Andrew arrested, Mandelson probed - where it comes to Jeffrey Epstein, “nobody is above the law” is about to get tested hard. Right so Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince, has been arrested by Thames Valley Police on suspicion of misconduct in public office, and officers have been searching addresses in Berkshire and Norfolk, and that alone is enough to set the whole Epstein universe on fire again, because this isn’t another vague “links to Epstein” story any more, it’s the British state saying, out loud, that it is treating a former royal now as a suspect in an abuse-of-office investigation connected to what he is alleged to have passed to Jeffrey Epstein while holding a public role. But Peter Mandelson is the name sitting right beside that in the public mind, because the Metropolitan Police have already confirmed they are also investigating misconduct in public office allegations involving a former minister in relation to Epstein material and they have executed search warrants there as well, and the public can see the two tracks at once now, not as gossip, as policing decisions, and that is why the question becomes immediate and unavoidable: why does one man get the full spectacle and the coercive control of an arrest while the other gets “under investigation” language, even while warrants are being served? Andrew’s brother, King Charles has done the ritual line, deep concern, proper process, law must take its course, and Keir Starmer has done the other strand of that, saying nobody is above the law, and anybody with information should come forward. With the nonsense he’s up to in trying to make the law fit when it comes to protesters, it’s a bit rich invoking the law in respect to this quite frankly, but that’s by the by. Those phrases though are supposed to steady the ship, but they don’t, because when the Epstein name is involved people do not hear reassurance, they hear establishment self-protection, and they start asking who is being thrown overboard and who is being kept behind the rope, how far does this latest Epstein rabbit hole go?

Trump’s Iran threats are now colliding with real-world red lines, a live military build-up, and a negotiation track detonating into war. Right, so Donald Trump has sent big, very loud signals at Iran while keeping the talks going, and those two things do not sit together unless the threat is the whole point. The second round of indirect talks in Geneva has ended, Iran’s side has described it as more serious than the first round, and they are talking about “guiding principles” and drafting. At the same time, Trump has been pushing more military weight into the region, and Israel’s own leadership has been told to prepare for a war scenario. Ali Khamenei has gone on record with the bluntest version of what Iran is saying back: you bring carriers, we have weapons that can sink them. He has framed it as a warning, not a plea, and he has framed American “strongest army” boasting as exactly the sort of arrogance that produces a surprise you cannot walk off, that even the strongest armies can get hurt. Once the other side answers your threat with a specific consequence, it stops being performance and starts being a bill you might have to pay. Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, has described the Geneva talks as more constructive than the earlier round and said there’s a general understanding on guiding principles, but he has also been careful to say it’s early days and the hard part is still to come when it comes to putting anything into text. The real fight isn’t the atmosphere in the room, it’s what Iran would actually accept on uranium enrichment, what the United States would actually trade on sanctions relief, and whether Washington is trying to drag missiles and regional alliances into a nuclear negotiation until “deal” really means surrender. Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s special envoy leading the US delegation, is doing it in a format that shows how little trust exists, because the talks are still indirect and mediated by Oman. Nobody is sat there smiling across a table. Notes are being carried back and forth like both sides are building a paper trail as much as they are building an agreement.

BBC Question Time panel leaves the Greens out while Labour bleeds councillors to them days before Gorton & Denton votes. Right, so Fiona Bruce is hosting Question Time tonight and the BBC has already published the panel list, which means the thing doing the damage is not a clip, not a quote, not a bad moment on air, it’s a decision that exists before the cameras even roll, because it names four people and only four people: Heidi Alexander for Labour, Richard Holden for the Conservatives, Robert Jenrick for Reform, and Jon Sopel as the journalist, and the Greens are not in the room. That list sits there in public before a single audience question, and that’s the whole point, because when a programme that often squeezes in five guests decides it’s only doing four tonight, it isn’t “one of those things”, it’s a hard exclusion choice, it’s a choice about who gets treated as automatic politics and who gets treated as optional, and they’ve made that choice in the same week a Green candidate is actually on a real ballot in a live parliamentary by-election. Tom Stannard, acting as Returning Officer for Manchester, has already signed and published the legal notice that fixes the Gorton and Denton by-election for Thursday 26 February 2026, and that notice is the hard object the whole week is built around because it lists the candidates by name, including Hannah Spencer for the Greens, Labour’s Angeliki Stogia, and Reform UK’s Matt Goodwin, so the Greens aren’t some outside commentator asking for airtime, they are literally on the ballot in a parliamentary contest happening in days. Robert Jenrick being put on that Question Time sofa tonight then becomes a broadcast decision with teeth, because the BBC is choosing who gets treated as automatic national politics in the same news cycle that by-election is live, and with Jenrick booked Reform gets the default stamp of “serious” while the Greens get treated as the party you can leave off the stage even when the Returning Officer’s own notice says they are in the same race.

