Even by the standards of these debased days, Donald Trump’s corruption of the US justice system takes your breath away.
To recap the last 48 hours: Trump needs Ghislaine Maxwell to tell the world that, despite all evidence to the contrary, he did not sleep with the trafficked girls she and Jeffrey Epstein procured.
In return for saying that she never saw Trump in an “inappropriate setting”, he will surely release her from the 20-year prison sentence the US courts imposed “for her role in a scheme to sexually exploit and abuse multiple minor girls with Jeffrey Epstein over the course of a decade”.
You scratch my back; I’ll scratch out your criminal record.
But Maxwell wasn’t done. She thought it worth her while to tell Trump’s envoy that she had not introduced Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, to Epstein, and that he did not meet his alleged victim, the 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre, at her home.
The photograph showing Prince Andrew, Virginia Giuffre and Maxwell together was “literally a fake.”
Her unconvincing denials showed that, despite all the prince’s efforts to reach settlements and shut the story down, the British royal family, once famed for its respectability, cannot escape the scandal.
Trump’s fate is tied to Prince Andrew’s fate. The cover-up must cover them both.
Nor do Prince Andrew’s corrupt links end with Epstein, Maxwell and Trump.
He exploited his role as the UK special trade representative in the early 2000s – a post funded by the taxpayer, I should add – to cut deals with oligarchs and enrich himself rather than his country.
He’s cornered now. Or so it seems.
Andrew Lownie’s demolition job of a biography, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, has seen to that. It was released last week to huge and deserved acclaim.
Lownie describes this scene as his story approaches its end.
“In January 2022 Andrew’s social media accounts were deleted, his page on the Royal Family’s website rewritten in the past tense and his military affiliations and patronages removed as no longer applicable… Journalists were now more open in their criticism and senior MPs were calling for a probe by the National Crime Agency into his financial links with Kazakhstan after Russian tanks were used to crush protesters against the country’s corruption, leaving 225 people dead.”
A year later, he tried to settle the Giuffre case. The effort cost millions and his ability to find a small fortune raised pertinent questions for Lownie and the rest of us
Prince Andrew travels by private jet. He has a collection of luxury goods – including a £150,000 Patek Philippe watch, a £220,000 Bentley and a £80,000 Range Rover. He lives in Royal Lodge, a 30-room mansion in Windsor Great Park, which he spent £7.5 million refurbishing, and which has annual running costs of £250,000.
A plausible explanation for his wealth is that he was a “player” in the corrupt world of the global oligarchy. Like so many other royal stories, Prince Andrew’s career says as much contemporary power structures as it does about him.
Not just Jeffrey Epstein but powerbrokers all over the world will pay for a piece of the monarchical action
Women who are drawn into the royal family quickly learn they have two duties – they must produce an “heir and a spare”. The heirs cut dull figures. The roles of the British monarch and his or her heirs are so constrained there is little for them to do except hatch, match and dispatch.
The lives of their spares are far more telling.
British royalty retains a global glamour. Not just Jeffrey Epstein but powerbrokers all over the world will pay for a piece of the monarchical action. Royals without onerous duties are therefore free to demand a place in the centres of power and prestige.
Watch them and you learn where privilege lies.
Princess Margaret, Elizabeth II’s spare, joined the swinging London of the 1960s – and enjoyed the UK’s final moment as a world culural leader.
Prince Harry, once spare for Prince William, is riding the wave of wealthy wokeness in California.
And Prince Andrew, who in his early life was the spare for our current king, Charles III, has embraced the dark money that flows from modern oligarchical power.
Lownie’s biography makes shows that this was always likely to be Prince Andrew’s fate. (I refuse to call him “Andrew,” by the way. He is not my friend.)
To get a measure of how he deviates from the image the British upper class once tried to project, watch Terence Rattigan’s 1946 play The Winslow Boy. It’s been filmed several times (see above) and is still performed. Arthur Winslow is falsely accused of stealing a five-shilling postal order at his naval college and expelled. His father risks his own health and the family fortune to clear his name.
He believes honour and shame matter in gentlemanly Britain and one slip could damn his son for good.
In the late 1960s, Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip sent Prince Andrew to Heatherdown prep school near Ascot. You get a feeling for the place when you read that an old boy told Andrew Lownie that on sports days there were three separate lavatories “one for ladies, one for gentlemen and one for chauffeurs “
While he was there, a box of expensive stamps went missing. “After a search they were found in Prince Andrew’s desk.”
Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip did not campaign to prove their son’s innocence. He was not to be a new Winslow boy, as it was already clear that he had no honour to defend.
“He had crossed out the name of the owner and put his own name on it. When discovered he simply shrugged it off.” The prince could do as he pleased, without fearing for the consequences.
This lack of honour and the absence of shame defined his life and the worst of our times.
His sexual career began when he lost his virginity at eleven after a friend’s father hired two escorts for the boys in a West End hotel. (Doubtless the man thought he was doing them a favour rather than engaging in a form of child abuse.)
Epstein described the grown prince as a sex addict
“He’s the only person I have met who is more obsessed with pussy than me. We have shared the same women. From the reports I’ve got back from them he’s the most perverted animal in the bedroom. He likes to engage in stuff that’s even kinky to me – and I’m the king of kink.”
Lownie shows that the prince spent part of his ill-gotten gains on hiring prostitutes – lots of them
He went to Bangkok as the UK’s official trade representative.
What with one thing and another, “hotel staff were used to foreigners bringing in girls but were amazed that more than ten a day were going to Prince Andrew’s room” for four days in a row.
Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that you cannot disentangle the sex from the money.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Writing from London to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.