bomb had happened ‘because people like you are dividing people’.

Not that the Greens started it. Jeevun Sandher, a Labour MP of Sikh heritage, complained about the ‘dog-whistle’ of a Green by-election video in Urdu that featured a picture of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer shaking hands with his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi, a deeply unpopular figure in Islamic communities.

It had evidently slipped Sandher’s mind that, five years earlier, at a by-election in Yorkshire, Labour did precisely the same thing, running a picture of Boris Johnson with Modi, next to the caption, ‘Don’t risk a Tory MP who is not on your side’.

Hannah Spencer celebrates her historic win with Green Party leader Zack Polanski this morning

Does this really need spelling out? No democracy can flourish if its people lack common identity and shared allegiance. 

There have been multi-national regimes down the years – the Habsburgs, the Ottomans, the Soviets – but they survived only for as long as they remained autocratic. 

The moment their peoples were given the right to choose, they fractured into their component ethnicities.

What is happening here is vastly more toxic. We have moved from being a cohesive nation, in which almost everyone accepted certain norms – equality before the courts, parliamentary democracy, religious pluralism, free speech – to one in which we ourselves are teaching groups of our own citizens to be separate and resentful.

We might have handled immigration differently, with more manageable numbers. But our real error was to turn our backs on British patriotism.

During the 20th century, most settlers arrived in Britain in positive spirits. People don’t abandon their family and language to go to places they despise.

But we taught their children that Britain was rapacious, reprehensible and racist. No wonder some of them turned against the country of their birth.

Labour has long encouraged such a narrative among ethnic minority communities for partisan gain, and can hardly complain when others, notably the Greens and the Gaza independents, take it further.

The Greens campaigned largely on two issues: lifting immigration controls and hostility to Israel. 

Why those issues? Because they unite what is left of the Greens’ previous base, who regard the whole notion of discriminating between citizens and non-citizens as somehow racist, with its new, Muslim voters. 

‘We’ve tried to appeal to people from all kinds of backgrounds,’ said the Greens’ deputy leader, Mothin Ali, when asked about the Urdu video. ‘That’s about inclusivity.’

An odd word to use for campaigning in a language 19 out of 20 British citizens don’t understand.

Not that the Greens started it. Jeevun Sandher, a Labour MP of Sikh heritage, complained about the ‘dog-whistle’ of a Green campaign video (pictured) in Urdu – but it evidently slipped his mind that, five years earlier, at another by-election, Labour did precisely the same thing

Ali came to national attention when he marked his victory in the 2024 local elections in Leeds by shouting, ‘We will raise the voice of Gaza! We will raise the voice of Palestine! Allahu Akbar!’

On the day of the October 7 abomination, he recorded a clip in which he argued ‘Palestinians have the right to resist occupying forces’ and that everyone should ‘support the right of indigenous people to fight back’.

Does he realise, as a second-generation Brit, how dangerous it is to encourage ‘indigenous people to fight back’?

The backlash risks not being a return to civic liberalism and a renewed emphasis on individual rights. 

It could also be collectivist and self-pitying, but directed the other way around.

Why are Leftists playing this game? Do Greens think that their new voters will buy into the rest of their policies? Do they imagine that Manchester Muslims are clamouring for puberty blockers, ‘gender-affirming care’ and the legalisation of all drugs?

Of course not. This is a simple numbers game. 

The reason the Greens have lost interest in the environment is not just that they would find it hard to outflank Ed Miliband; it is that it doesn’t pull in as many votes as campaigning for immigration and against Israel.

What the French call ‘Islamo-gauchisme’ – Islamo-leftism – is, by its nature, negative. 

All that unites the eco-loons with the Islamists is a dislike of the West in general and Israel in particular. 

Every such alliance has resulted in the first lot, the white Lefties, being swallowed up by the second.

Is there an alternative? Yes. Respectable parties should appeal to British Muslims as precisely that: British.

They should recognise that a lot of Green and Labour voters here support conservative parties in their countries of origin, where their sense of victimhood has not been encouraged. 

They should emphasise the values that encouraged millions of British Muslims to volunteer in the two wars.

The best way to defeat a bad idea is with a better idea. And if there is a better idea out there than an open society based on property rights and personal liberty, I have yet to hear it.

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is President of the Institute for Free Trade.

Molto panico in Downing Street yesterday. Wickets were falling. Master strategists were gobbling cyanide pills. Aides scurred right and left and further left, white-faced, trousers flapping.

Yet one figure appeared – at the time of writing, anyway – to be going nowhere. Jonathan Powell, the National Security Adviser, was safe in his roost. Why? Of all No 10’s advisers, he was arguably the most culpable for the disarray of the Starmer Government.

You may not have heard of Jonathan Nicholas Powell. He prefers it that way. Whereas Peter Mandelson and Morgan McSweeney long seemed to relish their demonic reputations, Mr Powell is one of life’s spectral figures. He is an eminence grise, a flitterer in the shadows, a half-sensed shape that shifts in the gloaming to whisper words in ears, impart viscous advice and ease his own survival prospects.

It is now widely accepted that Mr Powell was one of the two vital sidekicks who encouraged Sir Keir Starmer to appoint Lord Mandelson as our ambassador to Washington DC. The other was Mr McSweeney and he, accepting the dreadfulness of the mistake, has departed. Pouff! Gone in a puff of hemlock.

Like a midge on the windscreen of an accelerating car Mr Powell clings on for dear life, and so far his suction pads are working.

