Full Account?

What, exactly, did Matthew Doyle do to deserve a peerage? Never mind a Labour one, since Doyle campaigned for an Independent candidate. That is an automatic expulsion from the Labour Party, and a five-year ban from even so much as applying to re-join. Or, at any rate, it is for anyone else. That that candidate was Sean Morton was beside the point, just as the criminal investigations into Peter Mandelson and into Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor relate to misconduct in public office with a view to Jeffrey Epstein's financial gain, not to anything else.

If the Government is "a boys' club", then what do the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Foreign Secretary, the Home Secretary, and the nine other women around the Cabinet table do? Harriet Harman has never got over not being made First Secretary of State by Gordon Brown, but if she thinks that the answer to Epstein of all scandals is even her opinion, never mind the return for which she may be angling, then her lack of self-awareness is almost admirable.

Far more probably, Harman wants the new First Secretary of State to be Jess Phillips, the better to position her for the Leadership now that Wes Streeting had rendered himself impossible by criticising Israel, though not so as to have spurred him to any sort of action. Phillips turns out to have been sending out nothing more than pro forma replies to complainants against Mohamed Al-Fayed, so she does sound just the sort to become Prime Minister of this Epstein Island, the country in the world most controlled by the Epstein Class.

The monarchy has proved no protection against that, so the monarchist and the republican arguments are both still rubbish in their own terms, meaning that the case for change has not been made. Starmer's rebranding of His Majesty's Government as "the UK Government" echoes his practice of referring to it as "my Government". Matters are not helped by Prince William's fawning over the Epsteins of Saudi Arabia, whose presence at Premier League events Sir Jim Ratcliffe presumably refuses to acknowledge, just as he presumably does not say so much as "Good morning" to much of the squad of Manchester United. How do the Monégasques react to him as a coloniser?