In a geostationary orbit above the law: Even now Prince Andrew and the monarchy get media excuses and protection
The Duke should be in an orange jumpsuit. The ideal outfit to sweat in.
“No one is above the law.” That’s what Dame Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan Police’s foremost fail daughter, said when asked about Prince Andrew.
But that’s a lie, isn’t it? It’s a lie that we all know is a lie. And it’s one that’s become more obvious during the pandemic as the government’s friends and family have made out like bandits. David Cameron is £7 million pounds of dubiously-gotten Greensill cash above the law.
And Prince Andrew, hiding from the law in Balmoral, his legal team muttering about all kinds of obscure royal immunity, is not simply above the law. Prince Andrew is in geosynchronous orbit above the law. The law is a bright point of light thousands of miles below Prince Andrew, an abstract notion that applies to mere humans who sweat and feel inconvenient emotions like guilt and shame.
On Friday, Spectator Political Editor and villainous minor aristocrat in a Netflix costume drama James Forsyth dedicated his weekly Times column to some eminently mockable monarchy maintenance. Under the headline Britain needs the royal family more than ever and an equally ludicrous lede (“With No 10 looking chaotic, the more reliable royals can be a vital asset in helping the country’s international relations”), he wrote:
In different circumstances, Prince Andrew might be a rather active royal right now. Until 2011, he was the trade envoy and it’s easy to imagine him accepting enthusiastically the challenge of drumming up post-Brexit business. Hosting drinks receptions on a new national flagship would be much more his thing than his elder brother’s.
Veterans of the Cameron government recall how keen for extra responsibilities in this area Andrew was. But it’s a reminder of how long scandal has dogged him that he had to step down from that role in part because of his links to the disgraced Jeffrey Epstein.
In these two paragraphs alone there’s already more soft soaping than a bathhouse and more tenuous euphemisms than a music hall comedian’s act.
Prince Andrew’s ‘career’ as a trade envoy was not some uncontested success that simply went off the rails when he decided to fire up Pokemon Go and collect all the rare monsters littered around Jeffrey Epstein’s houses. An indulgent eye was simply turned to dubious friendships and, what we’ll call for legal reasons, corruption-flavoured behaviour.
The leak of United States diplomatic cables in 2010 exposed a report by then US Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, Tatiana Gfoeller, that Prince Andrew had discussed bribery in the country and the investigation into the Al Yamamah arms deal at a dinner which she attended. She wrote:
His mother’s subjects seated around the table roared their approval. He then went on to ‘these fucking journalists, especially from the National Guardian [sic], who poke their noses everywhere’ and (presumably) make it harder for British businessmen to do business. The crowd practically clapped!
Earlier in 2010, it emerged — thanks to more “fucking journalists” — that Timur Kulibayev, the billionaire son-in-law of the then-President of Kazakhstan, paid Prince Andrew’s representatives £15 million — £3 million over the asking price — via offshore companies for his Surrey mansion, Sunninghill Park.
By May 2012, another twist in that story had been revealed as Swiss and Italian police investigating “a network of personal and business relationships [used for] international corruption” began looking into a trust, Enviro Pacific Investments, which charged multi-million-pound fees to energy companies wanting to operate in Kazakhstan. Enviro Pacific appears to have paid £6 million of the £15 million for Sunninghill, which Kulibayev has now razed and replaced with a gaudy mansion to his own design.
The Sunday Telegraph reported in 2012 that the deal to sell Sunninghill was done at a meeting at a Thai beach resort between Kazakh oil executives and Prince Andrew’s “close friend” Goga Ashkenazi, a Kazakh oil and gas operator turned fashion boss. At the time, a Buckingham Palace spokesperson, said: “This was a private sale between two trusts. There was never any impropriety on the part of The Duke of York.” Translation: Butt out, plebs.
In 2016, The Daily Mail showed that Prince Andrew had brokered a deal to assist a Greek and Swiss consortium in securing a £385 million contract to build water and sewerage networks in… you’ll never guess… Kazakhstan, while still ‘working’ as British trade envoy. The Duke of York stood to earn £4 million in commission for all that effortful smiling, nodding, hand-shaking and blind eye-turning, but the plan fell through.
Buckingham Palace first claimed that an email from the Duke to Kazakh oligarch Kenges Rakishev — who was allegedly the one who brokered that entirely above board house sale — published by The Daily Mail was a forgery. Then, when that was a non-starter, it went to court to attempt to block the publication as “a privacy breach”. After all, what more private and intimate relationship is there than between a man and his ill-gotten gains?
With both the “it’s fake” strategy and the legal route used up, the Palace opted for an old favourite: Non-specific blustering. It issued a statement saying:
Claims that the Duke of York acted as a so-called fixer for an international consortium and stood to benefit from a potential contract in Kazakhstan are untrue, defamatory and a breach of the Editor’s Code of Conduct.
