The issue is a critical one for ­residents in the West London suburbs for whom Heathrow and the environment will be high on the agenda at the GLA elections in May 2012.

Across the spectrum, Labour now recognises the extent of the local environmental impact, finally kicking the idea of Heathrow expansion into the long grass. It has long been an albatross around the party’s neck, particularly at the 2010 general election, and one that we can gladly get rid of.

Maria Eagle’s statement came at about the same time as we heard of some worrying potential developments at a meeting of the London Assembly’s Environment Committee.

While there is an annual cap of 480,000 aircraft movements allowed at Heathrow, the number of passengers using the airport could rise from the current 66 million to 95 million, once redevelopment and construction of the terminals are completed. This equates to one-third more passengers passing through Heathrow and potentially London.

So, despite ongoing opposition to ­expansion at Heathrow, passenger ­numbers are still rising. This flies in the face of the usual argument peddled by the airport expansionists about limits on flight numbers stifling economic growth.

How, then, are de facto rising passenger numbers being squared with the ­maintenance of the annual cap? ­Essentially, the airlines are bringing in bigger planes. You only have to see the Emirates airbuses at Heathrow to appreciate that, while the airlines may have the same number of slots, they can fly more passengers with larger aircraft.

Naturally, there is considerable ­concern about the environmental impact of bigger planes for local residents.

BAA would have us believe that it is ­encouraging airlines to use more modern planes into Heathrow, because they are quieter.

However, recent changes to flight paths and operational methods could mean that more people than ever are affected by ­aircraft noise, the scale and impact of which is very difficult to evaluate at ­present as the Department for Transport begins a mixed mode trial.

Another aspect of this debate is whether we have enough surface ­transport to cope with the additional air passengers travelling into London by taxi, car and public transport. We were told that, of the additional 29 million passengers passing through Heathrow, up to one third of them would be ­transfer passengers – people going from one plane to another without leaving the airport. But that still leaves some 20 million additional passengers coming into London.

So while BAA,  IAG (formerly BA) and the other ­expansionists continue to point to the flight cap as the gatekeeper which prevents Heathrow from getting ever bigger, this mechanism does little to curb the ­expansion of actual passenger numbers. We should not detract from the usual ­objections for wholesale expansion at Heathrow, but nor should we lose sight of the impact that larger planes will have on noise and air pollution, particularly for local residents

Now Heathrow has taken a back seat, with London’s Tory Mayor Boris Johnson pushing even harder for a four-runway ­airport on the Thames Estuary to become the new airport hub for the capital. This idea has grown, as those in favour of wholesale expansion view Heathrow as an ill-placed aviation cul de sac.

Aside from the very real environmental concerns surrounding the idea of “Boris’ island”, it is hard to imagine West Londoners going to work in an airport in the Thames Estuary. So l won’t be surprised if a “Save Heathrow Airport” campaign is on the cards.

The London elections will be decided on three key policy areas, fares, policing and responding to London’s housing crisis.

An issue of major importance to every Londoner is the cost of public transport. We have the most expensive tube fares in the world thanks to four years of above inflation increases from Boris Johnson. The cost of off-peak travel in outer London has risen by 86 per cent in just three years. That’s before last week’s New Year greeting from Boris of another 5.6 per cent fares increase. Low-paid Londoners have also been hit, with the cost of a single bus journey up an eye-watering 50 per cent since 2008.

2011’s Annual London Survey showed that cheaper fares were Londoners’ top concern. Polling shows that his high fares are Johnson’s weak spot. So Ken’s Fare Deal campaign and his promise to cut fares by

7 per cent, followed by a year long freeze, is welcome. It will save people £1,000 over his mayoral term and is fully affordable because passenger numbers are increasing and there is now over £200m per year operating surplus in the mayor’s accounts. Rather than hoarding excess revenue he should be using it to put money back in Londoners’ pockets. This is what Ken will do.

On policing, overall crime has not risen under Boris Johnson. But after last year’s August disturbances and rising youth and violent crime, effective policing that protects Londoners while at the same time reaches out to disaffected groups is now more vital than ever.

Since the last Livingstone City Hall budget, police numbers have fallen and there is now a huge black hole in the finances. The Tory Mayor will probably receive some short-term funding from George Osborne and David Cameron to see him through the election, but then what? Johnson’s track record is extremely worrying. He is hollowing out the popular and effective safer neighbourhood teams and was nowhere to be seen during the August riots. We need to defend neighbourhood policing and maintain police numbers.

