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
How long has the royal farce got left?
As the prospect of a King Charles looms nearer, NICK WRIGHT looks at why the monarchy remains so important to the Establishment as public opinion increasingly turns against it
Labour’s new Treasury unit will ‘challenge unnecessary regulation’ by forcing nominally independent bodies like Ofwat to bend to business demands — exactly what Iain Anderson’s corporate clients wanted, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
DR DYLAN MURPHY looks at a Big Brother Watch report which exposes the government as an enabler of DWP secret spying on benefit claimants
The EU faces a critical choice: will it remain in the shadow of an increasingly unreliable US ally, or will it forge its own path in a multilateral world where co-operation with China is essential, asks MARC VANDEPITTE as leaders meet for the EU-China Summit
A lot of discussion about how the left should currently organise – including debate on whether the Green Party is a useful vehicle for advance – runs the risk of refusing to engage with or learn from the reasons the left was defeated previously, argues KEVIN OVENDEN
For Egypt trade trumps the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, but how long can the country’s ‘misleaders’ – and others in the region – continue their indifference against the popular will of their own people, asks ROGER McKENZIE
JUST OCCASIONALLY the intimate relationship between Britain’s royals and the Saudi Arabian dynasty — a family raised by the masters of the British empire from a nomadic existence to rule over the Arabian sands — is exposed to scrutiny.
When Turkish intelligence let it be known that they had audio on the 2018 dismemberment — by royal appointment — of the Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi the carefully contrived image of Mohammed Bin Salman as an enlightened ruler virtuously engaged in modernising his desert kingdom took a fatal hit.
The assassination was carried out by the personal entourage of Salman. After secret “trials” three of his top security officials were acquitted, a clutch of junior officials were condemned to death and as the tradition has it, pardoned according to the wishes of Khashoggi’s family whose consent to this procedure was no doubt hastened by a combination of sticks and carrots.
More from this author
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
