A French court has sentenced Dominique Pelicot to 20 years in prison for repeatedly drugging and raping his then-wife, and recruiting dozens of strangers to do the same. Gisèle Pelicot became a feminist icon after waiving her right to anonymity and opting for a public hearing, saying she wanted shame to “change sides”. The 50 other defendants have all been found guilty of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault. Water bills in England and Wales will increase by 36% over the next five years, an average of £31 each year. The regulator, Ofwat, says the steeper-than-expected rise is needed to pay for infrastructure upgrades and to reduce sewage discharges. Brexit has hit UK trade less than many forecasters predicted. Researchers at the London School of Economics found that in the first two years after the UK formally left the EU, the reduction in trade was “less than half” what the Office for Budget Responsibility projected.

A Farage premiership is no longer implausible

The idea that Nigel Farage could “go big and become prime minister” is no longer completely implausible, says Iain Martin in The Times. It’s not just the possibility of a big-money deal with Elon Musk. At the general election in July Reform won more than four million votes – nearly half a million more than the Liberal Democrats, who, thanks to the “vagaries” of the first-past-the-post system, ended up with 71 seats to Reform’s five. Since then, Zia Yusuf, the young tech millionaire turned Reform chairman, has set about professionalising the operation ahead of next year’s local elections.

Farage’s plan is to prevent Kemi Badenoch from becoming established as Tory leader, to create the “false impression” that he is the only real challenger to the Labour government. His hope is that the Tories will be stupid enough to replace Badenoch with a weaker leader, who he could push around as a junior partner in some future coalition. “Robert Jenrick springs to mind.” The nightmare scenario for Keir Starmer at the next election is that Reform demolish Labour in the red wall, while the Tories take back Lib Dem seats and small-margin Labour seats in the south, “squeezing Starmer out”. None of this will be easy for Farage, of course: Reform attracts unsavoury characters who put off moderate voters; Badenoch may simply keep her cool, like Margaret Thatcher in opposition from 1975-79, and stay the course. But the fact that Farage becoming the next PM is even conceivable – he is currently the bookies’ favourite – is testament to his “extraordinary achievement as a political entrepreneur”.

Vladimir Putin and I “only see each other at funerals” nowadays, says Bill Clinton on The Rest is Politics: Leading. But in our last official meeting, in 2010, I talked to him about Ukraine. “I know what you’re going to say,” he told me. “You made a deal with Boris [Yeltsin] to protect the territorial integrity of Ukraine in return for Ukraine giving up their nuclear weapons.” But “let me remind you”, he said, that Yeltsin never got Russia’s parliament to ratify that agreement. “And I do not agree with it. And I will not observe it.” In other words, four full years before he took Crimea – and knowing full well I’d “dutifully” report his comments to the US government – Putin told me he was “coming after Ukraine”.

Readers are always berating me for not reviewing more restaurants outside London, says Giles Coren in The Times. So I looked at how my pieces perform online. Ranked by the “subscriber satisfaction” metric, five of my seven worst-performing reviews this year – including all the top three – were out of London. My write-up of the “excellent” Joro in Sheffield, for example, rated just 29%, whereas my criticism of the “dreary” London cocktail bar Oriole scored 71%. Why on earth do I schlepp around the country doing my bit for the provinces, when nearly everyone would rather read me “sulking about some West End craphole”?

A devastating blow for Iran’s “Axis of Resistance”

Iran’s Axis of Resistance – the coalition of anti-Western, anti-Israel militias including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis – was already having a “terrible year”, says Arash Azizi in The Atlantic. But the loss of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad may have “dealt the knockout blow”. Few appreciate just how crucial Syria has been to the Axis, both as an organising ground and “proof of concept”. Assad owed his throne to Iran’s militias, which helped him kill hundreds of thousands of civilians. In return, Syria became a vital supply route for Hezbollah in neighbouring Lebanon and played host to armies of Islamist militants from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

With Assad gone, “Iran faces a reckoning”. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivered a defiant speech last week, blaming Assad’s fall on an “American-Zionist plot”, and vowing to expel the US from the region and “uproot Zionism, with the grace of God”. But his bravado “isn’t fooling anyone”. Israel has spent the past year battering the Axis on all fronts, including Iran itself – a beleaguered Tehran didn’t even respond to Israeli strikes in October. And let’s be clear: “The end of the Axis is good news.” Iran-backed militias have brought nothing but misery to the region, undermined the sovereignty of several Arab nations and “intensified religious hatred and sectarianism”. Iran sold the lie of an Islamist alternative to communism and capitalism, then ran its own nation as a corrupt and oppressive oligarchy. With any luck, the fall of Assad is the beginning of the end.

🚀💥 Those Israeli strikes in October were crucial, says David Ignatius in The Washington Post. An astonishing wave of 120 fighter jets took part, hammering Tehran’s air defence radars and factories producing fuel for Iran’s ballistic missiles. It was extraordinarily effective, leaving Tehran “nearly naked” and severely restricted in how it can respond to future attacks. Iran’s nuclear facilities are buried deep underground and only the US has conventional weapons powerful enough to bust those bunkers. It may fall to Donald Trump to choose whether to use them.

Forget the televised debates and party manifestos, says Anita Singh in The Daily Telegraph – the most revealing thing the party leaders did in the run-up to the UK election was tell Radio Times what TV they’d enjoyed recently. Rishi Sunak plumped for Bridgerton, “fatally unaware” that Regency England as a “multicultural wonderland” might not chime with the Tory base. Nigel Farage chose Baby Reindeer, the year’s “most unapologetically controversial” series. And Keir Starmer, ever keen to conceal his plans from voters, “dodged the question entirely”.

To The Knowledge:

Loved your piece on school reports (“The lost art of the savage school report”, 14 December). My schoolfriend David at Tonbridge got the following report from his Latin teacher in the 1960s: “If ignorance is bliss, this boy should lead a very happy life.”

Bill Webb
New Malden, London

It’s Obi-Wan the chihuahua, who’s fast becoming the “most famous sheepdog in France”, says The Times. The three-year-old doggo has gained a huge following online after his owner Damaris Barbe, a shepherdess in the Alps, posted videos on TikTok that show him careering around the flocks she looks after. While the minuscule mutt isn’t as “precise” as Barbe’s other sheepdogs – a Belgian malinois and an Australian kelpie – she says Obi-Wan is “enthusiastic and determined”, and that his fellow pups see him as a “colleague”.