I've negotiated with Trump's foes. He's taking a huge gamble
A decade ago, I sat next to Iran’s oil minister and senior Shell executives signing documents in front of a full auditorium and the world’s television cameras.
The agreements were to allow the energy giant to re-engage in oil and gas fields in the west of Iran. The plan was that within a year or two, Shell would be working with Iranian partners to renovate, modernise and develop the rusting and broken infrastructure and open new streams of exports to the world.
That didn’t happen. The nuclear deal signed by Barack Obama in July 2015 was starved of oxygen and then abandoned during Donald Trump’s first term in the White House.
New EU border checks should be suspended before peak summer, aviation industry leaders have said, after Brits reported huge delays due to the new Entry/Exit System (EES).
The system, rolled out fully in April, involves people from the UK having their fingerprints registered and photographs taken to enter certain countries.
The EES is used to enter the Schengen Area, which consists of 29 European countries, mainly in the EU.
For most UK travellers, the process is done at foreign airports.
Severe operational consequences disrupting passengers and putting border authorities, airports and airlines under unsustainable pressure.
Senior figures at three major aviation industry bodies wrote to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission warning waiting times at border control had “increased significantly, now reaching up to five hours”.
Since it’s implementation, the EES has caused travel chaos for Brits.
England’s stunning victory over the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) may have England fans elated, but some are wondering if Tuchel is still the right choice to lead the team to a World Cup victory.
England had never lost to an African side in a World Cup match, and only once in their entire history.
Inside seven minutes, a defensive calamity and mistake from Jordan Pickford put the DRC on the cusp of history.
It was Kane’s two goals within the last fifteen minutes of the match which saw England narrowly take the win.
England’s full-backs were a mess against DRC because Tuchel went weird with his selection and Ezri Konsa looks jumpy.
Gareth Southgate protected an average defence that was the weak point of the team and England became boring to the point of fault. Tuchel is ostensibly doing mostly the same but without the defensive protection bit.
England now face Mexico in Mexico: far harder, far more altitude, far better opponent, far more febrile atmosphere. The worry from Atlanta that won’t leave this brain: what if better are better against us and we’re already living on the edge of incompetence?
Russia launched a large-scale attack on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with missiles and drones, killing at least 13 people and injuring dozens more.
Russia launched a series of strikes on Kyiv, hitting residential buildings and triggering a fire in a hotel on a central boulevard.
Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko has said 13 people had been killed, with about three dozen locations across the city damaged in the attacks.
Many residents took shelter at metro stations after the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, issued the first warnings of the attack.
Zelenskyy was forced to cut short a trip to Dublin on Wednesday, citing intelligence reports of a large-scale Russian attack.
Ukraine said on Tuesday it hit one of Russia’s largest satellite communication centers in north Moscow for the second time in just over a week.
Russian president Vladimir Putin also recently admitted Russia is facing fuel shortages after Ukraine launched repeated strikes on oil refineries, while Kyiv notably launched a large-scale attack on Moscow last month.
Three families reflect on the early signs of the illness, which affected their parents.
They include the things they missed or dismissed, what they’d do differently and what they’d want other people in the same position to know.
One of the first incidents that rang alarm bells for Robert was his mum falling victim to a suspected scam from someone selling mattresses door-to-door.
She also started to struggle with cooking and making her special dishes she’d been making for decades without a problem.
We [had] just sort of played along with everything. But on one particularly bad day, I blurted it out over the phone, ‘Because you’ve got dementia, mum!’ She threatened to kill herself, which was very scary. Maybe it’s something I should have explained properly to her from the get go…
I think we missed some of the really early subtle signs.
Rosie’s mother was diagnosed with Young Onset Alzheimer’s Disease at 58 but some symptoms, like brain fog, were put down to the menopause.
She had become more forgetful, and was repeating herself, but as she had always “been scatty” it was dismissed.
It was on strange things like going to the same buffet.
Chloe was just 14 when her mum, Sarah, was diagnosed with young onset frontotemporal dementia, a rare form of the disease.
Another time Sarah, who was diagnosed in her forties, forgot how to boil an egg.
On Saturdays, when she’d usually go shopping, she’d go out and come straight back home, almost like she forgetting
what she was going out for.
