The former Prince Andrew may have been exiled, but there’s no putting the worms back in the can says Fleet Street Fox. There’s still a lot of wriggling going on
“It’s been a tragic situation,” said Donald Trump about a prince losing his title. “It’s a terrible thing that’s happened to the family.”
That’s the Royal Family, which has lost the arseh*** formerly known as Prince Andrew to the dreadful exile of having no superlatives with which to be announced before he enters a room.. And indeed, no rooms in which he is welcome.
A tragedy, of course, is when somebody dies. Like Virginia Giuffre did without seeing much justice. Or like Jeffrey Epstein did, without receiving any. Virginia’s three children have suffered a terrible thing. Epstein’s victims suffered terrible things.
But the Royals? Nah. Not even Andrew has suffered much in comparison, although it’s highly likely he’s struggling to cope with the disgust, outrage and disgrace that has poured upon him. Having apparently never been told “no” for 65 years, he simply won’t have the tools to deal with his first-ever personal calamity. What must be weighing on his rarely-tested mind is that this particular can still has a lot of very wriggly worms in it.
It is typical of Trump – a white, privileged, billionaire who also partied with dodgy financier Epstein – that he expressed sympathy for his fellow white, privileged billionaires and how sad it is for them. And with a scandal that has grown global legs mainly because it involved a senior Royal who mostly focused on himself, such people have been the centre of media coverage.
The wealthy white males which own and edit many of the world’s newspapers naturally feel the wealthy white male is the most interesting bit. That thirst has driven so many revelations that some of their outlets could now be called Andrewspapers.
Virginia has been a sidebar, the other victims an undertone, while the hunt pursued the meatiest backside it could get its teeth into. And after a series of abhorrent crimes for which only a woman has been jailed, it’s about time some of the men got dragged back to the gutter they allegedly frolicked in.
Now that he is merely Andrew Mountbatten Windsor – or to use the original 12-minute LP version, Andrew Glucksburg-Battenberg-Saxe-Coburg-Gotha – the hounds of Fleet Street are circling for a fresh scent. And the only question is which of the many big beasts involved are going to be shortlisted for extinction.
READ MORE: Prince Andrew’s grim ‘catch up’ email to paedo Jeffrey Epstein months after prison release
In the US version of Virginia’s book, she claims she was once loaned out by Epstein to a “well-known prime minister”, who “wanted violence”. He choked her, she claimed, despite her begging him to stop, and left her “in a pool of blood”. The harrowing episode was alleged to have taken place on Epstein’s private Caribbean island in 2002, and in the British version of the book he is referred to as a “former minister”, just in case anyone seriously thought it was Margaret Thatcher.
Dozens of countries have prime ministers. Even being named as an associate of Epstein in unsealed court documents does not provide conclusive identification, or indicate any wrongdoing. But efforts are underway to unseal further emails, and also videos seized from Epstein’s properties after his 2019 arrest.
So far the scandal has centred on people stupid or craven enough to be friends with a wrong’un. With more emails, flight logs and videos, those who merely had an ill-advised association will fall by the wayside, and those who dived headfirst into Epstein’s pathological abuse of women and girls will have harder questions to answer.
But Epstein didn’t provide their services out of the goodness of his heart. There must have been some sort of quid pro quo, wider and deeper than merely being friends with the rich and famous. And in the case of Royalty, it is not difficult to work out what that was.
Everywhere that a senior Royal goes, go too their police officers. Every building they enter, every person they meet, every day of their lives. And whenever Andrew visited Epstein, there should have been advance contact with local law enforcement, both to run background checks on individuals and to provide further security.
And so the FBI did, or did not, make the Met aware of its investigation in 2006. British police officers either checked, or did not check, on Epstein’s criminal conviction in 2008. And that was, or was not, flagged with Scotland Yard, or government, or the palace. And the risks of blackmail and being tainted by criminality were, or were not, overruled or brushed aside by someone, somewhere, well before Andrew was pictured strolling through Central Park with a convicted sex offender in 2010.
That matters, because if Epstein’s victims entered his properties during Andrew’s visits, they could have seen a British policeman. When they left, they may have seen local cops patrolling the area. How could anyone report Epstein’s crimes, when he was guarded even temporarily by the US and British governments? How must it have felt, to be one of those girls, seeing their abuser kept so safe? And why, in all his public statements, has Andrew never acknowledged that one of his grossest mistakes was to provide incidental taxpayer-funded protection for an appalling paedophile, whenever the two of them met?
If somebody in the pay of the British government acted unlawfully, and in so doing harmed a third party, they may face investigation for the crime of misconduct in public office. And from the lowliest constable to Andrew himself, who was a government trade envoy at the time, everyone in the chain of who should have known about Epstein’s sins was a public servant subject to the same laws.
What was a right Royal scandal could become a criminal investigation into who knew what, when, and whether their failure to act played any role in the continuing abuse by the rich and powerful of the poor and the weak. And if those responsible are not called to account, then Virginia’s life is a tragedy that will only be repeated.
