There have been penalties for those who looked the other way when Epstein was convicted of child sex offences and decided to maintain relationships with the financier — but not for the British ambassador to Washington, reveals SOLOMON HUGHES

YESTERDAY’S party of fiscal rectitude and unrelieved austerity is today’s party of unlimited spending, unbounded subsidy and near-universal wage supplements.
The party which spent the last decade or more consumed with an internal division over Britain’s trading relationships and our entanglement with the federalising European Union found itself improbably reunited under “il buffone.”
With former prime minister Theresa May marooned on the back benches and railing against the evisceration of her economic policy and her predecessor, David Cameron, scribbling his recriminations in a designer shed, it took only the nod from Boris Johnson’s consigliere to despatch the fiscally orthodox Sajid Javid and replace him with a new, compliant and flexible friend as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Holding office in local government is a poisoned chalice for a party that bases its electoral appeal around issues where it has no power whatsoever, argues NICK WRIGHT

From Gaza complicity to welfare cuts chaos, Starmer’s baggage accumulates, and voters will indeed find ‘somewhere else’ to go — to the Greens, nationalists, Lib Dems, Reform UK or a new, working-class left party, writes NICK WRIGHT

There is no doubt that Trump’s regime is a right-wing one, but the clash between the state apparatus and the national and local government is a good example of what any future left-wing formation will face here in Britain, writes NICK WRIGHT

European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde sees Trump’s many disruptions as an opportunity to challenge the dollar’s ‘exorbitant privilege’ — but greater Euro assertiveness will also mean greater warmongering and militarism, warns NICK WRIGHT