Epstein: ‘man in his sixties arrested’

There was a time when the police in Britain didn’t announce that a suspect had been arrested. The person in question would be ‘helping police with their enquiries’. The idea was to use a euphemism to leave it ambiguous whether the person was cooperating with the police, perhaps even simply being interviewed as a witness, or was likely to be charged later.

Well, that’s all in the past now. Today people are ‘arrested in connection with’ or ‘arrested on suspicion of’ a crime. But Britain doesn’t like to abandon its quaint little customs too readily, so we still have wonderful protocols in place, like not naming a suspect. Or at least not immediately.

So today the British public was favoured with a statement from the police to the effect that, as part of an investigation, they had:

arrested a man in his sixties from Norfolk on suspicion of misconduct in public office and are carrying out searches at addresses in Berkshire and Norfolk.

The man remains in police custody at this time.

We will not be naming the arrested man, as per national guidance.

The media, however, have no obligation to be as reticent in their use of language. The Guardian trumpeted:

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested at Sandringham home

So now we know who the man in his sixties was. Indeed, it was Mountbatten-Windsor’s 66th birthday today, and this was his birthday present. 

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor leaving the police statio
Photo from The Guardian

Incidentally, just in case you didn’t know this, Sandringham is in Norfolk. The Royal Lodge, where Mountbatten-Windsor lived before, is in the gardens of Windsor Castle, one of the king’s palaces, and Windsor is in Berkshire (note to Americans: that’s pronounced Barksher) (And Norfolk is pronounced Norferk).

Just in case you’re not too sure who this character is, let me hurry to clarify that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is the brother of King Charles III of the United Kingdom. He used to be known as Prince Andrew, until he was stripped of his title as a result of the drip-drip release in the US of material relating to the Epstein paedophile ring. Indeed, the police investigation into misconduct in public office was triggered by the latest release of Epstein documents, which contained references to confidential information a man now in his sixties and resident in Norfolk may or may not have released to Mr Epstein, in return for which he may or may not have received some kind of pecuniary advantage.

This is the first time since 1647 that any member of the royal family has been arrested. That was when King Charles, first of that name, was taken into custody. His tale ended on a scaffold in Whitehall and a short, sharp encounter with an axeman that left him literally headless. Naturally, I don’t wish the same fate on Andrew, but it would be highly satisfying to see the process of the law applied to him as it would be to any other citizen. To be fair, the namesake of that unfortunate Charles I, the present king and third Charles to sit on the throne, has said much the same, declaring that the ‘law must take its course’.

The rule of law does strike me as the very foundation of democracy, which makes it sad that the United States, once the great bastion of democracy, is now led by a man who clearly doesn’t agree.

A consequence is that British figures seem to be heavily overrepresented among those actually brought to account in the Epstein scandal.

The only person convicted and jailed is Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. She’s British and the daughter of the extremely dodgy and autocratic publishing mogul and onetime Labour MP, Robert Maxwell. 

I once knew someone who worked at Pergamon Press, Robert Maxwell’s publishing company, and he told me that Maxwell’s senior executives used a ‘rule of 7’: any figure circulating inside the company which ended in 7, was dubious. This was because Maxwell would never accept the answer ‘I don’t know’ to a question. So an executive buttonholed by him and asked, say, ‘how many copies of that book have we sold in Indonesia?’ had to come up with a figure even if he had no idea what the answer was. So he might say, ‘37’. His colleagues, if they later heard that the book had sold 37 copies, would know that this was a Maxwell-propitiation figure and should not be considered accurate.

I’ve no idea how they handled situations where the real figure actually ended in a 7.

Amusing though that story might be, we shouldn’t fall into the error of thinking that Maxwell was some kind of lovable rogue. He wasn’t. He stole £400-460 million from the pension funds of his companies, which included the Daily Mirror newspaper. Thousands of employees had their pensions cut in half, with even that level guaranteed only by a serious injection of taxpayer funds.

The father defrauded his employees. His daughter conspired with America’s most notorious paedophile to traffic and rape underage girls. In her father’s footsteps, though her crime was even more toxic.

