“Elite Decadence & Decay”

Lord Mandelson has been arrested on suspicion of committing misconduct in public office.

The former Labour minister was pictured being led from his London home by plain clothes police officers on Monday afternoon.

The Metropolitan Police started investigating Lord Mandelson after it emerged that he appeared to have leaked sensitive government documents to Jeffrey Epstein while serving as business secretary in Gordon Brown’s cabinet.

Jeffrey Epstein hid computers and photographs from United States authorities in secret storage lockers across the country, The Telegraph can reveal.

Documents uncovered by this newspaper show the paedophile paid private detectives to remove equipment from his Florida home in an apparent attempt to prevent investigators from finding it.

The documents also show that he rented six storage units across the US and used them to house items from his properties, including computers from Little Saint James, his private island in the Caribbean.

The House of Windsor has an admirable Teflon quality that has enabled it to survive constitutional crises from the abdication of Edward VIII to the death of Princess Diana. But the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor may yet prove to be the downfall of the monarchy and the British establishment which it props up.

The prospect of the former prince, who for now remains eighth in line to the throne, standing in the dock of an English crown court that bears his brother’s coat of arms, while detectives continue to extend their investigation across the royal estate, is likely to ignite a constitutional crisis that the royal family cannot survive. For the tax-paying public, watching aghast, it is hard not to sense a decades-long conspiracy of silence and self-interested self-protection as well as a strong whiff of rotten corruption at the heart of the state.

Members of Congress have urged the US government to take action against associates of Jeffrey Epstein, following the arrest in the UK of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor on suspicion of misconduct in public office.

“Prince Andrew was just arrested,” Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman who co-sponsored the law that compelled the justice department to release the Epstein files, wrote on X. “Now we need JUSTICE in the United States.”

The King’s brother, who was stripped of his titles last year due to his ties with Epstein, has consistently and strenuously denied any wrongdoing.

The belated performative outrage concerning the Epstein files and the UK rape gangs reeks of hypocrisy and moral whiplash as politicians and influencers have been relentlessly encouraging the sexualisation of society since sex was reputedly invented in 1963. Now, we are all expected to condemn with sorrowful faces these ‘outrageous’ sexual perversions when in fact people in power have been cheering them on for years. When Keir Starmer said recently to the Epstein victims: “I am sorry, sorry for what was done to you, sorry that so many people with power failed you,” his words may actually for once be accurate. Whether he realises what he should be apologising for is another story.

Lord Peter Mandelson had a plan. Use the people’s business as cover to build his personal fortune. But discreetly.

“My schedule in China is a bit complicated,” the Labour Party powerbroker wrote to Desmond Shum on August 30, 2010. “I arrive on Monday 13 Sep with an official UK delegation until Wednesday. I then want to stay on until Fri/Sat unofficially to meet people and network for the future but I am not sure how to do this, where to stay or get myself around because I want to be independent of the Embassy.”

James E. Staley, who recently stepped down as the chief executive of Barclay’s in the wake of allegations involving his ties to Mr. Epstein, emailed Mr. Epstein in 2014 to suggest that upper-caste Americans like themselves were unlikely to ever face a populist uprising like the protests taking place in Brazil at the time.

Pointing to Super Bowl ads that year, Mr. Staley wrote: “Its all about hip blacks in hip cars with white women. The group that should be in the streets, has been bought off. By Jay-Z.”

Journalists and researchers will spend the next months ferreting through the Epstein files in search of further criminal conduct or a new conspiratorial wrinkle. But one truth has already emerged.

In unsparing detail, the documents lay bare the once-furtive activities of an unaccountable elite, largely made up of rich and powerful men from business, politics, academia and show business. The pages tell a story of a heinous criminal given a free ride by the ruling class in which he dwelled, all because he had things to offer them: money, connections, sumptuous dinner parties, a private plane, a secluded island and, in some cases, sex.

That story of impunity is all the more outrageous now in the midst of rising populist anger and ever-growing inequality. The Caligula-like antics of Jeffrey Epstein and friends occurred over two decades that saw the decline of America’s manufacturing sector and the subprime mortgage crisis, in which millions of Americans lost their homes.

A highly regarded theoretical physicist is stepping away from the Ontario institute he helped found, after his ties to the late American sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were revealed in recently released files.

Lee Smolin, an American Canadian professor of physics and philosophy, has “agreed to pause his working relationship” with the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ont., according to an email on Thursday from Perimeter’s executive director, Marcela Carena.

In recent years, Americans have known what to expect from our Neronian Super Bowl halftime shows.

Mediocre music is veneered over with gaudy, flashily lit, but ultimately empty and meaningless sets.

Related …

The Western ruling class is unraveling: elites panic, institutions crumble, and the gap between rulers and the ruled has never been clearer.

If you take a close look at some of the major news stories that have captured our collective attention over the last few weeks, you may notice a peculiar pattern.

We’ll start in Minneapolis, with the story that has dominated the headlines for weeks. Although Tom Homan, President Trump’s “border czar,” has deftly negotiated a de-escalation of tensions in the nation’s most aggressive, bizarre, and aggressively bizarre sanctuary city, protests there continue. More to the point, state and local politicians continue to behave as if federal laws are irrelevant and as if they have no responsibility whatsoever to abide by rules that they have decided are unpleasant.