Given the “astonishing incompetence and corruption” in Donald Trump’s second administration, says Tom Nichols in The Atlantic, the question arises: “What does it take to get fired by Trump’s White House?” This week we got an answer, thanks to the resignation of Washington’s ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, following accusations of blatant graft. Her messages begging a Trump donor to pay off her huge credit card bills are cringe-inducing. “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” she wrote to Eric Deters, asking him to wire a cool $100,000 into her American Express account. When she failed to provide her promised access to the Trump administration, Deters revealed their arrangements.

Obviously, the corruption itself is unlikely to have bothered Trump. Compared to others in the administration – including the president himself – Guilfoyle is a “small timer”. This spring, for example, the FT reported that a broker for Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth tried to make a big investment in defence stocks just before the Iran war. FBI director Kash Patel has been accused of using government money as a slush fund to pay random bonuses to his favourites within the bureau. Border czar Tom Homan was caught on tape accepting $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents posing as businessmen, yet remains in his job. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner represents an entirely new kind of Washington figure, for whom diplomatic missions are a “means to extraordinary wealth”. The reason Guilfoyle was handed her marching orders, unlike these others, is partly because she became an embarrassment – she was once engaged to Donald Trump Jr – and partly because she is a woman. “In this administration, self-dealing is mostly a man’s game.”

London is the “divorce capital of the world”, says Katie Glass in The Standard, a status cemented by seriously big-money cases. This year saw Russian businessman Mikhail Kroupeev’s £100m settlement. Last year US billionaire Michael Fuchs was ordered to pay his French ex-wife £36m. Both are dwarfed by the record-breaking £554m agreement King Charles’s divorce lawyer secured for Princess Haya bint Hussein in her split from Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum in 2021. The appeal of London, one divorce lawyer says, is a combination of the “50-50 split” principle, meaning all assets built up during the marriage count as equally shared, and the fact that judges won’t be “fobbed off” with efforts to conceal wealth.

One lawyer says she frequently oversees ultra-high-net-worth divorces where clients divvy up everything from international homes – “you get Maine, I’ll have New York” – to Old Masters, yachts, cars, horses and “Birkin bag collections”. Rows erupt, she says, over exclusive personalised number plates, or wine collections that vanish “when one side drinks them during proceedings”. If a breadwinner tries to cheat financial disclosure, social media photos of them “on a yacht in Monaco drinking champagne”, say, count as acceptable evidence that they are not, in fact, “penniless”. In some cases, divorcees are advised to “spend, spend, spend” to prove they need a “generous maintenance payment”. One lawyer whose offices used to be around the corner from Selfridges says women would “disappear and sink £75,000”. No wonder big-earners would, in the words of another lawyer, prefer their split to go through “pretty much anywhere else in the world”.

After a week of glowing obituaries, it’s worth remembering just how badly Jeffrey Archer behaved, says Adam Macqueen on the Page 94 podcast. The author and Tory politician went to prison for perjury after suing the Daily Star for running a story about him sleeping with a prostitute, Monica Coghlan, then paying her a large amount of money to leave the country. Archer bribed several friends to pretend they’d spent the evening with him on the night in question. (He failed to pay up, infuriating one “bribee” so much he told the News of the World.) He also submitted an entirely fake “appointments diary” with made-up appointments during the week in question, without even bothering to fill in the other pages. Judge Potts, presiding, said it was one of the worst examples of perjury he had personally ever seen and surpassed anything he could find in the legal books.

Archer may have been a cad, says Matthew Parris in The Times, but in public life, “rascals who radiate cheerfulness” and politicians who “sail above tribal squabbling” often find affection. Boris Johnson comes to mind; or that adulterous old goat David Lloyd George, who made his wife lie for him in court. In fiction too, think of the pickpocketing Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist; or Falstaff; or Flashman; or Just William. Men in particular have a soft spot for the “cheeky criminal”. Look at the names we’ve found for them: “rascal”, “rogue”, “scallywag”, “scoundrel”, “scamp”, “ragamuffin”, or the Australian “larrikin”. To me, Archer’s great contribution to humanity, for all his faults, was cheering us all up, and for that, I can’t help liking him. “Ooh you are awful, Jeffrey, but… rest in peace, anyway.”