The blockade lifts — on a 60-day promise

Today the war that shut the Strait of Hormuz ended, or began to. The United States and Iran announced a deal to halt fighting and reopen the strait; President Trump declared it complete and ordered the US naval blockade lifted. The markets did not wait for the detail: oil fell more than $4 a barrel and share prices rose. After three months in which a fifth of the world's seaborne oil and gas sat behind a closed channel, the sentence that moved most was Trump's instruction to let the ships sail.

Read the document, though, and the caution writes itself. What was agreed today is a memorandum of understanding, signed digitally by Trump and his vice-president, with a formal ceremony promised for Friday in Geneva. It commits the sides to 60 days without fighting — a pause, not a peace. The text has not been published; officials say it will follow within a day or two. Iran's foreign ministry called the deal a victory and, in the same breath, said it does not signify trust. Israel has condemned it. The nuclear questions that started the war are pushed into a later phase that has not begun.

Hold the cost in mind, because it is the real measure. A three-month blockade, enforced for much of its length by a handful of mines and the threat of more, is being unwound by a signature and a social-media post. That tells you how cheap the leverage was and how expensive the consequences were for everyone outside the room — the hundreds of ships and crews stranded for three months, and the British drivers who paid for it at the pump.

Which is where it reaches home, and why the relief will feel slower than the headline. The falls in the oil market are immediate; the falls on the forecourt are not. The 23.9p a litre the RAC says petrol has added since late February will ease only as cheaper crude works through to wholesale and then to the pump, over weeks. The Ofgem cap that rises about 13 per cent in July was set on the costs of the past quarter and will not be rewritten by a deal signed in June; any relief there shows up in the autumn at the earliest, and only if the ceasefire holds.

What today changes is the direction. For three months the question on this beat was how bad it could get. Tonight it is whether a pause can become an end — whether a corridor reopened by promise stays open when the promise runs only 60 days. That is the thing to watch, and it is genuinely open.