Brendan O'Neill, Giles Coren, and their contrarian defences of 'Prince' Andrew and the dilapidated House of York

In the land of the columnists, two of the usual suspects find creative ways to declare themselves above the outrage.

Previously: AI;DR: Journalism’s quislings for AI and why I’ll never use AI to write this newsletter

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Over the past couple of years, I’ve tried to confine coverage of the rhetorical output of both Brendan O’Neill and Giles Coren to the annual rundown of the worst columns. In critiquing either of them, it’s hard not to shake the feeling that you’re involved in pig wrestling — getting covered in mud while the swine enjoys it. But having read both of their latest contributions to the commentary around the artist formerly known as Prince Andrew, the temptation to descend into the sty again was impossible to resist.

Let’s start with O’Neill’s op-ed for The Spectator, which emerged last week under the headline The hunting of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. He begins:

The first thing the mob kills is its own humanity. Long before they sink their collective claws into the target of their flapping ire, they lay waste to their own decency. We see this in the digital hounding of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Behold the ugly gloating over a man’s downfall. Witness the peddling of false accusations. The shame, right now, belongs less to Andrew than to those who have made a bloodsport from his troubles.

The key word here is “digital”. For all the dramatic language about “bloodsport”, what O’Neill is talking about are posts. People are making comments and jokes about the former prince. It’s that free speech that Brendan has spent so many years telling us that he reveres above all else (in fact, there’s an entire essay collection by him called A Duty to Offend). But suddenly the rawkousness of public debate is too much:

The hunting of Andrew has gone too far. Admit it – you can feel it. His arrest this week on suspicion of misconduct in public office unleashed yet another round of prideful animus for the former prince. Social media was a riot of malicious glee. Then came that photograph of him in the back of his car following his release from custody. He looks startled, haunted, frightened. The mob lapped it up. They wrung pleasure from his pain.

That picture is everywhere now. On the front page of every paper – naturally – and all over X. It has been turned from an image of one man’s anguish into the emblem of a dying elite. The relish of the mob over Andrew’s hollow-eyed torment horrifies me. One comic whipped his followers into a frenzy of medieval jeering by saying this is the face of a man who after 66 years of coddled life has finally ‘had the briefest of glimpses of the real world’. ‘Plenty more where that came from, I sincerely hope’, he said.

Does he think that Andrew is on social media? That the commentary on his arrest is more worrying than the arrest itself? O’Neill is a man who has expended hundreds of thousands of words on the importance of defending jokes, but laughing at Andrew becomes “medieval jeering” because he finds this particular laughter horrifying.

The pathetic quality of O’Neill’s special pleading on Andrew’s behalf becomes even clearer in the next section:

Will I be denounced as a snivelling apologist for the venal elites if I humbly suggest we let justice take its course? Right now, Andrew is as innocent of the crime of misconduct in public office as you are, dear reader. Praying for the swift ruination of a wealthy former royal is no better than dreaming of the stocks for a poor woman suspected of stealing bread – in both cases a twisted clamour for vengeance drowns out the enlightened ideals of justice.

Yes, mocking a man whose behaviour in public and private has been demonstrably appalling long before the current accusation of misconduct in public office — which he denies — is the same as wishing harm upon a fictional starving woman pulled from a parable that O’Neill has just composed.

O’Neill accuses everyone else of hysterical overreaction while indulging in the very same tone in his writing:

I know – asking for calm and reason from the Epstein obsessives is like asking a baby to recite Shakespeare. Nothing will dislodge their feverish belief that Epstein was the wily mastermind of a global cult of Satan-worshipping paedos, and that Andrew was one of them. Slander and calumny come naturally to the mob. In their eyes, every weapon, even lies, can be deployed in the hunt for the hated one.

Or, perhaps, a lot of people have now seen with their own eyes the evidence that Epstein was a master manipulator who drew powerful people from all spheres and political stripes — this was a world where Noam Chomsky and Steve Bannon were in the same circle — and just how many men were willing to either be complicit in or turn a blind eye towards the abuse of young women and girls. Turning that into a general belief in “a global cult of Satan-worshipping paedos” is a way of minimising the reality by crushing it under an exaggeration.

