George Galloway on the Rt Hon Sir Keir Starmer, KCB, PC, KC, MP:

I don't care if he's a top or a bottom.

There Mr Galloway is at odds with the rest of the Internet, which seems to have concluded unanimously that he's the latter. In the legacy media, one is struck by the all the Fleet Street dogs not barking. After all, two properties and one former motor vehicle of the PM have just been rather seriously firebombed, allegedly by a twenty-one-year-old Ukrainian "male model" with minimal English-language skills. At the very least, surely, this raises security questions, no?

On the face of it, yes. It was "counter-terrorism" officers who took down a second suspect at Luton Airport attempting to leave the country. This chap is twenty-six. That's all we've been told. Another "male model"?

It's beginning to feel a bit like the initial reports, two years ago, about a certain BBC presenter being harassed over some lad he'd been corresponding with - in which the alert listener had the vague feeling every media grandee knew what was really going on but they had all agreed not to tell anyone. Or, to go further back, the first morning of the Stephen Milligan story, shortly after his secretary Vera had found the Tory MP dead on his kitchen table, naked save for a pair of stockings and suspenders plus a third stocking tight round his neck and a satsuma and tab of Ecstasy under his tongue. I recall that the BBC's flagship "Today" programme covered the story without mentioning the nudity, the ladies' hosiery, the E, the orange, or initially the name of the deceased, or his demise: the news was that something had happened to someone in a sufficiently unusual way to make it newsworthy, but, other than that, you didn't need to know. When it all came out, the position of officialdom was that the hitherto unknown phenomenon of "autoerotic asphyxiation" was in fact perfectly normal and most of your friends and neighbours were doing it all the time.

Perhaps they were right. Since then, from BoJo resigning over his Deputy Chief Whip groping members' bottoms at the Carlton Club to Two-Tier Keir's incendiary Ukrainian "model", a once great nation's entire political culture seems to have autoerotically asphyxiated.

A baby boy was “routinely ill-treated, sexually abused and physically assaulted” before he was killed by a secondary school teacher adopting him, a jury has heard.

Jamie Varley, the teacher, 37, and his partner, John McGowan-Fazakerley, 32, were in the process of adopting Preston Davey.