MPs will vote this evening on plans to ban the sale of tobacco products to anyone born since 2009. The bill is expected to pass because it has support from Labour, but a number of Tory MPs have said they will vote against it. Israel’s army chief has promised that Iran’s attack on the country will be “met with a response”, despite growing pressure from world leaders urging restraint. Rishi Sunak has said G7 countries are preparing further sanctions on Tehran in a bid to prevent escalation to all-out war. Buckingham Gate in Westminster, a stone’s throw from the palace, is the most expensive street in Britain. Analysis by Rightmove found that the average asking price on the central London road is £9.63m; the most expensive street outside London is Old Avenue in Weybridge, Surrey, at £2.63m. See the rest here.

Iran’s “performative” strike

People seem to think that now Iran has “made its point” to Israel, with its failed attack on Saturday, we can “call it a day” and move on, says Thomas Friedman in The New York Times. That would be a “dangerous misreading” of the situation. What happened was an “escalation without precedent” in the long-running shadow war between the two countries – a conflict that has, until now, “almost exclusively” been conducted through proxy forces and strikes on the soil of third parties. “No country had attacked Israel directly since Saddam Hussein’s Iraq did with Scud missiles 33 years ago.” The Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, described the attack as a “responsible” move. But he had no way of knowing that 99% of the drones and missiles would be intercepted – any one of them could have hit an Israeli apartment building, “causing massive casualties”.

True, says Max Boot in The Washington Post, but this was a very calculated act by Tehran. Israel’s assassination of two top Iranian generals in an airstrike on Damascus two weeks ago “backed the mullahs into a corner”. They had to retaliate in some way, to “save face” at home and abroad, but they have no desire to get into a bigger war with Israel. Hence Saturday’s action – a “performative” strike “designed to make a statement, not to inflict mass casualties”. Had Iran really wanted to overwhelm Israel’s air defences, it could have directed Hezbollah to “unleash its arsenal of some 150,000 missiles”. By instead launching its attack mainly from Iranian soil, Tehran gave Israel and its allies ample time to activate their defences. The key now is for Israel not to escalate the situation by overreacting. It escaped “serious harm” this time. “It may not be so lucky next time.”

🪖 Should Britain stop selling arms to Israel? Read our explainer by clicking here.

The Daily Telegraph asked 15 of its travel writers to share the best place they’d ever stayed. Their choices include an extravagantly restored lighthouse on La Palma in the Canary Islands; glass cabins in west Sweden’s “lake-splattered wilderness”; an open-sided villa on the tiny island of Taprobane, off Sri Lanka; an eco-lodge high up in the trees of Ecuador’s cloud forest; and the Awasi hotel in Southern Patagonia, with views of the jagged “towers” of Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park. See the rest here.

🚤 For our top travel picks this week – including Italy’s lakes without the crowds – click here.

There’s nothing wrong with elitism

There’s an “anti-elitist and anti-club element in the air right now”, says Tomiwa Owolade in The Times. The musical director of the Royal Opera House says too many people are “embarrassed” by opera being “elitist”. The Garrick Club is under pressure to extend its membership to women. A group of former diplomats and officials want to “modernise” the Foreign Office by taking down colonial-era pictures and making it more forward-looking. For all the fuss over these campaigns, elitism doesn’t deserve its stigma. “There is nothing wrong with being the best.” We don’t complain about being treated by doctors who had to go through a selective process to qualify; our favourite sports teams only include the most talented players. “To have good taste in music and film implies a willingness to prefer something to another on the basis of quality.”

And throughout history, “elite cliques” have done a lot of good. The Bloomsbury Group produced outstanding talents like Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes. Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour cabinet was stuffed with Old Etonians and Old Wykehamists – but it also created the modern welfare state and the NHS. Britain is made up of “a rich tapestry of clubs: sports clubs, political clubs, social clubs, religious clubs, literary clubs”. All are, to some extent, elitist – why would anyone join them if they accepted everyone? “We are social animals.” We have an overwhelming instinct to belong to tribes. A world without them would be “impossible” to live in.

Voyager 1, a Nasa probe launched in 1977, is now 15 billion miles away from Earth, near the edge of our solar system, says David Whitehouse in The Spectator. It carries a golden disc full of images, sounds and words from our planet, in case “alien eyes” ever chance upon it. But whereas the earlier Pioneer spacecraft’s so-called “message plaque” contained a detailed outline of a naked man and a woman, Voyager has only silhouettes. Politicians had objected to Pioneer’s naked drawings, saying there should be no further “smut in space”, so Nasa agreed not to include anything “remotely erotic”.

It’s an artist’s impression of BH3, the “most massive stellar black hole yet found in the Milky Way”, says The Guardian. The celestial phenomenon, spotted by astronomers at the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, is a mere 2,000 light-years from Earth and 33 times the size of the Sun. Most stellar black holes are extremely difficult to spot, but BH3 was identified via the “companion star” which orbits it.