The third key battleground is housing. Millions of Londoners renting from social landlords or in the private-rented sector need help in the form of housing benefit. The Government is capping this support at 30 per cent of local market rents – a ­policy that will ghettoise the capital as four out of five inner London neighbourhoods become unaffordable by 2016. This will force people to outer London (or out of the city altogether) putting excessive strain on local services. Secure tenancies are also being abolished as the Government has pushed through fixed-term tenancies, making long-term security for many people a thing of the past. Families will soon have no way to be sure that their homes will not be taken away from them.

Boris Johnson has broken his pledge to build 50,000 affordable homes by 2011. He says 30,000 homes have been started. Good news. But if your idea of “starting” coincides with the National House-Building Council’s definition – in other words, when the foundations are laid– then the figure is actually 19,000. And that’s all before the Government cuts funding for affordable housing in London by 87 per cent.

All this while homelessness and overcrowding are going up. Almost half of all children in socially rented homes in ­London live in overcrowded conditions. The number of families accepted as homeless has jumped by 17 per cent in the last year. This is reflected in the “beds in the shed” scandal hitting many parts of ­suburban London where families are ­increasingly finding themselves housed in Dickensian sheds, unfit for human ­habitation. Ken’s response to the pressure on families is to introduce a “living rent” (following the success of the London ­Living Wage ­campaign) so those renting spend no more than 30 per cent of their ­income on housing costs.

The choice in May is simple: four more years of laissez-faire posturing and photo stunts with Boris Johnson, or four years of Ken Livingstone standing up for all ­Londoners, driving down fares, protecting neighbourhood policing and introducing a living rent. Our job is to get the vote out for Ken and all our Labour candidates for the London Assembly. With your help,  we can win for London.

The Vivaldi was given complete but interspersed with much additional music, both composed and improvised. Kennedy swaps from violin to electric throughout the evening and he is really on form here. His playing is amazing, of course, totally committed physical playing so extraordinary that it is both eccentric and wonderful. He can and does make a beautiful singing tone in the slow movements, still one of the great fiddlers. The violin is his extra limb and while many players speak through their instruments, Kennedy thinks through his.

The oft-quoted aim of the period instrument revival was to “remove the layers of varnish to reveal the authentic beauty beneath” and though this was by no stretch of the imagination an “authentic” performance it shared many of the qualities of the most exciting period performers. The electric guitar replaced the chitarrone and the vocal quartet essentially provided organ continuo. The violin trio of warbling birds in “Spring” was joined by bird whistles and why not? Antonio would have loved it. This is after all the most picturesque of music.

Singers sometimes intoned quiet poetry over the playing, echoing perhaps Vivaldi’s own descriptive doggerel. Everything was imaginative and creative from the barking dog viola solo to the repeated up-bows and playing on the bridge of “Winter”; it was great to see Nigel avoiding the too obvious stamping of the feet (written in the score) here.

The jazz inspired prelude to “Autumn”, with fantastic trumpet work, was perhaps a little too indulgent but the astonishing speed of the first movement propelled us along. Undoubtedly a master of the effects pedals, Kennedy sometimes used that which plays his fingered line an octave lower and there were some small tuning issues, but overall the effect was of a great baroque organ. Sometimes so unpredictable it’s obvious even the players don’t know what he’s going to do next, the foray into Fritz Kreisler became a little uncomfortable.

The second half was less compelling. Time allowed only three of the projected Four Elements – “Air”, “Earth” and “Water”. Beginning beautifully like “The Lark ­Ascending” these pieces had much colour in various, mostly jazz-inspired styles, at the emotional centre an utterly astonishing improvised cadenza from Kennedy.

His mostly middle-aged audience has grown with him and forgives a little on-stage swearing and drinking. As do I.

Set in Russian-occupied Eastern Poland, Nicholas Wright’s new drama, Travelling Light, evokes the early years of film-making. Using the form of a memory play, Wright introduces us to Maurice Montgomery, a Hollywood director, who looks back from the 1930s to his youth in a pre-war shtetl, a place where the clash of different cultures – Jewish, Polish and Russian – created a melting pot of ­creativity.

