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.
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| Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor leaving the police statio Photo from The Guardian |
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.
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| Peter Mandelson Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP, from the Guardian |
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?
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