As calls for the former prince to cooperate with investigation become deafening, this may be the reckoning Andrew cannot escape. In office, and since then, he has applied his forensic mind to the matters that concern him. Lately, he has been focused on the Epstein files. What he discovered shocked him. There was the immediate anger about the 'extent of betrayal' by his former business secretary, Peter Mandelson, during the global financial crisis. But it was the 'the abuse of women by male predators and their enablers – and Britain’s as yet unacknowledged role' that has left the deepest mark.
He looked at flight records, examined the evidence and came to a conclusion: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor should face police questioning over Jeffrey Epstein. This week, voices around Westminster and beyond have insisted the role of UK institutions in this most horrifying of scandals must be now examined. And that includes the monarchy. On Thursday, Cabinet Office parliamentary secretary Chris Ward was cornered about the former prince by Sarah Owen, chair of the Commons women and equalities committee. Mountbatten-Windsor was trade envoy to critical countries, including China and Hong Kong, between 2001 and 2011. Wasn’t it time for him 'to answer both to the police and parliament', she asked.
MPs can no longer afford to be deferential when it comes to the royals, Owen told the Guardian. 'We have to do this to put faith back into systems where people have lost it,' she said. 'If we don’t it weakens people’s belief in democracy, their trust in politics as a force for good. That risks us going down to a really dark path.' Writing in the New Statesman, Brown referenced a BBC investigation which found many of Epstein’s private planes had travelled through Stansted and other UK airports, where women 'were transferred from one Epstein plane to another'. But Brown had been 'told privately' that previous Metropolitan police inquiries 'related to the former Prince Andrew did not properly check vital evidence of flights'. 'The Stansted revelations alone require them to interview Andrew,' he argued.
Former Victim’s Commissioner Vera Baird told the Guardian that she had spoken to the police about Mountbatten-Windsor before the Covid pandemic struck, but was assured the issue was being investigated thoroughly in the US. 'Clearly, [Mountbatten-Windsor] is not going to do anything himself. Clearly, there’s a limit to what the royal family can do,' she said. 'So the police need to investigate.' Even from his bolthole in Sandringham, Norfolk, to where he is exiled by his brother, King Charles, can Mountbatten-Windsor, despite his vociferous denials of any wrongdoing, still ignore the deafening roars for him to cooperate with any police investigations, and to testify to the US Congress on what he himself knew about Epstein?
Thames Valley police is assessing whether to investigate the apparent sharing of some documents by Mountbatten-Windsor to Epstein during his time as trade envoy, and is engaged in discussions with specialist crown prosecutors from the CPS. The same force is assessing claims a woman was sent to the UK by Epstein for a sexual encounter with the then prince, which allegedly occurred at his former Royal Lodge residence in 2010. The woman, who is not British, was in her 20s at the time. The allegation is separate to the one made by Virginia Giuffre. As Mountbatten-Windsor’s past answers over his relationship with Epstein are apparently blown apart, there has been no response from him.
When, with titles still intact, the then Prince Andrew told interviewer Emily Maitlis and 1.7 million BBC Newsnight viewers in 2019 of his Pizza Express in Woking alibi, and revealed a temporary medical inability to sweat, he would have expected to be believed, especially as the queen’s son. There was also the matter of that March 2001 photograph, with Mountbatten-Windsor’s hand seemingly around the bare waist of a 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre, who would later claim she was forced to have sex with the royal, a claim he has always denied, and said to have been taken in Ghislaine Maxwell’s London Belgravia mews home. Asked about it, he had stared at Maitlis, earnestly. It was difficult, he insisted, to 'prove' it was 'faked', because it was a photograph of a photograph. 'Whether that’s my hand, or whether that’s the position …' he went on, before concluding: 'I’m afraid to say that I don’t believe that photograph was taken in the way th'
