Which points to a related irony, no less bitter. Because politics is Newtonian, with elections often won by those who represent an equal and opposite reaction to what has gone before, Starmer reached Downing Street in part because he was a boy scout – the squeaky clean antidote to the sleaze of Boris Johnson. His pitch to the voters was that he was not exciting, but he was trustworthy, a former prosecutor free of the whiff of scandal. For him to be linked, via Mandelson, to the netherworld of Jeffrey Epstein and the vile abusers of women and girls who filled it is not merely embarrassing or compromising: it destroys his chief claim to the top job. As the Economist asked this week, if this can happen, then “What is the point of Sir Keir staying in office?”