Similarly, O’Neill makes a point of declaring his own republicanism so he can lash out at the republican campaign group Republic (“I find their antics shameful.”) He claims that “the case for a republic should be made positively” as though there’s a long history of simply asking politely for power to change. Is demanding transparency from a famously opaque institution that turned a blind eye to bad behaviour and enabled a multi-million dollar payout to avoid Andrew ending up in court to face Virginia Giuffre “playing… games of court gossip and medieval finger-pointing”? It is to O’Neill.

Having whipped himself up into a state of high dudgeon that would surely make Lady Bracknell blush, O’Neill comes to this conclusion:

I can hear the cries from the cellars of the Epsteinheads: ‘How can you defend Andrew?!’ Actually I’m trying to defend the presumption of innocence. And truth. And reason over hysteria.

Destroying the principles of Enlightenment just to get one over on a posh bloke you don’t like is human folly of the most demented kind. Stop.

A man who has made much of his career on claiming the left can’t take a joke thinks that people posting unflattering things about a photograph of a disgraced former prince is “destroying the principles of Enlightenment”. Now, that’s the best joke that Brendan O’Neill has ever written.

Meanwhile, over at The Times, Giles Coren rides to the rescue of Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, Andrew’s daughters with Sarah Ferguson, who both appear frequently in the Epstein emails. For context, Andrew Lownie, author of the Andrew and Fergie biography Entitled, argued to BBC News:

[Beatrice and Eugenie] weren’t five-year-old girls when they were taken to see Epstein. They were grown-ups. There’s a big campaign to say they were innocents caught up in the shellfire, but they’re not, they’re deeply involved.

Like O’Neill, Coren attempts to position himself as above the rabble when it comes to the Andrew story:

Outrage is the least interesting of all human responses, so I do my best never to express it. But it’s hard. There are paedophiles out there, rapists, child killers, bent politicians, Send kids driven to suicide, shady monarchies answerable to no one, narcissistic lawyers forcing puberty blockers on pre-teens to advance their political ambitions … you could spend your entire life being outraged.

But I don’t. Because it’s boring. Which is why I find the Andrew “debate” so tedious. Because it’s all so bloody basic. There is no nuance. One can only be outraged, and everyone is. New story please!

Coren, a contrarian columnist of many years standing, pretending to have no interest in outrage, is like a tobacconist denying they sell cigarettes.

After his brief appeal for nuance, Coren throws the idea out of the window within two paragraphs, taking people’s suggestions that Beatrice and Eugenie should give evidence on what they know about Epstein and turning it into this:

Do British liberals really want to see children denouncing parents to the world? Do they want to see daughters snitching on fathers to the security services? Because the only people who have ever demanded that in the past were fascist dictators. If Beatrice and Eugenie have broken the law, fine, lock ’em up. But allow them to be loyal to their father if they want to be. Because the insistence that children betray parents was one of the very darkest obsessions of Nazi Germany, communist China and Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Whatever you think about Andrew — don’t tell me, you’re outraged? — the parent-child bond must be preserved for the sake of our national sanity.

Just as O’Neill turns jokes and comments into a mob, wielding torches and pursuing ‘Prince’ Andrew through the woods, Coren turns social media suggestions into a new Stasi, empowered to make the princesses turn state’s evidence and betray their dear old dodgy dad. No one is suggesting they be chucked into a black car and driven off to some modern reimagining of Lubyanka.

What links both columns we’ve looked at today is a pretence of superiority; the idea that both Coren and O’Neill possess a greater level of wisdom than the mobs of their fevered imaginations. Instead, they’re both engaged in a game of faux-intellectual hyperbole, boxing matches against opponents of their own invention, with flailing fists and glass jaws.

It’s perfectly possible to consider Andrew an abominable person and experience some glee at his downfall without destroying the notion of innocent until proven guilty. By the same token, you can believe that Beatrice and Eugenie should give evidence on Epstein without compelling them to testify against their father. The common sense version of these arguments makes the contrarians look sillier than usual.

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