| | Dear Reader, | As it's Good Friday, we thought we'd send you half a dozen pieces we've run for paying subscribers over the last few weeks. It's a pretty random selection, of course – just a little reminder of what you've been missing. | We'd love to persuade you to join our subscribers, so you can stop missing out and receive the newsletter in full again every day. It's very easy. Just click on the button below. | | With all good wishes,
Jon Connell
Editor-in-chief |
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| | |  | Cadets of the Iranian Army Ground Forces in February. Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto/Getty |
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| Assassinations won't topple the mullahs | Donald Trump was betting on a swift victory in Iran, says Ashkan Hashemipour in Engelsberg Ideas. When the Supreme Leader and many in Tehran's top brass were taken out within the first few hours, the US president no doubt felt regime change was on the horizon. That now feels like a distant goal. Trump mistakenly assumed that Iran could be treated in a similar way to other regional cases such as Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi's Libya and Bashar al-Assad's Syria. But these regimes were all "deeply personalistic" – the removal of the figureheads swiftly brought about the collapse of the system beneath them. The Islamic Republic is "fundamentally different". | Unlike those highly personalised autocracies, Iran is not organised around the fate of any particular leader. Instead, its institutional design prioritises the preservation of the system itself. The Supreme National Council brings together different regime elites – military officials, key ministers, the president – to formulate core national security policies, from the nuclear issue to the defence of the country's borders, meaning decision-making occurs through an institutionalised process rather than "unilateral directives" from the top. The armed forces are similarly "de-personalised and horizontal", with provincial units allowed to act independently of central command – especially when senior leaders are killed or communications are cut. And the IRGC, which emerged as an amalgamation of revolutionary militias, has a "flexible command structure" more or less designed for fighting "unconventional wars against superior forces". This is not to suggest that Iran cannot be beaten. But it's far too resilient to be taken down by a "quick triumph". | | | | Advertisement | | This is a compensation notification from TTP Financial Compensation, an FCA-authorised claims management provider. Following our successful work helping clients with FSAVCs (Free Standing Additional Voluntary Contributions), we are now extending our service to public sector employees who received pension advice from financial advisors, including IFAs, banks, and insurance representatives, between 1988 and 2008. We may still be able to help even if you no longer have full documentation, as long as you recall the firms involved. Please do not delay, as time limits may apply. We offer a genuine no win, no fee service. You may also submit claims independently through the Financial Ombudsman Service. |
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| | |  | TikTok/@lisarose.yoga |
| If you ever find yourself wide awake at 3am, says Anahad O'Connor in The Washington Post, try the 4-7-8 breathing method. First, inhale through your nose for four seconds, then hold your breath for seven, and finally exhale through your mouth for eight, repeating the process as many times as you need. Though deceptively simple, the technique, which is based on an ancient yogic practice called pranayama, relaxes your muscles and slows your heart rate, allowing you to drift off more easily. |
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| | | | |  | Cillian Murphy and Rebecca Ferguson. Dave Benett/Getty |
| My tip to film-makers? Bin sex scenes | If I ever had to film a sex scene, says Carol Midgley in The Times, I can't decide whether an intimacy co-ordinator would make things better or worse. It would be nice to have someone batting for you, telling the director: "No, Carol doesn't want to pull the orgasm face again." But there's also a danger it could prolong the whole ordeal if they kept butting in to say they'd seen an "accidental flash of tuppence". The actress Rebecca Ferguson, who has a "marathon bedroom scene" with Cillian Murphy in the new Peaky Blinders film, says she finds them "off-putting", and Gwyneth Paltrow felt the same about her sex scenes with Timothée Chalamet in Marty Supreme. "Girl," said Paltrow, "I'm from the era where you get naked, you get in bed, the camera's on." | Can I suggest a radical solution? "Bin sex scenes altogether." There are more full frontal appendages on show these days than you can shake a stick at. More often than not, these "fist-chewingly awful" moments are just "lazy filler" in a shoddy script that forces you to dive for the remote if you are watching with a teen or your Aunty Val. You could still have all the romance and snogging, but as soon as the dog is about to meet the rabbit, so to speak, the camera could just pan away to the sound of violins like it did in the 1950s. No need for nipple daisies, merkins and those special "gentleman socks". No need for half-deflated netballs. And the truth is, apart from a few "seedy mouth-breathers", no one would really care. | | | | |  | Freeland: no fan of the "great capitulation". Hector Vivas/Getty |
| It's time we liberals took up the fight | Looking back, says former Canadian deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland in The New York Times, 2025 will be remembered as the year of the "great capitulation". It was the year liberal democracy lost its nerve as law firms, universities, media organisations, corporations and countries bent over backwards to appease an increasingly illiberal US government in an "unseemly and miscalculated" scramble to protect their interests. Suddenly, liberals everywhere began declaring that all the uplifting stuff about the arc of history was no more than "sentimental claptrap" and that "the age of monsters" had begun. This is nonsense. The only real danger to liberal democracy in 2025 was liberals themselves throwing in the towel with this highly contagious defeatism. | Donald Trump's narrow victory over the hopeless Kamala Harris was not a "global shift toward the extreme right". It was part of a worldwide bonfire of post-Covid incumbents who were blamed for inflation. Some places – Germany, Poland, Argentina – followed the US in replacing a left-wing government with a right-wing one. Just as many others – Britain, South Korea, Lithuania – went the other way. In other words, the elections of 2024 and 2025 weren't a "tectonic social and cultural shift" or a repudiation of the Enlightenment. "They were a complaint about the cost of ground beef." There were plenty of cases in which the populist right was explicitly rejected by voters. New York and Seattle elected socialist mayors; in India, Narendra Modi's nationalist party lost its parliamentary majority; in Canada and Australia, strongly Trump-aligned candidates were mullered at the ballot box. Traditional conservatives – "perhaps the most bereft political tribe" at present – have a golden opportunity to reject the bizarre fantasies of the extreme right and the wet fatalism of the left and lead the great 2026 renaissance. | | | | | Labour is becoming "the party of the rich", says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. A new Ipsos poll split respondents into four groups: "comfortably off", "financially stable", "just about coping", and "financially precarious/extremely vulnerable". Labour is way behind Reform UK in the three poorest groups, but "miles ahead" in the richest, with 33% support compared to 18% for Reform. A poll last September found that Labour is also by far the most popular party among the privately educated, on 38% compared to 25% for Reform and 17% for the Tories. | | | | | | It's Punch, says The Economist, a seven-month-old Japanese macaque in Ichikawa City Zoo who has gone viral after being abandoned by his mother and bullied and rejected by his peers. Posts about the miserable monkey have appeared more than 630 million times on Reddit, YouTube and X, with some urging him to #HangInTherePunch and others saying they'd like to "wreak vengeance on his tormentors". One influencer even flew to Japan to check up on him, and the poor primate's only source of comfort, a stuffed orangutan from Ikea, has sold out in stores across the world. As one fan put it: "Punch is the most loved creature on the Earth right now." | | | "Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other."
Honoré de Balzac |
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