If there is consensus on any subject in British public life, it is that no fate is too bad for Prince Andrew. One unnamed minister told the BBC “he should be thrown under a bus”; Helena Kennedy, the human rights lawyer, declared he should “go and live in Switzerland or somewhere” and it looks as if he may not be permitted to remain in Royal Lodge, his large home in Windsor Great Park. Robert Jenrick, a shadow minister, observed that “the public are sick of him”.
With much of this it is hard to disagree. Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous autobiography, Nobody’s Girl, makes a harrowing read, including the part about her alleged three sexual encounters with Prince Andrew — allegations which he emphatically denies. She recalls that the first time they met, Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s partner-in-crime, asked Andrew to guess Giuffre’s age: “The Duke of York, who was then 41, guessed correctly: 17. ‘My daughters are just a little younger than you,’ he told me, explaining his accuracy,” she says.
That particular element, if true, is hard to take. My own daughter is 18; that alone would have made me savagely protective of someone like a 17-year-old Giuffre. Her account, if true, suggests Prince Andrew was wholly incurious about her and he seems not to have questioned how or why she ended up being offered to strangers as a toothsome sexual treat by the gruesome twosome, Epstein and Maxwell.
Allegations about the prince’s subsequent conduct compound the impression of stupidity and unscrupulous callousness
Allegations about the prince’s subsequent conduct compound the impression of stupidity and unscrupulous callousness, including the suggestion that he asked his personal protection police officers to investigate Giuffre’s background — even providing her social security number — with an eye, it would seem, to diminishing her credibility.
Sentenced to internal exile
But for all that, I feel squeamish at the pile-on. A public lynching is never a good spectacle, however merited. Some of the rush to cast the first, second, third stone at Andrew stems from frustration that he has never been subjected to a criminal prosecution for his involvement with Epstein. What we actually want is a confession of guilt, a conviction, followed by humiliating incarceration, preferably à la Nicolas Sarkozy. But the Prince has denied all allegations and indeed reached an out of court settlement with Virginia Giuffre. It is tricky to express remorse for his Epstein connection without also admitting guilt. So, what to do with the second son of the late Queen, who has no obvious way of earning a living but whom we don’t want to support through the public purse, yet don’t want to his brother, the King, to support either?
A public lunching is never a good spectacle, however merited
In happier days, he might have been allowed to retreat to a monastery to expiate his sins. Alas, it’s not an option for a Protestant prince. As for Switzerland, that useful asylum for superannuated playboys, that doesn’t come cheap; who would pay for his maintenance if not the King? And does anyone think there his every move wouldn’t be followed by the press, recording every party as proof of profligacy? If not the Royal Lodge, where? If Andrew were, like his former wife, Sarah Ferguson, cast loose, God knows what he might not do to keep himself financially afloat; no one actually wants to see a ghostwritten memoir out there. The Royal Lodge, or some more modest royal accommodation and a regular stipend funded by the King looks like the best option to me: a kind of internal exile.
A road to redemption
But there’s also the uncomfortable sense that Andrew is proxy for other men in the Epstein story. One interesting aspect of Nobody’s Girl is the number of men she doesn’t name; Andrew is one of the very few she does. She admits that there’s a reason. One man, a politician who subjected her to sexual torture, threatened to hurt her if she revealed his name. Others threatened to bankrupt her with litigation. One, whose name cropped up repeatedly in court papers, threatened to keep her in court for the rest of her life. And what about another man “with whom I was forced to have sex with many times…he is very wealthy and very powerful”? She didn’t name him either; she was afraid. And now she’s dead, poor woman; she took her own life. The one person who knows is Ghislaine Maxwell, who isn’t telling.
But the Epstein scandal isn’t dead. There’s the Wyden Inquiry in the US into the financing of Epstein’s sexual empire, which is refusing to accept JP Morgan Chase’s efforts to pin the blame for its failures on a single employee. There’s to be a vote on releasing the Epstein files held by federal authorities in the House of Representatives which the Republican Speaker is to allow. The Congressional House Oversight Committee is conducting a thorough review of the federal government’s handling of the Epstein investigation, which was both tardy and initially reluctant. Some members have said they’d like to get testimony from Prince Andrew. He could, with a lawyer at his elbow, co-operate with that inquiry. There aren’t many routes to secular redemption for Prince Andrew, but that would be a start.