The young Motl Mendl, as he was ­originally named, returns to his village after the death of his father, the local photographer, and discovers a Lumière Brothers ­cinematograph, which he soon uses to film his neighbours.

Financed by Jacob, a timber-merchant, Motl is inspired by Anna, a gentile servant, and together in some of the evening’s most enthralling scenes they discover the possibilities of close-up, montage and editing. But filming friends and neighbours doesn’t get you very far, and soon they embark on a fictional story.

Of course, in real life, movies were not discovered by one person in one place, but evolved in several different locations through the creative meeting of

new ­technological possibilities and the ­demands of the mass market. But this parable of artistic vision and the dawning imagination is at first enormously suggestive, and nicely mixes humour with illustrative film projections.

In the second half, Motl turns out to be much less illustrious that we might have at first believed. Wright creates an imaginative ending to his play that artfully ties up the loose ends in the manner of a master ­storyteller.

It’s not very plausible, but it is ­enjoyable. The charm of the play is that is stimulates and entertains, but without stretching the audience. Like its title, it travels lightly across the terrain from Western Europe to America.

Watching the birth of a new art form like this feels a bit miraculous and, in common with plays such as Terry Johnson’s Hitchcock Blonde, the account given here suggests that modern movies from the ­beginning necessitated a compromise ­between artistic integrity and populism. And knowing mirth is derived from showing how money problems and interfering producers were there from the start.

Directed by Nicholas Hytner, Travelling Light stars Antony Sher as Jacob, Damien Molony as Motl and Lauren O’Neil as Anna. If there is a tendency for Sher to hover on the brink of Fiddler on the Roof cliché, this is partly because that ­musical and the art of Marc Chagall have so successfully imprinted their vision of shtetl life onto our imaginations that it is difficult to eradicate them. But if the production sometimes feels a bit ­inauthentic in its portrayal of Jewish life, it remains a good account of how the ­preoccupations of some Eastern Europeans stamped their mark onto the Hollywood dream machine.

By contrast, Nancy Harris’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s 1889 novella, The Kreutzer Sonata, does feel authentic as it sends us into the depths of Russia, as Pozdynyshev, a middle-aged man, rides the trains ­endlessly, telling anyone who will listen the story of his lustful youth, his marriage to a beautiful young innocent and then his murder of her, inspired by his jealousy of her relationship with a music teacher. ­Acquitted by the courts for this crime of passion, he remains trapped inside his memories and his sexual guilt.

Although Tolstoy’s main message – that chastity is much better than carnal passions – gets lost somewhere along the line, this monologue is a riveting piece of theatre. Pozdynyshev, played by the craggy and ­intense Hilton McRae, buttonholes the ­audience from the start and holds us with all the manic insistence of a man ­possessed. Slowly, this ex-government official tells the terrible tale of how a nice middle-class ­marriage turned into violence and death.

Natalie Abrahami’s production, which was first seen at this venue in 2009, is staged on a set that is a partially distressed railway carriage, with a transparent screen for the background. This enables her to show, by lighting up the hidden space behind the screen, the scenes between the wife (Sophie Scott) and the violinist music teacher (Tobias Beer) as they play Beethoven’s Kreutzer sonata. Seeing and hearing the music played live definitely intensifies the story.

Not only does the play show their interaction, which evokes ideas about the erotic nature of music, but it also shows Pozdynyshev’s jealous imaginings. Although Tolstoy’s novella was banned by the Tsarist censors for its frank picture of sexuality, what comes across now is its ­portrait of a man consumed by his own fantasies. There is something very Russian in the openness of the text, its lack of hypocrisy and its blatant confusion. Like many troubled men, Pozdynyshev expresses both his love and his hatred for women, often within a single sentence.

The vividness of Tolstoy’s view of women reads like an argument in favour of feminism. He see them as natural sexual predators, who grossly manipulate and tempt men to forget the higher things in life. At the same time, he criticises bourgeois marriage as licensed prostitution, which was a common stance among freethinkers in the late 19th century.  And the success of this production can be seen in the compelling way in which these ideas are squeezed through the diseased imaginings of their unreliable narrator.

But that doesn’t matter because the magic of the myths and the mysteries is more powerful than the dull, prosaic truth – and that is why the legend of Arthur has echoed down the years. As Armitage says, he lives on in the collective imagination, “not just in literature but as a star of screen and stage and in many forms of popular culture and high art. No matter how many times he receives his death blow and is carried to Glastonbury or ferried to Avalon, Arthur remounts and rides again as the once and future king”.

