The release of documents related to the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein has proceeded like a bankruptcy – first very slow, and then very fast; 3m items were dropped by the US Justice Department last Friday.

It’s interesting how many figures in public life have maintained they barely knew Epstein at all, since his arrest and death by suicide in 2019. It’s just about plausible from a business associate, I guess; you can imagine those relationships being pretty thin, emotionally speaking, revolving as they were around money.

But can you imagine having lunch, multiple times, with someone you barely know? Would you extend an open invitation to your house, in a chatty email referring to an apparently metaphorical harem, to someone you’d only met in a group setting “such as a charity tennis event”, which is what Richard Branson maintains? I don’t know how happy I’d be, sitting in my dressing gown with someone who I barely knew, as Peter Mandelson did; I guess, if I’d recently travelled on their private plane, that might have been an opportunity to........

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