Forgive me if I am not congratulating officers for investigating Andrew now, instead of many years ago when they were with him in Jeffrey Epstein's house. Thames Valley Police has announced that its misconduct-in-public-office investigation into Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is also considering potential offences including corruption and sexual misconduct. On Friday, it made a public appeal for potential victims and witnesses to come forward.
Missed Opportunities
The best time for the police to have started quietly asking questions was shortly after Metropolitan police officers, Andrew's close protection detail, ferried him back from a London nightclub to a house with other friends in their 40s and one young-looking 17-year-old girl, then waited outside until he decided to come home. But the second-best time was probably when Andrew paid a reported £12 million to settle out of court with Virginia Giuffre, despite maintaining he had no recollection of meeting her. He denies any wrongdoing. The third-best time was when leaked emails suggest the former prince passed his Met close protection officer Giuffre's birthdate and US social security number and asked him to carry out checks on her. The fourth-best time was a full 12 years ago, when Giuffre alleged that she was sex trafficked to and assaulted by Andrew on that night and on two other occasions.
A Tragic Outcome
Virginia Giuffre took her own life just over a year ago at a remote Australian farmhouse, unable to outrun her demons. She was 41. She spent almost a third of her life trying to get people to act on what she was saying about a man who was literally protected by serving law enforcement officers. The Met never opened a full investigation into her claims.
Police Complicity
There is much talk about pressure on policing numbers and the inevitable downstream effects on service delivery. But imagine if you had a minimum of two police officers literally on the scene, often inside the house, in a whole variety of odd situations all over the world, with nothing to do but watch and wait for hours on end. They might have passed the time wondering what His Nibs might be up to, or why they were being asked to provide private security for a dinner party at the New York mansion of a man who had recently been released from prison after serving time for soliciting prostitution from a minor. Did anything about what these serving officers were required to do ever strike them as weird and perhaps even potentially legally undesirable? Of course it must have. Did they or their superiors do anything meaningful about it? Of course they didn't. Andrew's various homes were only finally searched in the year 2026, and evidence of interest was reportedly recovered during those probes.
Establishment Protection
The sole reason certain individuals and institutions in the British establishment have become relaxed about treating this case as they should properly have done all along is that not doing so would now be more damaging to them. But they spent the best part of 15 years not doing so. Nothing about this has ever been about doing the right thing; it has always and only been about protecting their vested interests, and that goes for the monarchy as much as the police. It also goes for the politicians who seem to have spent forever accepting guidance or winks and nods about how things just have to be, and not demanding that actually, this was bullshit and things shouldn't be like that at all.
Waiting for the Queen's Death
As far as the police go, it remains a grimly fascinating possibility that they waited for Andrew's mother to die before properly grasping this nettle. According to various solicitous statements on Friday, they believe there might be other witnesses or people with helpful information out there. After all this time, where would you start? Met police employment records? It was the late queen, we now know, who pushed so hard for Andrew to get the trade envoy role, presumably to keep him out of trouble. Looking back to a column written in 2015, I mentioned that I had always assumed that job was merely some sinecure designed to get the queen's second son between golf courses without any boring little people making a fuss about who was paying for the helicopters. Yet, according to the Andrew papers released this week, his people seem to have actively tried to prevent him playing golf on his overseas jaunts. One brief states: 'Captain Blair [Andrew's then personal private secretary] particularly asked that the Duke of York should not be offered golfing functions abroad.' There is a reason why football managers and trophy wives, and apparently concerned royal mothers, prefer it when their headstrong charges are playing golf. That is because when they are doing that, they are not doing any of the other things. Andrew should always have been golfing, because if he wasn't doing that, there seems to have been a strong chance that he might have been cocking up Britain's interests, laying the ground for impenetrable private business deals or indulging in various other activities that are even less mentionable.
Conclusion
No doubt we shall be hearing much more from the police about what is continually referred to as an unprecedented investigation. But you know what is better than an unprecedented investigation? A precedented one. This one should absolutely have been precedented, and doing it now, for the public service equivalent of clout, is precisely nothing to boast about.