Then, as well as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, there's another Brit under active investigation. He’s the grandson of a previous Labour grandee, Herbert Morrison, a man of talent and intelligence but with a sense of entitlement that rather exceeded his gifts. A former leader of the then London County Council, he was furious not to win the Labour leadership when Clement Attlee took in the 1930s. He became Home Secretary in Churchill’s wartime coalition and ultimately rose to be (a rather poor) Foreign Secretary in Attlee’s postwar government.

Peter Mandelson
Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP, from the Guardian

Mandelson seems to have inherited all of Morrison’s sense of entitlement. A member of Labour’s aristocracy, he pulled off the remarkable feat of twice being forced to resign from government over scandals, only to bounce back on each occasion. Most recently, he was appointed British ambassador to the US in February 2025, a position he was forced out of when, as with Mr Mountbatten-Windsor, the latest Epstein documents released revealed he’d been a lot too close to the leader of the paedophile ring.

He once declared himself to be ‘intensely relaxed about people getting stinking rich’. In fact, he was a lot more than relaxed. He wanted to be associated with such people, whatever the stink. His first scandal involved an undeclared home loan from a rich colleague in government. His relaxed attitude to the stinking rich may have been one of the reasons he was sent to the States to smarm around Donald Trump. It was certainly why he cultivated Epstein so assiduously. As with Mountbatten-Windsor, he’s now under investigation over information, including confidential and financially sensitive information, he may have released to stinking rich Epstein. 

Given that Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest is over allegedly giving Epstein confidential information, it can hardly have come as good news to Mandelson, can it?

Both these investigations concern offences tangential to the core criminality of the Epstein case. That’s the rape of children. Still, let’s not forget that Al Capone was ultimately brought down not over his mob activities, but over charges of tax evasion. Maybe we should just be glad that some criminal investigation is taking place. 

There is, of course, a chance that the core offences will be investigated later. The problem is that they were committed in the US not in the UK. And most of the perpetrators were American. 

That all makes it a little sad to hear American authorities announcing that they have no intention of pursuing prosecutions against anyone else. 

I remember that when Trump won re-election, the only MAGA supporter I know told me she believed it heralded a new era of honesty. Am I being too cynical when I suggest that the failure of his administration to investigate any of these cases rather suggests a very different kind of era? 

King Charles III says he’s happy to see the law take its course. King Donald I seems intent on making sure it doesn’t. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that only Brits are being made to answer for their roles in the Epstein affair.

Ah well. Didn’t an American once say he could shoot someone in a public street and not lose any support over it?

Grandparenting in the time of the kings

A few days before the New Year, Matilda and Elliott came to see us in our home in La Cañada, near Valencia. 

Well, they brought their parents too – at six and four, irritating rules concerning who’s allowed to do what on the highway meant they needed an adult to drive the car. Besides, it’s always good to have their parents nearby, so they can turn to them whenever they need a break from the company of their grandparents. 

Not that this often happens with Danielle, their Mamama. Nor with their uncle Michael, who was also with us. During a walk in the woods, he and Elliott had an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to reverse roles in a shoulder carry.

Nice try. But not wholly successful

Winter visits naturally require respect for winter traditions. They arrived a couple of days after Christmas but, hey, what’s so special about one date rather than another? A Christmas tree, especially one with Christmas gifts underneath it, is just as wonderful on the 27th of December as on the 25th. And so it proved.

Just as enjoyable on the 27th as on the 25th

Another tradition we indulged in was the fine French winter dish of Raclette. This comes from Savoie, up in the Alps, so well suited to cold conditions. You grill slabs of the Savoyan cheese, Raclette, and then pour it over potatoes, to be eaten with pickles or ham. I like the underlying principle of this kind of meal which, like its cousin Fondue, has the diners doing some of the cooking. Besides, it’s a great dish – if you don’t know it, you should give it a try (come to think of it, even if you do know it, you should give it another try). But it’s even more fun with children happily learning to toast their cheese and use the special spatulas provided to scrape it onto their potatoes.