Officials have drawn up contingency plans to cut further green levies from energy bills if prices remain high this winter, The i Paper has been told.
Several options are now circulating among Burnham’s transition team who are believed to be weighing up how to deliver on that pledge. A Treasury source said work on a package was ongoing to help with rising costs.
Burnham could remove remaining green levies from energy bills, funded through general taxation instead.
One proposal would be to raise the bank surcharge from its current 3 per cent.
Replace stamp duty, loosen fiscal rules and tax the capital gains uplift on inherited assets.
A written statement published by the Chancellor said the remaining sum would be “confirmed at Budget 2026, in a fair and balanced way”.
The coronation of Andy Burnham is fraught with dangers. Never will a prime minister have arrived in Downing Street with so little scrutiny of what he wants to do.
Sir Keir Starmer’s much-delayed Defence Investment Plan had one big bet at its heart: drones are the future of warfare.
American company Anduril makes the “Seabed Sentry“- a weighted cylinder that uses sensors and AI to monitor what is happening under the sea. They could be used to listen out for spying and sabotage by Russian submarines. They are far cheaper than crewed submarines using traditional sonar.
A dozen of the cylinders can be dropped onto the seabed at a time by an autonomous submarine, with the devices forming a network which communicate between themselves and listens out for undersea activity.
The UK is woefully unprepared with the Royal Navy in a desperate condition. Whoever sits in Downing Street come next September will need to address matters of defence, homeland and cyber defence especially, with urgency.
Electric flying taxis could be above the streets of London by 2028, a manufacturer has claimed. Here’s what you need to know.
Vertical Aerospace is still testing the aircraft and it will need to be approved by both the approval from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA). But the company says the aim is for air taxis to become as cheap and convenient as ordering an Uber to the airport.
Writer Sadhbh O’Sullivan looked into her own forgotten subscriptions when she became a first-time buyer, and realised how much she was wasting on things she wasn’t using.
I’d long considered myself to be quite a reasonable spender.
But the hidden costs across her bank accounts, like free trials that hadn’t been cancelled and memberships for abandoned services, proved otherwise.
It was full of small amounts, £2.99 here, £4.50 there. These small amounts added up.
According to a Nationwide survey almost one in five Brits don’t use every platform they pay for.
The bank suggests they could save as much as £400 a year by ditching them.
National Trading Standards’ 2025 research found 4.7 million people were paying for subscriptions they didn’t know they’d signed up for.
In 2024, a government report found unused and unwanted subscriptions cost consumers up to £1.6bn a year.
Hunt them down
Banking apps usually list your ‘subscriptions’ separately from direct debits and standing orders so you can easily spot what you’re shelling out on.
Check everything
You can be debited through credit cards, E-payment services, your mobile phone bill, Apple Pay or Google Pay.
Don’t vow to use a subscription you’re not going to, even if you
have good intentions.
Many businesses have changed from monthly to annual payments so look further back.
Make sure to track any subscriptions you have kept so you can cancel them, if need be, in future.
Fast forward 10 years, and Trump is now working on his deal. After a damaging war for both sides, trust could not be lower.
Having served as Britain’s ambassador to Iran during the period immediately following the last deal, I find much of what is unfolding today depressingly familiar.
I arrived in Tehran on New Year’s Eve 2015 under circumstances that were a reminder of the region’s unpredictability. Driving up the main avenue from the airport into the massive sprawling city of 14 million people, I recalled the words of a former British ambassador who told me that after serving in the Arab Gulf states, coming to Iran “you realise you are in a real country”. From that, I took that Iran is not simply a problem to be managed or a threat to be contained. It is a large, sophisticated and deeply political society with competing centres of power. It also has a long strategic memory.
Just weeks after my arrival, our small embassy team gathered in the newly reopened British Embassy to mark Implementation Day, when UN sanctions were lifted. There was a genuine sense that a door had opened. What struck me in those early days was the extent to which some within the Iranian leadership were thinking beyond the narrow parameters of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Shortly after my arrival, Iran’s then foreign minister, Javad Zarif, summoned the diplomatic corps to a meeting. He outlined an ambitious proposal for what was effectively an Organisation for Security and Cooperation in the Middle East. Zarif argued that the region needed a framework through which rivals could manage disputes, reduce tensions and establish rules of behaviour.
