Of Note

I did Winston Churchill yesterday, but there really should not be any politician on the banknotes of a monarchy. If there must be one, though, then it should be by far the most successful British politician in living memory, Queen Camilla, whose very title declares her astonishing ascent. She is at it again today, doing the #BelieveAllWomen line in the midst of the parliamentary progress of the Bill to abolish almost all trial by jury, even though rape will supposedly still be triable only by jury, and even though juries convicted in 76 per cent of rape cases. She may have access to information that was not in the public domain, she is a Privy Counsellor, and indeed a Counsellor of State alongside the man whom the Royal Family's own website still calls Prince Andrew.

One would have thought that both the famously bibliophile Queen, and the upper-middle-class gynocracy that was the Parliamentary Labour Party, would have raised enough objection to have kept Jane Austen on the tenner. On my stated principle, the sometime Robert Maxwell MP may be tricky. But the case for Jeffrey Epstein in unanswerable by or under a Government that had been appointed by Peter Mandelson last year, the year after Mandelson had handpicked the members of its Commons majority. That ought to enjoy crossparty support, since the Epstein Files named centrists, right-wing populists, right-wing elitists, and an anarcho-syndicalist libertarian socialist. At least unless Noam Chomsky would not vote either for the Green Party or for the Zarah Sultana wing of Your Party, then their proximity to his views and indeed to him should identify them as Epstein Class parties, and thus no more deserving of our votes than any of the others was.