Israel is using a land-registry process to reclassify Palestinian land as “state land” when proof thresholds can’t be met - on their terms of course. Right, so this is the proof object. Land registration. A state registry entry. A file that turns Palestinian land into “state land” if the people living on it can’t satisfy an Israeli proof test. Bezalel Smotrich is Israel’s finance minister, and he’s the one driving this as part of the settlement push. Yariv Levin is Israel’s justice minister, giving the legal machinery and the courts cover to run it as “procedure”. Israel Katz is Israel’s defence minister, which means the whole thing sits under the same security apparatus that controls Area C on the ground. They’ve restarted a process that was frozen for decades and they’re calling it “transparency” and “dispute resolution”, which is always the language you reach for when you want theft to sound like admin. Because once the registry says the land belongs to the state, the eviction stops looking like a land grab and starts looking like “enforcement”. That’s how people get erased without a headline-making massacre, and it’s also why Jordan is sounding the alarm and why this stops being a local story. So stay with me, because I’m going to show you how the mechanism works, why the proof bar is the weapon, and what this locks in for the region once it’s written into the record. Right, so Israel’s cabinet has now approved a return to land registration in the occupied West Bank, and the names attached it matter because it tells you what this is for: Bezalel Smotrich has brought it, Yariv Levin has backed it, and Israel Katz has signed onto it, and the mechanism is brutally simple even when it’s wrapped in tidy bureaucratic language. The state restarts a process that was frozen for decades, the state decides what gets “settled”, and anything Palestinians cannot prove to an Israeli standard gets recorded in the state’s name. Land becomes “state land” by default. A dispossession pipeline with a rubber stamp.

Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain is splitting Farage’s vote — and dragging the whole right wing further into a deportation bidding war. Right, so Rupert Lowe has launched a new party called Restore Britain, so now there are now two hard-right parties chasing the same voters, Reform and Restore, sat side by side, competing in the same turf. The far right starting to eat itself. So on the surface, that sounds like good news. If you want Nigel Farage stopped, a split like this could blunt his momentum, waste votes under First Past The Post, and turn his “inevitable next government” act into a right wing scrap. But here’s there is a catch. Lowe isn’t trying to beat Farage by being better at governing. He’s trying to beat him by being nastier. He’s already on record talking in “millions will have to go” terms when it comes to migration, he’s already playing games with who counts as British, and Reform figures are already publicly arguing about the racism swirling around Restore’s online antics. So here’s what we need to go over, because I’m going to walk through what this split could block under first past the post, what it could still drag the country into even if Restore wins nothing, and why Farage’s attempt to look respectable could end up forcing him into the same mistake we’ve seen the Tories and Starmer’s Labour make in chasing a right wing flank of voters drifting away from you, until the whole argument moves right. Right, so Rupert Lowe has launched Restore Britain as a political party and, in the process, he’s turned Nigel Farage’s big selling point into a visible weakness: the far right in Britain is not a single brand, it’s a market, and markets split when there’s money, attention, and grievance to harvest. Lowe has done the launch through a set-piece announcement video, shot on his farm, built to travel on social media first, and to feel like it’s already a movement before it’s even a party. Restore Britain has been presented as the place you go if you think Reform has started playing dress-up and trying to look “credible” for the cameras, the donors, and the same old TV panels, and that framing matters because it means Lowe isn’t trying to outcompete Farage on competence, he’s trying to outcompete him on permission.

Labour’s Gorton & Denton dinner tape has triggered a police complaint - watch the clip, then judge what it says for yourself. Right, so Labour’s Gorton and Denton dinner tape is leaving a bit of a legal aftertaste, and I’m not asking you to take my word for anything because the proof is the tape itself. So here’s the deal, I’m going to play you the clip, I’m going to tell you what we can say with certainty just from what’s visible and audible, and then I’m going to walk you through the only thing that matters after that, which is the legal and political mechanics that make this so toxic for Labour in Gorton and Denton. Because “treating” is a real word in election law, “ordinary hospitality” is the excuse everyone reaches for, and intent is the hinge that decides whether this is just grim optics or something that drags a campaign into a police file. And if you’re thinking this is just another internet row, it isn’t, because once a by-election is being fought with a dinner tape as Exhibit A, nobody in that race gets to pretend it’s about policy leaflets anymore. So stick with this, because by the end of this you’ll know exactly what questions Labour can’t dodge, what receipts would make or break the story, and why the public judgement lands long before any official process does. Right, so that was the video clip in question, circulating from the Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election campaign showing a roomful of people at a sit-down meal, with Labour campaign material visible, and a voice on the recording setting out a condition for being fed that sounds, to the ear, like “if you want to get fed” then you need to hold signs up. And the first consequence is not even legal, it’s practical: once something like that is on film, nobody in that room gets to pretend the event is private, nobody in the campaign gets to pretend it’s a misunderstanding that can be tidied away with a statement, and every other party in the constituency now has a ready-made line that fits on a leaflet.