Tales of Arthur seem to date from the period, after 410, when the Roman legions left Britain (what they called Britannia was, roughly, what we know as England and Wales) and the country was attacked by Teutonic tribes from north-west Europe. He appears, first, in Welsh poems such as Y Gododdin, and some attributed to ­Taliesin, as a Celtic hero defending the people of the west from their enemies –

the Angles, Saxons, Franks, Frisians and Jutes. ­Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote about Arthur in his History of the Kings of Britain in 1136 when, as Armitage dryly points out, “literature and history were not ­necessarily approached as independent ­disciplines”.

Wace introduced the Round Table in his Roman de Brut (1155), La?amon the magical aspects of Morgan le Fay in Brut (c1190) and Chrétien de Troyes the ideals of courtly love, the chivalric code and the pursuit of the Holy Grail in his Arthurian Romances. Sir Thomas Malory, in Le Morte Darthur, printed by William Caxton in 1485, drew on his predecessors to imaginatively retell the stories in prose in a form we can recognise today – they were known to Tennyson when he wrote his Arthurian cycle Idylls of the King between 1855 and 1874 – and Armitage says ­“Malory had ­certainly read the Alliterative Morte Arthure, the academic and ­unglamorous title” given to a Medieval epic poem of 4,346 lines, of which this is a new translation.

Armitage has a bit of form here. Five years ago, he published a glorious translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a 14th century poem of 2,530 lines about courage, loyalty, temptation and chivalry. While not as faithful as other translations – JRR Tolkien’s (1953) is a better student crib – Armitage managed to retain the four-stress rhythmic line and alliteration of the Middle English original while peppering the poetry with modern idioms. It is, as I said in these pages at the time, amagnificent achievement; a powerful and exciting new version of one of the jewels of Medieval English literature.

This poem was written some time around 1400, we don’t know the name of the author, and there is only one manuscript copy – in the library of Lincoln Cathedral – in existence. “Typically”, says Armitage, “each line of the original has four stresses, two falling either side of a caesura, and contains three alliterating syllables, usually two on the left side of the divide then one on the right, followed by an unalliterating stressed syllable”.

Technically, Armitage is right on the money, writing of “all the red gold and the riches of Rome” and telling how “our brave, bold king had entered the battlefield / with battalions in formation and banners unfurled.” It’s brutal, bloody stuff – “fetched him a blow of such force in the forehead / that the burnished blade bit through to his brain” and “through the bladder and bowels he drove that blow, / piercing his privates, ripping them apart” – but beautifully written, like this line of Cador’s as he sees the King of Libya die at his feet: “Find comfort if you can as you cool in the clay.”

There are some wonderful set pieces – the dream of a dragon which brings ­Beowulf to mind, the death of Kay, and Arthur’s hand to hand combat with the monster of Mont St Michel – but it is the way that Armitage manages to sustain the energy of his version for 156 pages – “till the fame that we fought for has frittered away” – that is most impressive. His translation is a revelation which has rescued a Medieval epic from obscurity.

He had, says Harry Kelsey, a “stolid ­composure” – but this was an advantage in getting things done.

One success was introducing legislation for a return to Roman Catholicism. A stumbling block existed between the Vatican and the new owners of church lands confiscated during the dissolution of the monasteries. Philip used his influence to persuade Rome to drop its claims. His marriage to Mary was strategic; he was pressured into it by his father, Charles V, driven by a desire to form an alliance against France. Ever the dutiful son, Philip was also a dutiful husband – and did not take mistresses, at least while in England.

One awkward issue left unresolved was his official position. In the marriage treaty, he could enjoy the “kingly name” and was allowed to partake in government, but this would end if the queen predeceased him. Philip wanted a coronation but Parliament dragged its heels fearing that, if crowned, his heirs (by Mary or anyone else) would turn England into a Hapsburg satellite. Was this fear justified? Was Philip trying to re-negotiate the treaty? Did the absence of a crown fatally undermine his status? And did he always agree with his wife?

Kelsey says Mary was prepared to “allow the new religion to continue in areas where the people preferred it”, but she executed far more Protestants than her predecessor Edward VI killed Catholics. Historians argue over the exact number – were the leaders of the Wyatt rebellion killed for being Protestants or for being traitors? – but 300 is the accepted figure. Kelsey, erring on the conservative side, ­argues it was “perhaps 200 in all”.

