On the eve of the publication of Virginia Giuffre’s book Nobody’s Girl, released six months after her death from despair, Buckingham Palace is apparently braced for fresh revelations. Many MPs are calling for a change in the law, to give King Charles or a parliamentary committee the power to remove royal titles, with Rachael Maskell, the Labour MP for York Central, pleading with parliament to take seriously this opportunity to “address the wrongs of history and to ensure that the voices of victims and survivors are really heard and acted upon”. A source at the palace told the BBC they expected “more days of pain ahead”.
Getting ahead of these “days of pain”, Prince Andrew – he continues to hold the title he was born with – announced last Friday that he was relinquishing his use of “Duke of York” and “KG”, knight of the garter. In a statement, he said that after discussions with the king he had decided to give up the titles “to put my duty to my family and country first”. He has consistently denied all of Giuffre’s allegations against him.
If this sounds like a relatively minor instalment in what has now been years of disgrace, starting in 2011 with the Mail on Sunday’s first publication of a photo of Andrew with Giuffre, note that it was Andrew’s habit to sign even his most intimate correspondence “A, HRH the Duke of York, KG.” That was how he signed his email to Jeffrey Epstein, anyway, the one that was sent on 28 February 2011. It was the day after that famous photo was published, and 12 weeks after Andrew claims to have cut all contact with the sex trafficker. “It would seem we are in this together and will have to rise above it,” the email read – the Mail on Sunday verified his email address and Epstein’s – concluding, even more nauseatingly, “Otherwise keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!!!!”
Giuffre’s book is revealing more in the detail than in the allegations, many of which have been well-known since 2014, when she described Andrew’s involvement while giving evidence against Epstein. (The judge at that time threw out these accusations as “immaterial and impertinent” to the case. He was presumably on pretty solid legal ground, but you do have to wonder, how, if trafficking is a crime, it comes to be immaterial who the victim was trafficked to.)
Nobody’s Girl describes Andrew correctly guessing Giuffre’s age, 17, when he first meets her in London, and recalls him observing that she was just a few years older than his daughters. Her account of the first time they have sex is painfully plausible, right down to his clipped “thank you” at the end. He seemed “entitled”, she wrote, “as if he believed having sex with me was his birthright”.
What this book describes most powerfully is the absolute despair Giuffre suffered. That feels more important than her credibility on the matter of her relationship with Andrew, which hasn’t been in doubt for years. He has never accepted any “wrongdoing”, but who’s to say what he even believes to be wrong? Whether because he lacks probity on verifiable facts such as the timeline of his “cut ties” with Epstein or because his assertions sound so wild (who could forget that he’s unable to sweat?), he presents as fundamentally dishonest. Taking in the phenomenal forgetfulness of Sarah Ferguson, who can’t recall visiting Epstein in New York after he’d been convicted, biographer Andrew Lownie wrote “over four years [of research] I learned not to trust a single thing the couple said”.
So the question on everyone’s minds is not, “What exactly happened between Andrew, Giuffre and unnumbered other girls who looked under-18 and didn’t speak English?” – but rather, as the BBC puts it, “After all those scandals, why would he quit his titles now?” The answer is that, until now, there was a collective decision to look away. You could level that charge at the royal family – particularly if it’s true, as it is rumoured, that the late queen covered part of his £12m payout to settle Giuffre’s civil case – but you couldn’t level it only at them. The tenacity of Emily Maitlis aside, there was a general sense that these scandals would be forever rumour-only, that however believable, they just had to pass into lore as things that may or may not have happened. We all pay a price for Epstein and his buddies, that of having to accept the idea, collude with it, really, that there’s a level of power at which right and wrong no longer exist.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
