So DNA at last solves the mystery of who Jack the Ripper was: Aaron Kosminski, one of the key suspects. The same method that proved Anna Andersen was not the Tsar’s daughter Anastasia has been used ingeniously by a Ripperphile to nail the guilty man.

I must admit that my money was always on Montague Druitt, a clerk whose visits to see his mother in the Whitechapel asylum coincided with every single murder. A violent mother-fixated misogynist, Druitt eventually committed suicide by throwing himself off a Thames bridge…and the killing spree stopped abruptly.

History is very much my metier, and while I freely admit to being fascinated by unsolved mysteries, their occurrence through the ages does hold very important lessons for today. Not the least of these is the principle ‘innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt’ – a cornerstone of our freedom foundations that London Mayor Boris Johnson wants to bring to an end, and his mates at Newscorp regularly ignore with their snide celeb rumour-mongering.

The following bullet points might be instructive:

1. There was infinitely more to connect Druitt to the Whitechapel murders than there is to prove Rolf Harris a paedophile. Druitt was mad but innocent: Harris is sane, but has been found guilty.

2. There is nothing new in cover-ups and Rotherham-style correctness: at one murder scene, Kosminski scrawled a message next to the body saying, “The Juwes [Jews] are the men who will not be blamed for nothing” – the sort of police-goading clue common to many serial-killer case histories. But the Met Police Commissioner at the time ordered it to be wiped away: he feared a violent pogrom if “the Yellow Press” reported the message’s existence.

3. Protective, secretive groups like the Masons were just as powerful in the 1880s too. Kosminski had been seen quite clearly hurrying away from the site of one murder. The descriptions given to the police matched their pictures of the guy. Detectives were convinced the case was about to come to trial…but both the men who’d seen him were Jews. They did not want to condemn a fellow-Jew to death. Compare and contrast with the Labour paedophile who erased Ian Huntley’s paedophile past…thus enabling him to commit the Soham murders.

4. The folks with an agenda – determined to blame the Establishment for everything – are in turn nothing new. Queen Victoria’s grandson Albert Victor was a name peddled by the Republicans of the time as the likely murderer. As with the case of Cliff Richard and Elm House, the ‘basis’ for the claims was decidedly flaky: for much of the murder period he was in India. But the legend persisted, and I can well remember being told by a convinced radical in the late 1960s that Albert was “without doubt” the Ripper.

We live today in the Age of  Rush to Judgement, the Age of Trial by Media, the Age of Circumstantial Propaganda, the Age of Privilege’s Revival, and the Age of Calculated Demonisation. This is not so much a mixture as a suspension. The main thing we are being asked to suspend is disbelief. What we should do is  approach all ‘stories’ in the media with a dark shadow of doubt.

Yesterday at The Slog: In media terms, it’s all about choice. Allegedly.