It seems grimly appropriate to be writing about the baleful legacy of the pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein on Halloween because, like an unusually well-heeled Mike Myers, Epstein’s corrosive influence has not only survived his death in 2019, but continues to grow in new and unexpected ways.
Earlier this year, Lord Mandelson, the British ambassador to the United States, was forced to resign because of his previous friendship with the sex trafficker, and now Prince Andrew, a noted intimate of the moneyman, has had his royal titles and honors stripped from him by his brother the king. How’s that going to go down at the family Christmas this year?
PRINCE ANDREW TO BE EVICTED FROM WINDSOR RESIDENCE AND STRIPPED OF ROYAL TITLES
We can only speculate, but it had become increasingly clear that after a fortnight of dire headlines and breaking news stories, all revolving around Andrew’s ill-advised and decidedly toxic relationship with Epstein and the fallout from that, there could be no place for the disgraced former duke of York in the royal family.
It was suggested earlier in the week that Andrew Mountbatten Windsor — as he is now known, without the dignity or recourse to his princedom, dukedom, order of the garter, or any of the trappings of state that he had previously enjoyed — might choose voluntarily to quit Royal Lodge, which he has not paid any rent on for decades, in exchange for other homes on the Windsor Estate being found for him and his former wife Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson.
Whether Andrew was proving unusually stubborn or King Charles’s patience simply wore thin, we shall not know, but in an angry statement issued Thursday night, it was made clear that the playboy prince has now been cast off into outer darkness, or at least some obscure residence on the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk, where he will presumably spend the rest of his days in self-pitying brooding. Yet Andrew is no Hamlet figure, given to existential musing on the nature of fate.
Instead, if he has an ounce of self-awareness, he might look back on his association with Epstein and express long overdue regret at continuing such an opportunistic and ultimately one-sided friendship. Epstein brought the teenage girls and the private jets; Andrew brought the royal titles and association with the British monarchy that is now so desperately trying to disassociate itself from him.
If the now-banned old duke of York had apologized or shown any contrition, then it would be easier to pity him. Near-unbelievably, some in Britain are defending him on the grounds that someone should be regarded as innocent before being proved guilty and that he is entitled to a fair trial. To which I can only suggest that the words “Andrew” and “trial” are unlikely to crop up in relation to one another if the royals have anything to do with it.
It cost his mother as much as $20 million in hush money to settle the civil case against him by Epstein’s trafficked victim Virginia Giuffre, and her posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl, published earlier this week, continued to heap embarrassment and shame upon his princely head, suggesting that the money might have been better spent elsewhere: say, establishing a center for the trafficked women and girls that Queen Camilla is said to have a special interest in through her work on sexual assault referral centers.
The question now is whether King Charles’s actions have done enough to stem the rot, or if the existential damage caused by Andrew’s ill-judged associations has gone to the heart of the monarchy. Certainly, the standing of the British royal family in the United States has traditionally been high — “No Kings” protests notwithstanding, to say nothing of a little thing known as the Revolutionary War — perhaps because this country can look on the institution with kindly interest, like an aged relative who may be prone to say the odd inappropriate thing in public but is generally benign and harmless.
Unfortunately, the revelations about Andrew’s alleged behavior are so embarrassing that it is as if the aged relative has soiled himself in public and then rejoiced in contaminating everyone around him with the ensuing filth.
WAS TRUMP’S ROYAL WELCOME WORTH IT? BRITS CERTAINLY THINK SO
Epstein, like the addressee of Kipling’s poem “If,” walked with kings and never lost the common touch, if “common touch” is a suitable description of the victims whom he trafficked on the grimly nicknamed “Lolita Express.” His name will rightly live on in infamy forever now, but it is his toxic influence on the British monarchy, in whose palaces and grounds he was photographed, that is the more salient issue.
As his good friend Andrew sits in his reduced accommodation on the Sandringham Estate, forever wondering whether the knock on the door is the one that represents the beginning of criminal proceedings against him, the king and prince of Wales must be ruing the day that the man once known as “Randy Andy” was befriended by a man as superficially charming, and posthumously dangerous, as Epstein.
Alexander Larman is the author of, most recently, The Windsors at War and an editor at Spectator World.
