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.