This is the beginning of the end for the Remainers, but it's the start of something that could be extraordinary for Britain. Our Prime Minister alrea… - Allison Pearson

One thing you can be sure this embarrassingly useless inquiry will not be concluding is that our pandemic policy was devised and implemented by a group of spectrummy males, many of them physicists, mathematical modellers and behavioural psychologists who would struggle to pick out their own child in a school photograph.

This is known as "victim shaming" now, but it is a true account of how young women felt about a famous, magnetic male who flattered them. And it would be more honest, perhaps, to admit that certain girls will always throw themselves at powerful, sexy, exploitative men.

Yesterday morning, I was on a train to Liverpool to cover the trial when my editor called to break the news about the new guilty plea. My first reaction was anger. The reason I had set aside a predicted three-to-four weeks away from home, putting myself through what would undoubtedly be harrowing stories of maimed and dying primary-school children, was pretty straightforward: I wanted to bear witness. I wanted to get to the truth about what should, by rights, if this still calls itself a civilised society, be regarded as a notorious massacre. The heinous mass-murder of children with a carved knife – our nation has known nothing on that scale since Dunblane – in a respectable seaside town on the west coast of Lancashire merited a full public explanation.