I studied town planning in Cheltenham in the late 1960s. It was a culture shock. Walking down the Promenade I noticed the women were well dressed, with make-up and nail varnish.

When I recounted this to my mother her response was predictably savage. ‘Just like Jesmond’ she said. ‘Fur coats and no knickers.’ As far as she was concerned, such women were pretentious or something worse – just as in that ‘posh’ part of Newcastle.

One characteristic of my native north-east is the ingrained loathing of pretentiousness. It comes out of our egalitarian history. We are all the same. Airs and graces are not for us.

The wonderful Forest storyteller Winifred Foley who was in ‘service’ in pre-war Cheltenham expressed it more politely. In her memoire, ‘A Child in the Forest’, she observed ‘Cheltenham people were a little bit better than they ought to be’. This was not a political analysis. It was a casual and obvious social observation for her to make.

She would have seen straight through Donald Trump.

What does the Epstein ‘scandal’ tell us? There is a network of very rich and politically connected people who socialise and conspire together to make money wherever they can smell riches.

Those who were paying attention were aware of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell years ago. He was the money man, and she was the fixer who inherited her father’s Israeli spy contacts. Robert Maxwell was a monster – a brutal, embezzling liar who plundered the Daily Mirror pension pot. He was feted in Israel and rewarded by being buried on Jerusalem’s holy ‘Mount of Olives’ for undisclosed services to the Israeli state.

An ex-Labour MP and war hero who won the Military Cross and who traded information and influence with US, UK and Israeli politicians, he was born in Czechoslovakia. Most of his Jewish family were exterminated by the Nazis. He had reason to hate them and to embrace Israel.

Greed was another thing that made him brutal. And did he flaunt his wealth!

He was the prototype for Trump. His daughter Ghislane clearly has some sort of ‘leverage’ over Trump and is currently conniving to get him to ‘pardon’ her 20-year prison sentence.

If you look at photos of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell together there is no hint of affection from him. His eyes are cold as if she irritated him. Perhaps her treacherous procurement of young girls was to win his affection.

Epstein was not untalented and neither was Maxwell. Epstein had an easy charm and displayed wide knowledge. He believed in eugenics and was comfortably racist in the kind of way that many ‘educated’ people in the west still are. It’s not virulent racism – it simply looks down on people with different coloured skin and speech as culturally inferior.

Trump lacks the intellect of either Robert Maxwell or Jeffrey Epstein. He displays all these characteristics with brutal candour and has no saving graces at all. He is all ‘fur coats and no knickers.’