A dab hand at Raclette

Much less conventional but doubtless as much fun, was Mamama Danielle’s visit to the woods with the children to paint tree stumps. The idea is to colour the exposed surface of the stump, with enthusiasm and imagination, and demonstrate that in a woodland environment, not only will art imitate nature, nature and art also mix well.

 

Painting the forest

Nor did Danielle limit her activities with the children to painting. On the contrary, with their Dad Nicky, she took them to a bouncy castle paradise, where Matilda amazed everyone by her daring in tackling obstacles and slides even some adults feared to attempt. Elliott was never far behind her.

Matilda and Elliott: bouncy castle adventures

I too took the kids on an outing. This was to the next town, La Eliana. It has a playground that has long been a favourite of Matilda and Elliott’s, and it still attracts them. That’s despite the local council's apparent intent to wind it down, taking out pieces of equipment from time to time and not replacing them, so that it becomes increasingly denuded of sources of fun. That didn’t stop them enjoying themselves, however, even doing simple things like using bits of plastic they found lying around to decorate the sad site of a long-departed swing.

Art replacing boisterousness:
decorating the site of a long-gone piece of playground equipment

In any case, I’m not sure that it isn’t the travelling to get there and back that gives them their real fun, more than the playground itself. We go by metro and they love that. This time they made a new discovery: standing in the rubber-sided connection between carriages, which twists as the train goes around curves. Exciting stuff. At least as enjoyable as a vanished piece of playground apparatus.

Fun between the carriages

Then it was back to tradition. Mixed traditions, come to that. The great feast of the Christmas period here in Spain is the Feast of the Kings – los reyes – on the 6th of January, twelfth night. With unfaultable logic, that’s when Spaniards give children gifts, the idea being that the three kings in the Christian narrative brought gifts to the infant Jesus at that time. 

We had to take some liberties with the dates again, since the kids were going home with their parents in tow on 3 January. So we had the celebration a few days in advance. I can only say that the dating inaccuracy again did nothing to reduce the enthusiasm of the celebration.

With slightly less scriptural basis, the Spanish, like the French, celebrate the feast of the kings with a specific type of cake. In Spanish, it’s called a roscón de reyes (cake of the kings). In French, it’s a galette des rois (same). There’s a baker’s near us that makes the French variety rather well.

Roscón de reyes

Galette des rois

Danielle’s a good Frenchwoman at heart (well, as good as she can be: she’s from Alsace in the far east of France, on the border with Germany, and there’s some doubt about how good they are at being French, except as a way of not being German). She prefers the French version. Apparently, Elliott agrees, though Matilda would rather go for the Spanish variety. But in our house, our rules apply, and we had a French galette.

As the galette des rois protocol prescribes, the youngest person present (in this instance Elliott) sat under the table and called out the names of the people to receive each slice of cake as it was cut. That’s a way of ensuring that the slice with the little token in it – as often as not a figurine of one of the biblical kings – goes to someone selected entirely at random. This is important, I should point out, because the person who gets the token becomes the king or queen of the day and wears a fine cardboard crown, almost Trump-like in its golden glory. 

Whether we were quite as fair in the distribution of slices as these rules suggest I can’t claim with unqualified integrity. This year the crown went to Matilda, who duly became queen, just as last year, Elliott became king. 

He was less than enchanted with being usurped this year. He made clear his disapproval of this manifestly unfair choice (i.e. one that didn’t favour him) in the way that a four-year-old does best, though in his defence, he did that briefly before recovering his equanimity. Funnily enough, this is another common point with that fine President Trump, who also likes to express dissatisfaction with decisions that deny him what he feels is his entitlement (Nobel Peace Prizes come to mind). Unfortunately, unlike Elliott, Trump’s dissatisfaction comes backed up with serious armed force and powerful economic weapons. He also makes much more of a fuss and makes it for far longer.

