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Hello and welcome to Spectator Out Loud with me, Lyndon Kempkaren. Each week we choose our

favourite pieces from the magazine and ask our writers to read them aloud.

Coming up on the podcast this week.

Paul Wood delves into the complex background of the Middle East and asks if Iran might have been behind the Hamas attacks on Israel and what might come next.

James Heel ponders the great Tory tax debate

by asking what is the point of the Tories if they don't lower taxes?

And Robin Ashtonon

on how he plans to introduce his half-Russian daughter

to the delights of red buses, beefeaters and a proper full English.

First, it's Paul Wood.

A little more than a week before Hamas carried out its Operation Al-Axa flood,

the US National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, said,

The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.

Sullivan was expressing a consensus view, one apparently shared by the Israeli government.

Then came the attacks of last weekend, and as the Israeli President Isaac Herzog said,

not since the Holocaust have so many Jews been killed in one day.

The surprise attacks have been called Israel's 9-11, it's Pearl Harbor, and so the question Israelis are asking is, how could this happen?

And of more consequence, perhaps, who was really behind it?

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali-Ham Hamini denies it was him. In a televised speech, he said,

we kiss the foreheads and arms of the resourceful and intelligent designers of the operation,

but those who say that the recent great event is the work of non-Palestinians, are making miscalculations.

...