The Duke never did sue for defamation and the Palace remained vague on what part of the Editor’s Code of Conduct was breached by publishing words that the Prince had actually said.
And when Prince Andrew wasn’t using his position to enrich himself, he was acting as the ruddy-faced frontman for the arms industry. When Forsyth writes about an alternate reality Andrew “drumming up post-Brexit business”, I assume he means finding more despots with open chequebooks and ‘inconvenient’ opposition movements. No doubt he’d use some of the ‘colourful’ racist language he learned from his father while doing it.
The conclusion to Forsyth’s column — which includes the ludicrous claim that it was Netflix’s The Crown that drove Prince Charles’ reputation into the toilet rather than, you know, things he’s said and done — is almost beyond satire:
Whatever one’s views of this country’s constitutional arrangements, the last few years have demonstrated the benefits of a branch of the state that can transcend politics.
In recent months alone there have been multiple revelations about how the Royal Family interferes with how laws are written to suit its finances and property holdings. Pretending that the monarchy “transcends politics” is more fantastical than any historical invention The Crown’s writers room could possibly imagine.
But Forsyth is a mere amateur in the realm of bad takes compared to veteran bullshit spewer Tony Parsons. He saw the high bar of hilarious special pleading for the monarchy set by the younger man and vaulted it with ease, composing a Sun column under the headline Prince Andrew must find his Falklands courage and face his accuser.
After laying out the charges against Andrew, Parson writes:
Andrew must summon up the raw courage that served him so well in the Falklands War and confront the accusations against him.
That’s the same ‘raw courage’ that Andrew has used to claim, with absolutely no medical evidence, that “an overdose of adrenaline” in the Falklands made him incapable of sweating.
Back when Prince Andrew first made that claim, during his 2019 interview with Emily Maitlis — less a “car crash” and more a series of car crashes followed by a huge action movie-style explosion of bullshit, Dr. Mark Lupin, a dermatologist who acts as a clinical instructor at the University of British Columbia told Canada’s National Post:
It is implausible to the point of being impossible that an ‘overdose of adrenaline’ could cause a persistent inability to sweat; there are no human studies nor is there reasonable science to back up this claim,” said Lupin in an email to the Post. “The claim that an overdose of adrenaline has led to the inability to sweat does not make sense.
What we need now is a scientific study into the amounts of sweat broken by the British media to justify the royal family and to claim as Forsyth that there are “more reliable royals” who we absolutely need.
The Daily Telegraph this morning spends hundreds of words footling around the issue of which royals will get which military titles if Prince Andrew is “forced to step back permanently from public life, as is widely expected”. And there he is, above the law again, with no one realistically believing he’ll “step back from public life” and straight into a US holding cell.
The big ‘punishment’ in the eyes of The Daily Telegraph is that the gross old Duke of York will no longer be able to cosplay as Colonel of the Grenadier Guards. The paper’s most relentless royal commentator/Meghan and Harry obsessive Camilla Tominey — who previously spun hard against Prince Andrew’s accusers — wrote a column on Saturday headlined The palace has left Prince Andrew to fight his own battles.
It’s an interesting piece from someone who still has a picture of herself laughing chummily with Prince Andrew on her website. After quoting from the legal case against Andrew, Tominey writes:
The problem for Andrew, and by association his royal relatives, is that despite protesting his innocence he has already been found guilty in the court of public opinion.
Even if Ms Giuffre's claims remain completely unproven, the general consensus is that we, as a country, have for years been victims of a pompous, arrogant fool who has spent much of his time since serving in the Falklands on a series of jollies, clocking up Air Miles at taxpayers' expense.
There is a notorious picture of Prince Andrew with Virginia Giuffre, and millions of the British public saw his ‘evidence’ presented in the Maitlis interview.
It’s quite incredible that someone who was conducting friendly interviews with Prince Andrew as recently as 2014 and published an insinuation-littered ‘exclusive’ last year under the headline Prince Andrew's accuser was a prostitute paid off by Jeffrey Epstein, court papers allege is now talking about how ‘we’ are now tired of the “pompous, arrogant fool”. We weren’t the ones giving him press cover, Camilla. To use the word “victims” to describe the British public — and particularly Telegraph readers — when discussing a story with real victims is just the nasty cherry on top.
The line “The palace has left Prince Andrew to fight his own battles” is straight from briefing by the palace. While it can’t shift the truthful impression that the dear old apolitical Queen is standing behind her favourite son, it still wants to suggest that “the firm” itself is not.
The fact that Kay Burley trailed covering the Andrew story on her show last week with the words “Prince Andrew home to mum as allegations emerge from the US which he denies” says it all. Prince Andrew is a 61-year-old man and not only is he above the law, he’s behind his mother’s skirts. And our largely compliant media will pretend that’s not weird.