Table of Contents
Let’s get one thing clear from the outset: I’ve pretty much always thoroughly disliked the former Prince Andrew. Every family has one, they say, and he’s definitely the Mountbatten-Windsor family’s. Notwithstanding his meritorious service in the Falklands War, he’s long clearly lacked the sense of duty of his siblings, rather regarding his status as privileged by essentially useless as a licence to behave badly. For the longest time, it seemed that was merely limited to being a buffoonish boor – until his dealings with Jeffrey Epstein became public.
Here’s the thing, though: of all those implicated in Epstein’s web of, at the very least, trafficking in under-age girls for repeated abuse, and quite likely much, much worse, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor seems to be very far from the worst. This is not to dismiss the illegality and the moral heinousness of what he did. But even a cursory skim of the Epstein Files – at least, those which have come to light – read like a horror story.
A horror story that stars an ensemble cast of some of the most wealthy and powerful people in the world. Andrew is almost the comedy relief by comparison. So, why is he at the centre of such an unholy firestorm?
Anyone who thinks the gleeful shaming of Andrew in that sewer of social media has anything to do with holding him to account for his moral errors is deluding themselves.
This isn’t a search for truth – it’s a search for a demonic figure for the mob to tear down in order that they might feel that fleeting glow of fake virtue.
The arrest of Andrew last Thursday unleashed an orgy of malicious gloating. Across X, people cheered and whooped like the witch-fearing mob at Salem. You could be forgiven for forgetting that Andrew was not arrested for any devilish crimes, but merely on suspicion of “misconduct in public office”.
That ‘misconduct’, apparently, consists of having shared sensitive documents to Jeffrey Epstein during his stint as a UK trade envoy from 2001 to 2011. Which is pretty bog-standard corruption in international diplomacy.
But none of that matters to the mob. They get to not only exorcise their hatred of the Royal Family, but to do so with the approval of their own conscience. It’s an Orwellian Two Minutes of Hate.
Then came the photo of him in the back of his car, leaving police custody. He looks startled, haunted, frightened. The mob lapped it up […]
Andrew hasn’t even been charged yet, far less found guilty. Will I be denounced as a royalist toady – or, worse, an excuse-maker for “pedos” – if I humbly suggest we let justice take its course?
The worst offenders, of course, are the media. The same Brit media that made an institution of page-three girls often barely older than Andrew’s victims is whipping itself into an orgy of self-righteousness.
The media has derived an almost parasexual pleasure from that image of Andrew in anguish […]
The mob has no interest in calm fact-gathering about Andrew’s suspected wrongdoings with documents. They just want a devil to rage against. A witch to drag down. A demonic figure with red eyes like “portals to hell” that they might digitally slay in order to feel holy and important.
The supreme evil of all this is that it is exactly what the elites who formed a conga-line of abusers on the Lolita Express want. While the mob is busy howling and hunting one essentially useless royal boor, even worse criminals are slinking into the undergrowth.
It’s exactly the same modus operandi as Operation Yewtree, the UK police investigation into historic sex offences by media personalities. Fertile ground, you might think, when legions of some of the world’s most famous rock stars and celebrities more or less openly bragged about banging a succession of underage groupies through the ’60s and ’70s.
So, who did they nab?
Rolf Harris. A bunch of has-been DJs and minor media figures. Gary Glitter – who’d already been done multiple times for child abuse crimes.
Who didn’t they touch?
Jimmy Page, who, it’s a matter of record, instructed his bodyguards to literally snatch a 14-year-old girl from a nightclub, whereupon he kept her locked away in his country estate for years, until she was ‘legal’. Never mind that the girl thought it was all a romantic dream: the law is the law.
Nor did they touch David Bowie, whose defloration of 14-year-old girls in the ’70s is also a matter of record. Nor Bill Wyman, who openly abused a 13-year-old. Nor Richard Neville, who bragged about molesting a 14-year-old in his memoirs.
They were all too ‘cool’ apparently, to face the reckoning of the law. Rolf Harris was never cool, nor was Prince Andrew.
So, they’re easy to throw to the wolves, so the rest of the black sheep can slink over the hill during the feeding frenzy.