Besides, in the grandkids’ case, Matilda had the generosity ultimately to give her crown to Elliott. Which is nothing like María Corina Machado handing over her Nobel Peace Prize medal to Trump. Matilda wasn’t expecting anything in return, so wasn't as disappointed as the Venezuelan opposition leader.

Elliott enjoying the crown

As for us, we all had a fine evening. Not spoiled even by the passing disagreement about the crown (Shakespeare was wrong: it’s the head that doesn’t wear the crown that doesn’t lie easy). And, even though Matilda might prefer a Spanish roscón, we all took great pleasure from our French-style, Spanish-baked galette.

All in all, it was a good visit, and a fine way to celebrate the season.

A Trump anniversary needs an Orwell reminder

It may not be the best literary diet for a twelve-year-old, to read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World one week, and George Orwell’s 1984 the next. Not at least if he wants to retain an innocent, rose-tinted view of the world. I certainly didn’t when I raced through those two books, emerging somewhat shellshocked by the experience.

A mix not designed to encourage an adolescent

It was 1984 that hit me particularly hard. The book introduced the notion of ‘Big Brother’ to the world: Big Brother is a man, who might be no more than a propaganda fiction, presented as the leader of Oceania, the nation where the book’s protagonist Winston Smith lives. Big Brother’s face is on posters at every street corner or on screens in people’s houses. The slogan associated with the face was ‘Big Brother is watching you’, another phrase that has entered mainstream English.

The dystopia Orwell described saw the world divided into three blocs. He finished the book in 1948 (the title came from reversing the last two figures). That was just three years after the Second World War, which had been dominated by the Soviet Union fighting in alliance with the United States and the British Empire. At the end of the war, the Soviets had extended their control significantly westward, into Eastern and Central Europe. The British Empire was in decline, but both Britain itself and most of its former imperial holdings were closely bound to the United States.

A possible view of the world presented in Orwell’s 1984
Note who controls Greenland

It didn’t take a huge effort of imagination to conjure up the bloc Orwell called ‘Oceania’. It covers the Americas as a whole plus Britain and the whiter parts of its former empire. To defend itself against its rivals, it has become an authoritarian dictatorship, policing all thought, ostensibly because only such centralised power can defend against the other blocs.

The second of these, clearly based on the old Soviet Union and just as oppressive as the Soviet state and Oceania, is ‘Eurasia’. That’s Russia extended westward to the Atlantic and including all of continental Europe.

Meanwhile, in the Far East, a third bloc has emerged, covering China and Japan and their neighbours, called ‘Eastasia’. 

The three powers were in a constant state of war, in which Oceania allied with one or other against the third, but in a cynical but highly effective strategic move to guarantee their own survival, all three kept the fighting away from their homelands and concentrated mostly in Africa. There war would cause no damage at home while providing a distraction from domestic troubles.

Government in Oceania was provided through four ministries.

• Minipax, the Ministry of Peace, concerned with prosecuting war
• Miniplenty, the Ministry of Plenty, concerned with rationing 
• Minitrue, the Ministry of Truth, concerned with propaganda
• And Miniluv, the Ministry of Love, the most frightening of them all, concerned with crushing all possible dissent, though its secret police (the thought police – another phrase of Orwell’s that has entered the general language), its inquisitors and its torture chambers.

At the heart of the regime is the lie. It’s perhaps best summarised by its three slogans, picked out in giant lettering on the side of the ministry building:

WAR IS PEACE  

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY 

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The lie doesn’t concern only the present and future. Minitrue also brings the past into line with present concerns. So when Oceania ends an alliance with Eurasia to fight Eastasia, and instead allies with Eastasia to fight Eurasia, it’s important for history to record that this was always so. Winston Smith, who worked in the ministry, saw people quickly adapting to the new ‘truth’ that: 

Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

At one point, Smith, who is increasingly at variance with the regime he serves and keeping a diary in which he illegally records his own opinions (behaviour officially classified as ‘thoughtcrime’), writes that he can understand how the system works, but not why. That will be made clear to him later by a senior member of the party:

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.

