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

ON January 3 1918, Maxim Litvinov, a Russian communist living with his wife in a modest home in Hillfield Road, a turning off West End Lane, West Hampstead, read in a newspaper of a radio message from the Petrograd capital of the Bolshevik government, that he had been appointed ambassador to Britain.
“Citizen Litvinoff is appointed plenipotentiary in London,” he learned.
Less than two months earlier, Lenin’s Bolshevik government had withdrawn from its predecessor’s alliance with Britain and France in the war against Germany and Austria.

The summer of 1950 saw Labour abandon further nationalisation while escalating Korean War spending from £2.3m to £4.7m, as the government meekly accepted capitalism’s licence and became Washington’s yes-man, writes JOHN ELLISON

JOHN ELLISON looks back at Labour’s opportunistic tendency, when in office, to veer to the right on policy as well as ideological worldview

JOHN ELLISON recalls the momentous role of the French resistance during WWII
