Sam Leith

They should make a film about Peter Murrell, shouldn’t they? Starring, possibly, Leonardo DiCaprio. Nicola Sturgeon’s ex-husband is not only a crook of shameless proportions, but for a decade or so, he somehow spent like a sailor on shore leave without anyone around him raising so much as an eyebrow. Not for him the discreet Swiss bank account or the mattress stuffed with bearer-bonds. Tom Ripley, Frank Abagnale Jr, Macavity the Mystery Cat: these figures are cautious amateurs by comparison. Is he a hypnotist? Is there a point at which incuriosity becomes a superpower?

Remember when Sir Keir Starmer was sold to us as, effectively, the anti-Boris? Where Boris was slapdash, Keir would be methodical; where Boris fibbed as easily as breathing, Keir would be truthful as a boy-scout; where Boris was boastful, Keir would be modest; where Boris exuded ambition, Keir would exude dutifulness; where Boris was charismatic, Keir would bore the pants off us; where Boris mumbled schoolroom Latin, Keir would mumble courtroom Latin. The thing about Boris is that you sort of knew what you were getting For those of us who thought Boris Johnson – like him personally though we might – ill-suited to being put in charge of so much as a round of drinks, let alone the country, Keir Starmer looked like an agreeable alternative. Well.

When I was a nipper, a staple of children’s television was a show called Why Don’t You? The full title, as the theme song made clear, was: “Why don’t you just switch off your television set and go and do something less boring instead?" Very “meta”, as we didn’t then say. And, of course, generations of children sat on the sofa gormlessly drinking Um Bongo while we watched the show’s cast demonstrate all the wholesome arts-and-crafts activities we could have been doing instead of watching TV. This was a few years before our parents discovered the joys of eating microwave TV dinners while watching Master Chef. A previous generation feared that the rise of television would put an end to children reading. It didn’t I start with this to give a bit of context.

When I was young and green and working as a gossip columnist, I learned much from the energy and enthusiasm of my colleague Lady Olga Maitland. Long before Boris Johnson decided he could be an MP at the same time as editing this magazine, Olga – she was always ahead of the curve – combined her duties as a gossip reporter with serving as the Conservative MP for Sutton and Cheam. And my goodness, she was interested in bins. She’d breeze into the offices of the Ephraim Hardcastle column at the dot of 11 every morning, trilling triumphantly – she was a great triller, was Ollie – about the latest development in her campaign to improve the bin collections in Sutton.

I wrote not all that long ago about this disconcerting situation we’re in where the only news story the Prime Minister seems capable of generating is a news story about the likelihood of his losing his job. Let’s just say, things haven’t exactly changed. As ever, Starmer said all the standard things about how everyone saying he was useless doesn’t bother him In the first week of January, his nibs thrilled the world by giving an exclusive interview to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg (and no doubt he’d think of this as a decisive move to draw a line under frivolous speculation in the Westminster Bubble): “‘I’ll be PM this time next year,’ Starmer tells BBC.

“London Has Fallen.” Little did I imagine, when I sat on the sofa with my friend Tanya gorging on Quality Street and enjoying the latest instalment of Gerard Butler’s heroically average action-movie series, that the film’s title would come to sum up a major strand of global political propaganda.

Sometimes, a nickname comes along so excellently unkind that you know it's going to stick. One such is “MattGPT” – which will, I suspect, follow former academic and failed Reform candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election Matt Goodwin to his grave. “MattGPT” is a nickname that will follow former academic and failed Reform candidate Matt Goodwin to his grave The taunt gained traction after the writer Andy Twelves noticed a series of factual errors in Goodwin’s self-published new book Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity. (He seems to have been strongly inspired in theme as well as in choice of title – intellectual homage, or Salieri eyeballing Mozart?

‘Vulgar, vulgar, vulgar,’ was the verdict of the late Lord Charteris on Sarah Ferguson. He did not, I think, mean it as a compliment. But her subsequent career has shown quite how liberating such a disposition of character can be. Combine a complete lack of class or taste with a resoundingly innocent love of money, and there’s really nothing you can’t do. Or won’t, perhaps. Fergie says she was “surprised” to get a pair of corgis rather than jewellery or money Hence yesterday’s Mail on Sunday headline, which offered welcome relief from all that stuff about oil prices and collateral damage: ‘Fergie’s Plot to Clone the Queen’s Corgis for Reality TV.

So farewell then, Ayatollah Khamenei. I’m put in mind of Private Eye’s cover on the death of Hendrik Verwoerd. “A Nation Mourns” read the headline, under a photograph of four black Africans in ceremonial dress leaping joyfully in the air in a traditional dance. Nobody’s going to be sorry he’s gone. The received wisdom tends to skirt the possibility that some senior Nazis may have been quite cultured But reading his obituary, I confess to surprise and dismay. What was to be found there was not, at least at first, an austere and viciously power-hungry religious monomaniac. Here, from what we know, was somebody who at least in his younger years was disciplined, modest, intellectually curious, and artistically inclined.

So: is the game up? Looking at the former Prince Andrew’s slumped posture, corpse-grey face and thousand-yard stare in the snatched photographs of him leaving police custody, you might be tempted to think so. He looked like Ebenezer Scrooge confronted by the Ghost of Christmas Future. The future certainly doesn’t hold anything very uplifting for this wretched, silly specimen – but will he take the monarchy with him? The Firm gets away with being secretive in all sorts of ways – not least around money. That must change There are two separate cases here, I think. One is: does the former Prince’s disgrace present a rational case for the abolition of the monarchy?