What was Philip’s view? We know he approved of the execution of a man who ­attempted to murder a monk – standard for the time – but what of the execution

of the Archbishop of Canterbury,

Thomas ­Cranmer, architect of the English Reformation? Did Philip support ­Cranmer’s death? Or express caution? Was he consulted and, if not, why not? The ­decision to burn Cranmer at the stake was pivotal in Bloody Mary being perceived – and not just by Protestants – as vengeful, yet this book ignores it.

Calais was another debacle. Kelsey lays the responsibility entirely at the doors of the Privy Council, whose members were not prepared to pay for its defence. Were they too tightfisted? Or did they think it not worth defending?

The last chapter is a diatribe against Elizabeth, a “shameless flirt, frolicking in bed with her guardian, Thomas Seymour” – a highly contentious claim. Kelsey even suggests Elizabeth may have been a man with deformed genitalia – “the evidence is contradictory”. Possible, I suppose, but highly unlikely. There are more obvious reasons for her rejection of Philip’s ­marriage proposal. Finally, Kelsey claims that in refusing the King of Spain’s “great gift”, Elizabeth began “a global conflict ­between England and Spain that lasted for the next four centuries and may not yet be ended”. Now, even Philip might have found that funny.

Baruch Rachmilevitch – Bert Ramelson’s original name – was born in the Ukrainian shtetl (Jewish community) of Cherkassy just across the river from Kiev. He was seven when Lenin launched the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, aiming to change the world. No matter that his father was a Talmudist scholar qualified to be a rabbi and wishing to escape communism’s rejection of religious doctrine; young Baruch was destined to be a Leninist revolutionary. Had he remained in Cherkassy – as his three older revolutionary sisters did – instead of emigrating to Canada in 1922, it is a fair bet that Comrade Rachmilevitch would have graduated to sit alongside Stalin or maybe Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev and the other discarded Bolshevik pioneers as part of the Soviet Union.

Instead he became a leading British communist who only in his later days developed doubts about Lenin’s doctrine of “democratic centralism” – the corepiece of Soviet communism. Between those dramatic beginnings and his death in 1994, Ramelson rose to become one of the most influential figures in the Communist Party in Britain. The irony was that this revolutionary, who played a key role in developing the party, was a controversial figure in its collapse in 1991.

Ramelson became the party’s national industrial organiser in 1965. From a modest office in King Street, just off the Strand in London, he masterminded an industrial strategy through a disciplined network of communist trade unionists across the movement. In that role, to 1977, he sometimes seemed to exercise more influence on Britain’s industrial system than the governments of Harold Wilson and Ted  Heath. It was a critical time for politics, especially on the left, and by 1974 one in 10 full-time union officials were members of the CP – largely due to Ramelson’s exceptional organising ability and his dedication to creating an industrial force capable of determining, or changing, government economic policy, Labour and Conservative. Communists in Britain had an influence in industry quite out of proportion to the party’s membership and despite their failures in parliamentary elections. Much of this was due to the boy from Cherkassy.

He had come a long way since moving with his parents to Canada where he studied law. By his early 20s, he was working at a law firm but, influenced by Zionism as well as Marxism, he joined a kibbutz in Palestine where he could combine Marx with a Jewish experiment in collective living. It was there he learned how to use firearms. His attachment to Zionism was brief and he went home planning to join the Communist Party, then illegal in Canada. Instead he went to Spain to fight Franco’s fascists as part of the International Brigades. He joined the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion and, in 1938, formally became a member of the Canadian Communist Party (in Spain). He fought on various fronts, was wounded and went to England in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War to join the British Army, train as a tank driver and was sent to North Africa. In the Battle for Tobruk in 1941 he was ­captured and spent six months in a desert prisoner of war camp from where he was shipped to Italy.

After the war, he got a job as a salesman at Marks & Spencer in Yorkshire which, from 1946, became his political base. It was there, as a member of the shop workers’ union USDAW, that he teamed up with local communists, married his first wife Marion, who was also actively involved in party affairs, and became Yorkshire district secretary of the CP.