Although the title of National Security Adviser may not sound exciting, some at Westminster call Mr Powell ‘the real Foreign Secretary’. Yvette Cooper occupies that great office of state in name, yet it is said she has little influence over policy or the major appointments.

It is to the tousle-haired Powell that Sir Keir defers on geopolitical strategy. It was he, not Ms Cooper, whom Sir Keir had at his side when he met China’s president Xi Jinping in Beijing a fortnight ago. Powell was a picture of patrician languor that day, pushing back his chair from the table and crossing his legs. How conceited he looked. A year ago he was at the White House, too, carrying an enormous briefcase when Sir Keir met Donald Trump.

If Mr Powell, 69, looks to-the-manner born, it may not be surprising. His much older brother Charles was Mrs Thatcher’s foreign affairs adviser. Jonathan himself joined the Foreign Office in 1979 and held various middle-ranking positions, possibly intelligence related, until he had a lucky break. In the early 1990s he was on a posting to Washington when he was told to get close to a ‘no-hoper’ presidential candidate Bill Clinton. When Mr Clinton entered the White House, Powell suddenly became the Foreign Office’s hottest expert on US affairs.

Jonathan Powell is the National Security Adviser, though some at Westminster call him ‘the real Foreign Secretary’

That good fortune brought him to the notice of Tony Blair, newly elected leader of the Labour Party, who was eager to muscle in with President Clinton. Blair asked Mr Powell to become his chief of staff. He remained in that job during the decade of Blair’s premiership. When we handed Hong Kong over to the Chinese, Powell was there. When we did a deal with the IRA to stop their war, he was in the thick of things – it was almost as if he derived a thrill from meeting gnarled Provos who had led the terrorist campaign.

And after Manhattan’s Twin Towers were destroyed, and as George W Bush’s neo-cons took the US to war in Afghanistan and then Iraq, it was very much Powell who was supervising our involvement. The then British ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, asked Downing Street how it wished him to proceed. Back came the message from Powell: ‘Get up the a*** of the White House and stay there.’

If the instruction was coarse, simplistic, self-lowering, it was perhaps instructive. Mr Powell is one of those Left-wing baby boomers who has a low opinion of his own country. He is so ashamed of our history – so warped by post-imperial guilt – that he thinks we should grovel to foreign powers, or in the case of the IRA, to Ulster hoodlums.

In those Blairite days he worked closely with Peter Mandelson. Mandelson was so amused by Mr Powell’s shimmering efficiency that he nicknamed him ‘Jeeves’, after the ‘gentleman’s gentleman’ in PG Wodehouse’s comic novels. The fictitious Jeeves has the ability to enter a room unnoticed. Jeeves always knows how to get his chinless wonder of a master out of scrapes.

Wodehouse’s Jeeves is a benevolent figure. The same cannot be said of Powell. The Iraq War was an enormous mistake, costly in blood, treasure and historical consequences. It only emboldened Islamism. Hundreds of British service personnel died, as did hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

When Blair left No 10, his successor, Gordon Brown, did not retain Mr Powell’s services. The Blairites and Brownites had got along badly, as Powell detailed in a joltingly indiscreet book.

When he published that bitchy account of the Blair-Brown struggles, he perhaps little suspected he would ever return to Downing Street. But when Sir Keir won the 2024 election, he soon appointed Mr Powell as his envoy to negotiate the so-called deal that has come to be called the Chagos Isles surrender. Britain offered to give away the ownership of its strategically vital air base in the Indian Ocean to Mauritius, which had no historical connection with the Chagos Isles.

More than that, Mr Powell agreed that we would pay billions of pounds for future use of this base – which we already own! The driving emotion behind this dreadful idea was, again, our old friend post-imperial guilt. When Donald Trump regained the US presidency in 2024, Britain had an excellent, professional ambassador, Karen Pierce. She knew the Trump team well. She was colourful, congenial and able to put the case of British interests without offending Mr Trump. But Downing Street – more particularly, Jonathan Powell – developed the view that Ms Pierce would not do. It was decided that a politician was needed. A man. Someone who could speak Trump’s locker-room language.

Sir Keir Starmer was encouraged by Mr Powell to appoint Lord Mandelson as our ambassador to Washington DC

Trump is admittedly a rum piece of work, but would Ms Pierce not have been a better choice? The usual procedure is to trust the professional diplomats. And ‘usual procedure’, as we know, is Sir Keir’s default setting. But someone talked him into defying civil service convention.

If you will permit me to join the dots, it may be worth recalling that when Powell became No 10’s chief of staff in 1997, special arrangements had to be made to allow him and Alastair Campbell (both political appointees) to work in positions that should have been held by impartial mandarins.

The Blairites, most notably Powell, have never had time for civil service convention. They regard the rules as an inconvenience. They place greater premium on personal connections, ‘who you know’, on the nod-and-wink approach, politics as the milieu of rich men and schmoozers and pals. This is the foetid swamp in which the Mandelson appointment was made, with the connivance of both the fallen Brother McSweeney and the still-untoppled Powell.

Had Sir Keir only had more belief, in himself and his country, he would have kept Karen Pierce in place. A prime minister with some national pride might also have told international lawyers to take a running jump when they pressed him to surrender the Chagos Isles.

Instead we have a National Security Adviser (National Self-Loathing Adviser, more like) who reveres our country’s critics and caves in to our opponents. And somehow, when so much else is falling to pieces, he survives. It is baffling. And wrong.