Greens “Zionism Is Racism” Vote Being Stopped? Here’s how the conference clock could stop a vote without anyone actually banning it. Right, so Green Party Spring Conference 2026. Motion A105. “Zionism is Racism.” Is the vote now at risk of not being reached? Because look at this. A stack of amendments are now sitting on top of the motion like a weight, and the only thing you need to know about conference is the clock doesn’t care who’s right, it cares how long it motions take to proceed. If this gets dragged out, if this turns into endless micro-changes and procedural wrangling, you don’t need anyone to ban it. You just need time to run out, and then you get the easiest outcome for everyone to hide behind is ‘we ran out of time’ ‘we didn’t have time to get to get to vote’. So I’m going to show you what is happening in regards to this motion now, how a vote can be stopped without anyone admitting they stopped it, what the Standing Orders Committee can do about it, and what members can do to make sure this doesn’t end as a no-vote scandal where everyone’s furious and nobody’s accountable. Right, so Jewish Greens has published a call urging Green Party members to vote against Motion A105, and it has done it in the only way that forces the party into a reputational bind, because it frames the motion as something that risks making Jews feel unwelcome in the party and it treats “Zionism” as a term so broad that it can become a disciplinary label rather than a political description. Jewish Greens has also put on record a fear that party structures could be instructed to act on that label in ways that leave Jewish members uniquely vulnerable to accusation and disciplinary stress, and it has warned about the public impression of the party moving from anti-Zionism to anti-Jewishness in the eyes of people who will not read fine distinctions. Jewish Greens does not speak for all Jews and it does not speak for every Jewish Green member, and it does not need to, because the moment a self-identified Jewish group inside the party publishes a warning about belonging and discipline, the party is now operating under a public constraint that no procedural memo can undo.

Right, so Donald Trump has just come out with the line that tells you where this is really heading. Regime change in Iran, he says, would be “the best thing that could happen”. Well for who, you big orange balloon? So when you now hear about how “talks are ongoing”, don’t picture diplomats leaning over a table looking for a deal. Picture a countdown with a polite label stuck on it instead.

Because at the same time, the US military is being described as getting ready for operations that could run for weeks, with everyone involved expecting Iran to hit back. A second aircraft carrier is moving in. Bases are being hardened. And the kind of targets being discussed aren’t just “nuclear sites”, they’re the state itself.

So in this video I’m going to do something really simple. I’m going to take the tangerine tyrant’s quote, lay it next to the buildup, and show you what it removes, because in doing what he has done and saying what he has said, he’s already removed deniability and it removes the idea this is still about a neat little technical deal. And it leaves you with the only question that matters now: how long do they plan to keep calling it “talks” while they set the board for war, now seemingly saying as much out loud?

Right, so Donald Trump has stood there, in public, and answered the regime change question by saying it “seems like that would be the best thing that could happen” in Iran, and once a US president starts speaking like that, every other sentence about diplomacy becomes stage dressing and every “indirect negotiation” becomes a timer you can’t see, because the end-state being floated isn’t a deal, it’s a removal. That fixes a constraint on everyone else in the room, including the negotiators who are still trying to pretend this is a normal bargaining process with a normal off-ramp, and it fixes a constraint on Iran too, because there is no technical concession that answers a demand for your government to stop existing.

The Pentagon is simultaneously preparing for the kind of operation that doesn’t fit inside the neat little euphemisms people use when they want audiences to think “limited”, “surgical”, “one night”, “back to normal by Monday”. The planning being described by US officials is for sustained operations measured in weeks, not hours, and the target set being contemplated goes beyond nuclear-related infrastructure into Iranian state and security facilities. That is the operational definition of escalation, because once state facilities are in scope, the action is no longer being sold as “non-proliferation enforcement”, it is being built as punishment, disorientation, and pressure against the machinery of the state. It is also being built with an assumption of retaliation, meaning the plan is not “hit and stop”, it is “hit, absorb, hit again”, and that means the real decision is not whether a strike happens but whether the United States accepts a back-and-forth cycle as a managed condition for weeks.

The hardware posture has been shifting in ways that match that assumption, because a country preparing to throw one punch does not spend this much effort on shields unless it expects the other side to throw one back. The USS Gerald R. Ford is being moved towards the region to join the USS Abraham Lincoln, and you don’t do that for show. You do it because you want more aircraft, more sorties, more command-and-control depth, and the ability to keep going day after day. A second carrier isn’t about signalling politely across a negotiating table; it’s about making the threat real, and keeping it real.