But it was as national industrial organiser that he became really influential. He was, in effect, the strategic commander of the ­Communist Party in its ideological battle against the capitalist state, using communist strength in the unions. Ramelson was an ­archetypal revolutionary in the Leninist mould until he was removed from the post in 1977. That was a turning point for him – and for the Communist Party in Britain which was riven with ideological and personality disputes. Orthodox communism was in decline across Europe, with the Soviet Union badly damaged by the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which Ramelson opposed in defiance not only of Moscow but of those British comrades known as “tankies” for supporting the suppression of Alexander Dubcek and “socialism with a human face”.

In the end, Ramelson failed for a range of reasons. By the time he departed from his role, two years before Margaret Thatcher was elected, the Communist movement, in Britain and Europe, was split between reformists and remaining revolutionaries, and Ramelson’s uncompromising views on wages policy, Harold Wilson’s Government’s Social Contract, and any creative collaboration with the state, even under Labour, were collapsing under the weight of immense practical difficulties.

A more liberal model of Euro ­communism, in the mould of Antonio Gramsci, was fashionable, even among British communists. Ramelson, on the ­editorial board of the World Marxist Review, based in Prague, was under attack from old comrades, partly for his policies but also for his style. Serious rifts opened within the party hierarchy and between them and their daily newspaper, the Morning Star, while the party’s theoretical journal, Marxism Today, had a makeover and, with its new-found ­passion for Gramsci, made a remarkable ­impact on the intellectual left.

Ramelson was stunned by these ­developments and, with his influence dissipated, he later spoke of his disillusionment with the way Soviet communism developed under Stalin; his favourite sister, Rosa, was a victim of the Gulag. This book struggles effectively to analyse these upheavals, but concludes that Ramelson’s final years helped reinforce his “growing conviction that democratic centralism was a system prone to corrupt misuse by party leaderships anxious to stifle debate and repress opposition”.

He left a parting conviction that some form of socialism would eventually triumph – yet no belief that his own strategy might be part of that process.

However, the other turkeys are every bit as bad, as they pander their way to see who can get most primary votes from Christian Zionists and cheques from Likud reactionaries. British leaders still bask in the illusion of the “special relationship”, but on Capitol Hill, the term is almost ­exclusively used for Israel and the United States. For better or worse, two world wars, Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan, and the half century of Britain being a prime nuclear target on America’s behalf, is not exactly at the front of legislative thoughts.

Between them, the candidates seem to have made it axiomatic that Israel should attack Iran, with US support. However, polls suggest, not surprisingly after the ­debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan, that one of the few points of unity for an otherwise bitterly divided American electorate is ­opposition to a new war. Even in Israel only 41 per cent support an attack, which is ­surprisingly high, considering who would suffer most in any exchange of weapons with Tehran. But Republican candidates happily cheer terrorist assassinations of Iranian scientists.

The one exception among the candidates, Ron Paul, has become the standard bearer of some on America’s alleged left, who are prepared to overlook his profoundly reactionary domestic policies because his America-firster views lead him to oppose Israeli influence in Washington.

This is no time to get sentimental about ayatollahs, and the appropriate response to Israeli threats is certainly not adulation for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The regime in Iran is almost as attached to fundamentalist religion and the death penalty as a southern Republican governor. It does appear to have stolen the last election, but some informed observers think that it might have won anyway.

However, if there is one thing that seems to unite Iranians, it is the nuclear programme, with many Iranians probably going beyond the government, which still disclaims a military nuclear option. As an aside, I am often invited as a pundit on Iran’s Press TV, and have told them, live, that they should disclaim civilian, let alone military nuclear programmes, abide by even unjust United Nations resolutions, and invest in their refining capacity instead. Last week I reached the limits of their ­tolerance. They called me about the ­Falklands, and when I told them I would say that even English speakers had the right to self-determination, my slot was immediately dropped.

I also said that Argentina used the issue to divert domestic discontent about the economy – which is a role that Iran plays for Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters in the Israel lobby in the US, where Iran can whip the majority of liberal-minded Jews into support for the occupying state.

So, begin with principles. It is useful to treat it like a mathematical equation and substitute the terms. Take out Iran and put it in Israel, Pakistan or India, the real rogue states. The difference is that Iran has signed the non-proliferation treaty and they have not. However, it could withdraw from the treaty, like North Korea, and it has not. If Israel attacks Iranian facilities and murders its citizens, it should not complain if its Dimona nuclear facility is targeted.