Of course, Orwell meant all this as a cautionary tale, a warning of how things might go if we weren’t careful to ensure they didn’t. As the actual year 1984 arrived, many of us felt some relief that, while there were clear trends towards the kind of authoritarianism Orwell had warned against, overall things weren’t too bad and democracy seemed reasonably secure.

Today, on the first anniversary of the start of Donald Trump’s second term as president, anxiety seems much more appropriate than relief.

He’s busy constructing himself an Oceania of his own. He’s produced an updated, though not improved, version of the Monroe doctrine, which he calls the Donroe doctrine, identifying the Americas as an exclusive domain of the US. He wants to add Greenland to it. Britain, as attached as ever to belief in a special relationship with the US even though it isn’t reciprocated by the Americans, may let itself be sucked in. After all, Brexit pulled the UK out of its association with its European neighbours, leaving it vulnerable to increased US domination.

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin seems intent on building Eurasia. For the moment, it hasn’t gone as far or as fast as he might like, with only Ukraine invaded and proving a harder nut to crack than he’d hoped. But it’s clear that he’d be more than happy to move further westward just as soon as he can.

And the great winner in all the global posturing has been China, rapidly moving ahead of the US in key sectors such as green energy production, electric cars and, with increasing probability, even AI. At the same time, it’s growing its military power fast. Doesn’t that sound like a great core for a real Eastasia? 

Internally, the latter day Eurasia and Eastasia are both despotically authoritarian and oppressive regimes. Now Trump is emulating them. He’s sending masked armed men into US cities not sufficiently devoted to his worship. We’ve seen them opening fire on civilians without justification, causing them serious injury or even, in at least one instance, death. And, as in Winston Smith’s Minitrue, this is all backed up by a tissue of lies that presents an innocent victim as a terrorist, and anyone who dares oppose Trump as a criminal. 

Will there be military force deployed at polling stations in the November midterm elections, to intimidate possible opponents? Will they be seizing ballot results to ‘correct’ them to suit Trump? Will this be endorsed by Trump acolytes in an ever-increasing circle of compliant – or complicit – courts and media organisations?

Trump’s turning what Orwell meant as a cautionary tale into an instruction manual.

It feels to me as though we ought to pay a lot more attention to Orwell’s warnings. At last, some statesmen seem to be waking up. Gavin Newsom, governor of California, today warned that it’s time for European leaders to end their complicity with Trump. The Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, has called for the non-Orwellian powers to pull together to resist abuse by the superpowers of Russia, China and the US. And French President Emmanuel Macron has warned against the emergence of a world ‘where international law is trampled under foot’.

We need to hear a lot more leaders voicing that kind of message. And a lot more voters backing them, even if it implies new costs. Because the alternative would mean that Orwell only got the date wrong. Perhaps by as little as half a century.

If we’re not careful, 1984 from being a past date will become a future destiny.

Postscript

I need to put in a good word for 1984 (the year, not the book). That was when our youngest son was born. While he could sometimes drive us crazy, he brought us a lot of joy, a lot more often. It’s certain that Trump has brought us much more vexation and, for anyone but his billionaire paymasters, practically nobody any joy at all.

Nicky, our 1984 kid, asleep. A couple of years later

How a chat with a child led to a 43rd anniversary

Dinosaurs. Planets. Two subjects that have fascinated kids for at least a couple of generations. What’s surprising is how impactful a conversation about either can turn out to be.

In my case the subject was the planets. I was in France and a nine-year-old boy, by curious coincidence sharing my name, David, visited the house where I was staying. We got into a chat about the solar system, and I ended up drawing a diagram with him showing all the planets, right out to Pluto – this was 1980 and we hadn’t yet learned to exclude Pluto from the list of true planets. 

How we thought of the planets in 1980

Please don’t think that the illustration here is a faithful copy of the diagram we produced back then. That’s long since been lost. This is a ChatGPT-generated reproduction, and far more sophisticated than anything either of us could have drawn. ChatGPT is just far too skilled (at least at this kind of thing) to lower itself to our level.

Still, unimpressive though our drawing was, it seems it impressed David enough for him to go home and tell his mother, Danielle, all about this curious Englishman he’d met. Curious enough to make her feel she’d like to see what he was like.