He drew on the 1975 Helsinki process, which helped ease Cold War tensions and ultimately contributed to transforming the European security landscape. But Western governments, including the UK, largely dismissed the proposal. There were understandable reasons for scepticism. Iran’s actions across the region often contradicted its rhetoric. Yet, with hindsight, it may have deserved more consideration than it received.
The central lesson for Trump – who this weekend claimed Iran “will never learn” as the two countries exchanged attacks and traded blame for ceasefire violations – is not that diplomacy with Iran is impossible, but that diplomacy that fails to address underlying political realities is unlikely to last.
The 2015 agreement achieved important objectives, at least in the short term. It placed significant restrictions on Iran’s nuclear programme and established an intrusive inspection regime. Yet, it still contained fatal weaknesses.
The first was political. Obama lacked the bipartisan support necessary to embed the agreement securely in American law. Instead, it rested largely on presidential authority. That made it vulnerable.
The second weakness was its scope. The agreement addressed the nuclear issue but left untouched a range of other disputes that still dominate the region. Iran’s missile programme was excluded as was Tehran’s support for armed groups and proxies across the Middle East. As a result, opponents on all sides were able to argue that the deal either went too far or not nearly far enough.
The deal collapsed not because diplomacy had failed, but because its political foundations proved too fragile. When Trump entered the White House, he was simply able to reverse US policy through another presidential action. The US withdrew and prevented many international businesses and financial institutions from participating in its implementation.
That history matters now – because many of the same forces remain in place.
One of the enduring missteps around Iran is the tendency to treat it as a unified actor. In reality, competing power centres coexist. During my time in Tehran, there was constant tension between the elected government and foreign ministry on one side and the security establishment, particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), on the other.
The political environment is now harder, yet the contest between those who favour engagement and those who benefit from confrontation remains.
Abbas Araghchi, one of the principal architects of the 2015 negotiations, remains a central figure as foreign minister. Much of the expertise assembled for the Obama-era talks is still present within Iran’s diplomatic machinery.
But today’s Iran is not the Iran of President Hassan Rouhani. The balance of power has shifted. The political space available for advocates of engagement is narrower than it was a decade ago. This is why the approach adopted by the US matters so much.
The Trump administration should seek to strengthen those within Iran who favour engagement. Measures that reinforce the narrative of Western hostility or seek to humiliate Iran are likely to play into the hands of hardliners.
The reported text of the proposed deal is extraordinary in ways that would have been difficult to imagine even a few years ago. Unlike previous arrangements, it includes addressing US sanctions, as well as broader questions of economic integration. It points towards the possibility of a fundamentally transformed relationship.
If US companies invested in Iran – and there would be many hurdles to overcome – it would generate significant commercial benefits for the US. It would also lead to change from within the Islamic Republic – which so far has proved elusive.
Iran’s oil minister said this month that if Western stakeholders adhere to the spirit of the pact, hundreds of investment opportunities stand ready. The foreign minister spoke of a “trillion-dollar opportunity for the US”.
If realised, such an outcome would catalyse a strategic reordering of the Middle East. Over time, it could place Iran in a position far closer to the US than many observers would once have thought possible.
This outcome would represent one of the most significant diplomatic achievements in the region for decades and could transform Trump’s foreign policy legacy. But there is a more plausible – and damaging – outcome.
For every member of the Iranian regime pushing for economic opening and integration, there are many others interested in maintaining Iran’s isolation. Continued conflict in Lebanon strengthens opponents of compromise. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz raises the prospect of escalation, and regional actors who view a US-Iran rapprochement as threatening have every reason to complicate things.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has long been sceptical of agreements that leave the current Iranian regime intact. Trump appears willing to explore a broader accommodation.
For now, diplomacy remains alive. Despite his track record, this US President is perhaps uniquely positioned to coerce support and neutralise opposition. If he does, it would be the crowning achievement of his presidency and may indeed merit a Nobel Prize.
A decade ago, Obama’s nuclear agreement opened a window that many hoped would remain open. It did not. Now, another window may be opening. The challenge is that the forces trying to shut it are already hard at work.