Sam Leith

Praise be. A day or two ago, something potentially quite exciting took place in Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire. It was a two-day conference and its guiding question – according to documents obtained by the Observer – was: ‘How can we make Brexit work better with our neighbours in Europe?’ Gathered there, and not a moment before time (though some might say five or six years ago might have been better still), were a number of politicians and public figures. It’s described as having been a ‘private discussion’. There are two things that seem worth noticing about this.

The time it takes to mount a political comeback gets shorter and shorter, doesn’t it? The last prime minister but one barely got his toes in the sand on his first holiday after leaving the post before he was flying home with thoughts of mounting a return to high office. Now his successor, too, is campaigning to get on track to get her old job back.  The first wallop of Liz Truss’s one-two punch was a long article for the Sunday Telegraph explaining why the mini-Budget that so spectacularly sunk her premiership was, in fact, absolutely the right thing to do; punch number two will be an interview with Spectator TV that goes up this very afternoon. I’m interested, as I expect we all are, to see how she develops there the arguments that her piece for the Telegraph set out.

How big does a bath need to be for 'sex frolicking' to be a possibility? That’s not, if you’d asked anyone six months ago, the question on which the reputational future of the monarchy might be in part held to depend – and yet here we are. A bizarre photograph has been released by the brother of Ghislaine Maxwell in an attempt to discredit Virgina Roberts Guiffre's claims of abuse. The photograph made the front page of the Daily Telegraph, no less. It showed two people, described in the accompanying story as 'acquaintances' of Ghislaine Maxwell, sitting facing each-other, fully clothed, in the bathtub of Maxwell’s old home.

The cliché is that it’s scandals about sex that tend to do for Tories, and scandals about money that do for their counterparts on the opposite benches. To give credit to the current generation of Tories, though, the last decade or so has seen, in this department, a feat of triangulation quite undreamed of by the likes of David Cameron or even Tony Blair. The Conservatives have retained a creditably strong showing in the extra-marital nookie and unwanted sexual advances stakes; but my goodness, they haven’t half upped their game in financial sleaze.  Using 'I was simply careless' as your explanation for why you accidentally seem to have not paid several million pounds in tax won’t really cut it All credit to Boris Johnson for captaining the team.

Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me. All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.  It’s quite the retrospective performance review What’s more unusual is what happened next.

Several hundred years ago, in the 2014 film 20,000 Days On Earth, Ray Winstone asked Nick Cave: ‘Do you want to reinvent yourself?’ Cave, looking out from his sunglasses, replied: ‘I can’t reinvent myself.’ ‘Do you wanna?’ ‘I don’t want to either. I think the rock star’s gotta be someone you can see from a distance. You can draw them in one line… They’ve got to be godlike. It’s all an invention. But it happened early on for me.’ On the handful of occasions over the years that I’ve seen Cave from a distance, he has been just that sort of figure – one a deft cartoonist would draw with one line: ski-jump nose, Sesame Street eyebrows and a swept-back bob of jet-black hair like Wednesday Addams after Uncle Fester chopped off her pigtails for a prank.

‘Standing in my kitchen in Suffolk after a quiet New Year's Eve, I scanned my newspaper for clues as to what might be lurking around the corner.’  So run the opening words of yesterday’s first extract of Matt Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle Against Covid. 1 January. New Year’s Day. And our hero – modest, unassuming, but eternally vigilant, eyes always scanning the horizon – is on duty, even when most of us are nursing a foggy head.   Of course, we know now what this man of destiny didn’t know then: that the ‘news-in-brief story about a mystery pneumonia outbreak in China’ that catches his eye is the harbinger of the vast global story that is to change all of our lives.