Even the International Atomic Energy Agency, despite some worries, has not concluded that Iran has moved decisively towards military nuclear capability. The UN Security Council only became involved when a kangaroo court on the IAEA’s ­ruling body referred the case – with nuclear India one of those supporting the referral, strongly instigated by Israel, the one ­definite nuclear state in the Middle East, with its several hundred war heads.

So is this a crusade, or jihad (since the Saudis seem to be onside) for civil rights? The Wahhabi theocracy in Saudi Arabia makes the most conservative ayatollahs appear positively Anglican in their ­tolerance. We are being invited to support or condone an illegal and unethical war that would unite Iranians and much of the Middle East against Israel and the West, and risk the destruction of Israel with collateral damage to its neighbours not to mention a high chance of casualties among the “oppressed” Iranians.

One does not expect our lords and ­masters to be too concerned about mere human body counts, but they should worry that one sure consequence would be a drastic spike in oil prices that could push the world economy, already teetering on the brink, over the edge, with a calculable chance of escalation. It seems a high price to pay so Netanyahu can keep on building settlements.

Any responsible government should be telling Israel that – far from backing, tacit or otherwise – there would be immediate consequences in terms of military and financial support. But the Republican and Likud circus is, at least in part, designed to weaken Barack Obama’s ability to do that in this election year – which is why we should be worried. What’s David Cameron’s excuse?

The news that Barack Obama has signed new sanctions against Iran was swiftly followed by reports that Iran had test-fired shore-to-sea and surface-to-surface long-range missiles close to the Strait of Hormuz. The missile tests came at the end of a massive 10-day Iranian military exercise in the Gulf and accompanied a reported threat by Vice-President Ahi Rahimi to close the Strait of Hormuz should further sanctions be imposed on Iran.

In response, spokespersons for the Pentagon and the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet stated that any disruption of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz oil route “will not be tolerated”. Iran then warned a US aircraft carrier to stay away from the Gulf. The military response of the United States was to state that: “The deployment of US military assets in the Persian Gulf region will continue as it has for decades.”

Diplomatic relations between Iran and Western nations hit an all-time low after the storming of the British Embassy by hardliners in Tehran at the end of last November. The attack led to the withdrawal of British diplomatic staff and the expulsion of Iranian diplomats from London. While there may have been sound security reasons for the withdrawal of ­diplomats, the breaking off of diplomatic relations has severed an important channel of communication which had remained intact throughout the Iran-Iraq war and the 1979 revolution.

The possibility that Germany, France, Holland and Italy – all of which recalled their ambassadors from Iran for consultations following the attacks – might follow Britain’s example, and with America having no ­formal diplomatic engagement with Tehran, future negotiations with Iran are set to ­become significantly more difficult.

It is all a far cry from 2008 when a newly-elected President Obama showed a determination to engage directly with Tehran. In his broadcast to Iran, he publicly acknowledged that country’s right to enrich uranium. In October 2009, he held direct talks with the Iranians in Geneva. ­Commenting on these talks at the time, the ­Financial Times noted that President Obama “got more out of Iran in eight hours than his predecessor’s muscular posturing did in eight years”.

But Geneva was to prove a high-water mark in good US-Iranian relations. In the intervening years, Iran has accelerated its ­enrichment activities and Obama has long since withdrawn his “hand of friendship”.

At the Geneva talks a proposed agreement devised by the US would have seen Iran exchange most of its current stockpile of low-enriched uranium (LEU) for fuel rods from Russia and France. This “fuel-for-fuel” swap was largely accepted by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad but he proposed that the International Atomic Energy Agency assume control of the LEU in Iran until the fuel rods were delivered. The Americans rejected this proposal.

The following year Brazil and Turkey ­negotiated a deal with the Islamic Republic where LEU would be taken to a neutral country. The deal was almost identical to one put forward by the US in Geneva but rather than welcoming it Washington ­responded with scepticism and imposed new sanctions on Iran. In September,

while attending the United Nations General ­Assembly meeting in New York, Ahmadinejad hinted that he would be ­willing revive the fuel swap deal saying that Tehran would stop producing 20 per cent enriched uranium if it was guaranteed fuel for a medical research reactor. Whether or not this was a serious offer or political brinkmanship, we will never know, since the offer was never ­followed up.

