Among the many gifts the Watergate scandal gave us was Nixon’s White House press secretary declaring: ‘This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.’ That was after months of sticking to increasingly threadbare denials. In Donald Trump’s White House, operative statements become inoperative from one day to the next. That’s especially true of Iran. In 24 hours, from Tuesday to Wednesday this week, Trump went from ‘a whole civilisation will die tonight’ to ‘this could be the Golden Age of the Middle East!!!’. Taco: Trump Always Chickens Out, as the meme has it.

The two-week ceasefire agreed this week with Iran is a lesson that you can win every battle but lose the war. (This is the lesson the United States learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to forget it again.) What Trump calls his ‘total and complete victory’ leaves Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz, the 21-mile-wide channel through which a fifth of the world’s oil flows. It can even charge $1 million a ship. The deal gives the mullahs the power they always had but never quite dared to use with impunity – leverage over the world’s oil supplies and, by extension, the global economy.

Why Trump stepped back from the brink

The Iran deal has shown Britain’s irrelevance

The winners and losers of the Iran ceasefire deal

America’s 47th President once said: ‘There’s a certain unpredictability about Trump that’s great.’ Speaking of yourself in the third person is usually a sign of delusional narcissism. The question with Trump is always whether there is method in the madness, or just madness. On Monday, Trump stood on the south portico of the White House flanked by the First Lady, Melania, and a seven-foot Easter Bunny with huge floppy ears. He told an audience of bemused schoolchildren that we would........

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