Hello from The National and welcome to the View from London – your weekly guide to the big stories from our London bureau
Opposition voice
About a week after the ceasefire between Iran, Israel and the US, the man who would be king in Tehran has been on a lightning visit to London.
Senior members of the diplomatic service had the chance to bump into Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi at an elegant townhouse overlooking Green Park on Wednesday.
At the Middle East Association event, regional ambassadors, politicians and others took the chance to find out more about how Mr Pahlavi is developing his post-regime thinking.
The opportunity in the confrontation over Iran's nuclear programme may be obvious but it is also hard to describe as tangible. The Crown Prince, who is the eldest son of the last Shah of Iran, is keen to assert his readiness to be a unifying figure for all those in opposition to the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his acolytes.
Certainly there is a more receptive message for the Crown Prince's manoeuvres than has existed in the past.
Iran's influence in the UK can often best be tracked by the grassroots sentiments of the Iranian community. Some of the Foreign Office officials in the room are keen to ensure the country is on the right side of history as the situation plays out.
German rebuke
Iranian ambassador Majid Nili Ahmadabadi was summoned to the German Foreign Ministry after prosecutors announced the arrest of a man suspected of scouting Jewish targets in Berlin.
The man, identified only as Ali S, allegedly spied on three properties in June in preparation for further intelligence activities.
He is suspected of having received his orders from Iranian intelligence services early this year and the information leading to his arrest came from Germany's domestic intelligence service, prosecutors said.
According to Der Spiegel magazine, the suspect took photos of buildings including the headquarters of the German-Israeli Society and a building where the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, was said to occasionally stay.
Placebo not resolution
It's not exactly a poacher-turned-gamekeeper situation but eyebrows should be raised when a former UN humanitarian aid chief calls out the world body for using emergency interventions as a substitute for its historic role of keeping the world in order.
Martin Griffiths, the former undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief co-ordinator of the UN, made the remarks on Tuesday when he appeared before a House of Commons committee.
The topic was how the permanent five members of the Security Council can use the leadership role known as penholders (those charged with formulating resolutions) to make a difference in a deadlocked world.
Mr Griffiths comes from a world of mediation and back-channel interventions. It is indeed a world to which he has returned.
His thoughts are worth recycling in quotes: "I think humanitarian assistance, certainly in recent years – I was there 2021 as the emergency relief co-ordinator, the head of that community, until mid-last year – has become in some ways a placebo."
In other words, the charge is that the $30 billion annual set of interventions in the world's most desperate situations has become a substitute for other forms of action, particularly political diplomacy. This is because the higher-level brokering and other historical tasks of the UN have become more difficult.
Mr Griffiths said he would argue strongly that humanitarian intervention should not "be a substitute for political action, it's an additional option [or] mitigation".
The UN is so bereft that humanitarian operators are increasing their interest and contact with mediation and political diplomacy. In a changing world, these bodies are starting to fill the void.
French connection
President Emmanuel Macron's effort to reset French relations with Algeria is one of the most important of his presidency. The ties between two countries that were in a colonial relationship until 1962 have often been fraught and are sometimes rocky, such as now.
An important test looms on Saturday when the Algerians are expected to pardon the writer Boualem Sansal. France on Tuesday urged Algeria to show clemency after an Algerian court upheld his five-year prison sentence.
The conviction and sentencing of Sansal, 80, a Franco-Algerian who is known to be suffering from cancer, has exacerbated tension between the two countries, whose relations have reached a low.
