For those of us with a sincere, nonpartisan interest (I swear) in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, it’s been a good week: First the Democrats, with an eye to hammering Donald Trump, released a few redacted Epstein emails in which the president’s name featured prominently; then Republicans, presumably with an eye to burying the Democratic leak, released thousands more Epstein documents. With this kind of tag-team effort, we’ll have the whole story out in the open by Christmas!

Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were friends in the 1990s but later fell out.

A word of caution, though, for those liberals who are relative newcomers to the Epstein saga, for so long a mostly conservative fixation. There is a dark conspiratorial thrill that comes with encountering the reality, amply displayed in the latest round of disclosures, that so many American elites were perfectly comfortable being buddy-buddy with a trafficker of teenage girls. And because both right and left have pivoted away from the Bill Clinton-era neoliberal centre, the fact that Epstein had (to quote the left-wing writer Jeet Heer) “very banal centrist politics with the same gestalt as 90 per cent of US elite since 1990s” makes him an ideal symbol of........

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