Jumping forward a couple of years, Danielle had thrown in her lot – and David’s – with mine and we were all three living together in England. Nor were we going to be just three for long. There came a dramatic day when I rang Danielle – from a public call box to a landline, you understand, mobiles still being a long way off – to tell her about some incident in my day that I obviously thought so important that I told her about it before she could give me her news, though now it seems so inconsequential, particularly compared to what she had to tell me, that I’ve forgotten all about it.

‘Don’t you want to hear my news, then?’ she asked. ‘About the result of the test?’

Memory flooded back. She’d been due to have a pregnancy test that morning. With the memory came certainty, given the solemnity with which she mentioned the test, about what its result had been.

‘It was positive,’ Danielle confirmed.

That was the starting pistol for a race. Those were the days of the Thatcher government, which had recently changed the laws concerning British nationality. If we were married, and the child was born in Britain, he or she would automatically inherit my nationality as well as Danielle’s, though I’d been born abroad (in Rome, since you ask) and Danielle was French. Otherwise, it would be down to the Home Secretary’s discretion. And I didn't know how discreet he was.

There was less of a practical consequence if the child was a girl. If however it was a boy and he received only French nationality from his mother, he would – as the law then stood – have been liable for military service in France when he turned 18. At the time, that represented 12 months out of a young man’s life which struck me as an appalling waste of time. Since there was no compulsory military service in Britain, getting him British citizenship would free him of tiresome obligation.

Shall I confess that I also rather liked the idea of my child sharing my nationality? I already shared a name with the lad who would become my stepson and, later on, precisely over the military service issue, would share a nationality with him too. I preferred it that my other children should not be technically foreigners to me.

Now, you may be thinking, ‘what was the problem? All you had to do was get married, right?’

Sadly, it wasn’t that simple. Danielle still had a husband back in France. As it happens, he was willing to grant a divorce, and there was no technical problem with getting an English divorce to a French marriage. There was just a linguistic one: her then husband spoke no English and the divorce papers would include no French.

He tried to be helpful. He signed the papers the court sent him on every page, but not in the one place where he had to, in the signature space. Danielle had to explain to him exactly where he had to sign and the court sent them back. By then time was getting very tight indeed. 

In the final stages of the exercise, the judge called Danielle, David and me in to see him in chambers. He checked with David that he was happy with the custody arrangements (term time with us, holidays with his dad); he said he was. The judge then looked at Danielle’s distended belly and said, ‘I expect you’d like me to reduce the delay between decree nisi and decree absolute’. 

Usually there’s a six-week gap between nisi and absolute, the provisional judgement for a divorce, and the definitive one that allows remarriage.

The judge reduced the time to one week.

As a result, when I started a new job on 4 January 1983, I had a request to make of my new boss.

‘I apologise for having to ask for a day off on the very day I’m starting work.’

His face fell. I could see him thinking, ‘What kind of guy have I taken on here?’

‘We’re about to have a baby and the only day my local registry office can marry us is 11 January, next Tuesday.’

He gave a roar of laughter and threw himself back in his chair.

‘David,’ he said, ‘there are few excuses I could have accepted, but that’s definitely one of them.’

So on Tuesday 11 January 1983, Danielle and I were married. And just eighteen days later, Michael was born – safely a British citizen – to join Danielle, David and me. 

incidentally, by the time Michael was eighteen, obligatory military service in France had been replaced by attendance at a one-day ‘citizen’s day' workshop.

Yesterday was 11 January 2026. Danielle and I joined a bunch of people with whom Danielle used to go out dragon-boating (check it out – it’s the Chinese answer to canoeing and good for health). They were there for their annual get-together.

Our 43rd wedding anniversary became a subsidiary factor in the general good cheer.

Celebrating our 43rd

We promised them all invitations to our golden wedding anniversary. We just have to survive another seven years. We’ll give it our best shot.

In the meantime, isn’t it fun to see where a casual chat about the planets can lead?