Last June, following IAEA chief Yukiya Amano’s statement that he had “received further information related to possible past or current undisclosed nuclear-related activities that seem to point to the existence of possible military dimensions to Iran’s ­nuclear programme” Tehran announced that it would shift its production of higher grade uranium to an underground bunker and triple its production capacity.

In the meantime, the US has ­strengthened its military force in the Gulf, carrying out large-scale naval manoeuvres in the Atlantic with the British and French and allowing Israel to use Nato bases for ­exercises. Nato’s missile defence system has been deployed across the region and reports suggest the US has shipped hundreds of “bunker-buster” bombs to military bases on the island of Diego Garcia and supplied 55 of the bombs to Israel.

In Iran, the ratcheting-up of nuclear tensions has had a negative impact on the beleaguered Green Movement diverting attention from demands for greater democracy. Hopes that the movement would be reinvigorated by the Arab Spring have not been realised. With its leaders under house arrest and activists and intellectuals imprisoned or forced to flee abroad, the Green Movement has been largely contained.

With elections looming in America and the US in the midst of economic troubles, Obama will not be keen to get involved in another unpopular military adventure in the Middle East. However, he may well be coming under increasing pressure to take a harder line against Iran, not just from ­Congress but also from within his own party. Like the conservative Iranian ­leadership, neo-conservatives and policymakers in Washington are concerned by the ­unprecedented rise of people power ­sweeping the Middle East and the resulting loss of strategic influence. Withdrawal of US troops from Iraq has only helped to extend Iran’s sphere of influence in the region.

Western anxieties about Iran’s influence are nothing new. In 1953, the CIA and British secret services orchestrated the overthrow of Iran’s President Mohammad Mossadegh and the recent disclosure of British political documents from 1981 revealed that Margaret Thatcher’s Government was covertly supplying military equipment to Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war. While Iran has clearly has reasons to mistrust the Western powers, Western concerns about Iran’s possible nuclear weapons programme are also genuine.

With tensions escalating this should be a time for increased diplomatic activity rather than a diplomatic shut down. The best way to ensure that Iran does not become a ­nuclear-armed nation is not to isolate Tehran but to revive discussions around the fuel-for-fuel swap and reinstate the IAEA’s rigorous international monitoring activities. Rhetoric on both sides should be toned down and the parties should be encouraged to move back towards the negotiation table. Only then might war be prevented from spilling from the minds of men and onto the bloody canvas of the battlefield.

His latest collaboration with Dujardin, however, has propelled both men firmly into the international limelight. Dujardin won Best Actor at Cannes for his irresistibly charming and charismatic turn as George Valentin, a slick-haired 1920s screen-idol who combines the smouldering Latin-lover magnetism of Rudolph Valentino with the lithe-limbed athleticism and easy-going swagger of the peerless Douglas Fairbanks Senior. And just as Fairbanks struggled to adapt to the coming of sound (Valentino had already gone to the great boudoir in the sky by the time of The Jazz Singer), Valentin suffers the indignity of a riches to (almost) rags decline, as the fickle ticket-buying public turns to fresher faces – and voices.

His precipitous fall mirrors the rapid rise from obscurity of Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), a beanpole, bouncy re-imagining of Joan Crawford’s “flapper” persona – their diverging fortunes complicated by an on-off romantic relationship between the pair.

The Artist is a rousingly heartfelt tribute to a bygone, unfairly neglected cinematic era. Hazanavicius and his cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman craft an affectionate, relatively lo-fi pastiche of 1920s movie-making styles. With its near-incessant jazz-age soundtrack and ­judiciously sparing use of sound effects, however, The Artist is no “silent” movie. And it certainly takes what experts might dub a casual approach to actual Hollywood chronology. But Hazanavicius does manage to capture the look and feel of films from the 1920s and ’30s – his eye for background detail is unobtrusively delightful.

Audiences will revel in the old-school star-quality of appealing leads Dujardin and Bejo, who enjoy a nonchalant kind of chemistry and hold their own against stiff competition more recognisable supporting players including John Goodman and James Cromwell. Even Malcolm McDowell pops up for a cameo, although it’s disappointing that the British veteran should be restricted to just a single brief scene.

Enjoying rather more screen-time is Valentin’s milk-white terrier Uggy, a ­delightful canine thespian evidently ­intended to stir memories of the Thin Man series’ Asta.