Sam Leith

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.

The Cursed Ratio strikes again. Twitter users have voted 52-48 in favour of Elon Musk allowing the return of Donald Trump to the website, causing the gnashing of a great many progressive teeth in the airless no-space of the internet. The kicker to this is that – psych! – the former president almost immediately announced that he had no interest in returning to the site in any case. A pyrrhic victory, then, for Little Elon in his Struggle Against the Eunuchs, but still.   I’m no fan of Trump myself. I’d love to see him doing a sullen perp-walk in an orange jumpsuit, and I dearly hope one day to witness such a thing. But it strikes me that having him back on Twitter might not be the worst thing in the world should he deign to rejoin it.

'Politics,' as the old quip has it, 'is showbusiness for ugly people.' That quote was minted in the good old days when there was, at least implicitly, some clear blue water between the two things: it intended to draw an arch point of comparison between two quite different spheres of activity. Politics was momentous, solemn, and consequential; showbusiness was vain, silly and inconsequential. The quip points to a sneaking sense that, secretly, those in the former realm were actuated by less high-minded concerns.   These days, there is less and less sense, either among the general public or the practitioners of either art, that any such distinction exists. Both are now simply vehicles to attain the infinitely fungible currency of fame. That’s a slippage too far.