The long-term lease to the O2, London’s best-known live entertainment venue, has been sold to Britain’s biggest pensions insurance specialist.

Sky News understands a deal was signed last week for Rothesay, the title sponsor of England’s home Test cricket matches, to acquire the landmark’s 999-year lease for about £90m.

The agreement, which is likely to be announced within days, comes more than two months after Sky News reported that Rothesay was the frontrunner to clinch a deal.

Rothesay has become one of Britain’s most successful specialist insurers, having been established in 2007.

It now protects the pensions of more than one million people in Britain and makes more than £300m in pension payouts every month.

The auction of the O2 lease kicked off several months ago, when Cambridge University’s wealthiest college, Trinity, instructed advisers to launch a sale process.

Trinity College, which ranks among Britain’s biggest landowners, acquired the site in 2009 for a reported £24m.

The O2, which shrugged off its ‘white elephant’ status in the aftermath of its disastrous debut as the Millennium Dome in 2000, has since become one of the world’s leading entertainment venues.

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Operated by Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), it has played host to a wide array of music, theatrical, and sporting events over nearly a quarter of a century.

Trinity College, which was founded by Henry VIII in 1546, bought the O2 lease from Lend Lease and Quintain, the property companies that had taken control of the Millennium Dome site in 2002 for nothing.

In a joint statement issued in response to an enquiry from Sky News, Rothesay and Trinity College Cambridge said they were “pleased to confirm that Rothesay will be the long-term owner of The O2 arena, following a competitive auction process for the lease of this London landmark”.

A spokesperson for Rothesay said separately: “Prestigious and high-quality property assets like the O2 form an important part of Rothesay’s investment strategy, providing the predictable and dependable returns which create real security for the one million-plus pensions we protect.”

For Ukraine – its exhausted, brave soldiers, its thousands of bereaved families mourning their dead, and its beleaguered president – it is exactly what they feared it would be. 

They fear the compromise they will be forced to make will be messy, costly, unfair and ultimately beneficial to the invading tyrant who brought death and destruction to their sovereign land.

Six weeks ago, I spoke to President Zelenskyy in London.

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I put it to him in our Sky News interview that Presidents Trump and Putin were heading towards making a deal between themselves, a grand bargain, in which Ukraine was but one piece on the chessboard.

Zelenskyy smiled as if to acknowledge the reality ahead.

He paused and then he said this: “We are not going to be a card in talks between great nations, and we will never accept that… I definitely do not want to see global deals between America and Russia.

“We don’t need it. We are a separate story, a victim of Russian aggression and we will not reward it.”

It was a response that betrayed his greatest fear – that this will become essentially a Trump negotiation in which Zelenskyy and Ukraine will be told “take it or leave it”.

And, by the way, if you “leave it”, then it will be painful.

Harsh realities

It’s the prospect that now confronts Zelenskyy as Trump and Putin plough ahead on a course that has clear attractions for both of them.

Of course, Zelenskyy is right to say there can be no deal without Ukraine. But there are harsh realities at play here.

Trump wants a deal on Ukraine – any deal – that he can chalk up as a win. He wants it badly and he wants it now.

It’s the impediment to a broader strategic deal with Putin and he wants it out of the way. It’s what he does, and it’s the way he does it. And President Putin knows it.

He knows Trump, he sees an opportunity in Trump, and he can’t get across Russia to Alaska fast enough. He will be back at global diplomacy’s top table.

Always a deal to be done

Make no mistake, when Trump says he just wants to stop the killing, he means it. Such wanton loss of young lives offends him. He keeps saying it.

He sees war, by and large, as an unnecessary waste of life and of money. Deals are there to be done. There’s always a deal.

Sadly for Ukraine, in this case, it is unlikely to be a fair deal.

How can any deal be “fair” when you are the victim of outrageous brutality and heinous crimes.

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But it may well be the deal they have to take unless they want to fight an increasingly one-sided war with much less help from Trump and America.

A senior UK diplomat told me if things turn out as feared, it should not be called a land-for-peace deal. It should be called annexation “because that’s what it is”.

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But here’s the rub.

Peace, calm, the end of the nightly terror of war has much to recommend it. In short, a bad peace can often seem better than no peace. But, ultimately, rewarded dictators always come back for more.

If Ukraine has to accept a bad peace, then it will want clear security guarantees to make sure it cannot happen again.

It is the very least they deserve.

There is much at stake in Alaska.

As if life in Gaza wasn’t hard enough, there is now a heatwave – compounding the problems of minimal water, food and the basics you need to keep a family alive.

To keep your children halfway clean, when you’ve been displaced over and over again, forced to live under tarpaulin rammed up against your neighbours.

“We suffer greatly, especially because we live in tents,” says Riham Akel, who was displaced from the north and now lives in Gaza City.

“They are made of cloth and plastic that do not protect us from the heat. In addition, there is no electricity, drinking water or water for washing, no fans or air conditioning.”

Given Israel’s planned takeover of Gaza City – and the evacuation of the 800,000 or so people now living there – it’s likely she’ll be forced to move again.

In Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, the crowds have swelled these past two Saturdays – almost doubling after Hamas published propaganda videos showing two of the remaining hostages starving in captivity – and now this week, Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to push ahead with full security control of the Gaza Strip.

People here just want it to stop.

Yael said: “I feel like a hostage in my own country, as though no one listens to me – 80% of the citizens don’t want it anymore.”

“When you talk about the government it’s not only Gaza,” says David Solomon. “They are trying to undermine the democracy in Israel, they’re trying willingly to destroy the whole of Israel, they don’t care just for another year or two of their survival.”

There are also calls for IDF soldiers to refuse to carry out Netanyahu’s plan to take over Gaza City.

Another major point of contention is what many see as the failure of the International Red Cross to bring food to the hostages. Food for the Palestinians in Gaza is not much discussed, except for a small group on the fringes.

“We believe that the Israeli public is ignorant on purpose,” says Gilad Melzer – holding up a sign saying “Stop Genocide” with a photo of a starving child.

“Some of it wants to stay ignorant and some, the government wants to keep them ignorant of what is going on in Gaza and they’re ignorant as well of what is going on in the occupied territories.”

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Benjamin Netanyahu seems to have made up his mind, though. He will ramp up the fight, despite international outcry, despite the opposition of his military leadership and despite the tens of thousands who rally each week in Hostages Square, hoping someone in government will bother to listen.

There is a sense of hopelessness here – that the solidarity of numbers still makes so little difference.