BY PAUL T HORGAN
Perhaps it was all inevitable. Any non-American fingered as an associate of Jeffrey Epstein would be publicly disgraced and ostracised. Epstein, after all, was a paedophile, and this was public knowledge after his first and only conviction. If anyone kept in touch with him thereafter, they did so in the full knowledge that they were consorting with a monster.
And yet. The knives are out for a man, the son of a monarch, who has been toppled from his position in society in a manner not too dissimilar from the fate of royalty after revolutionaries have stormed the palace gates.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been stripped of his birthright to be described as a royal prince. His fate seems to be to live out the rest of his life rather like Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albert von Hohenzollern did on his estate in Doorn in the Netherlands when the former Kaiser fled the militarily defeated and collapsing Imperial Germany in 1918 after a mutiny of his generals.
Andrew is like an earlier version of Prince Harry, as they had similar fates. Sunlight has to intrude on the magic of royalty, and monarchy is an organic institution. The Royal Line of Succession must be preserved. This means that there should not be a single point of failure, as there was when the future George IV had a single legitimate child, Charlotte, who died in childbirth. But both Andrew and Harry had the same problem, which is that once their elder siblings started to have offspring, their role in securing the succession was at an end.
In previous generations, such siblings could be given ceremonial or official roles with which to fill their time, such as Prince Henry, George V’s third son, who was created Duke of Gloucester on his marriage, and enjoyed a military career (he was caught in several Luftwaffe bombing raids in France and Belgium in 1940 and was evacuated from Europe after the fall of Dunkirk), before becoming Governor-General of Australia in 1944. Henry’s surviving son, Prince Richard, is 32nd in the line of succession and has the distinction of being the highest in the line who is not a descendant of George VI. Before retirement, he worked as an architect, having obtained professional qualifications.
The difference between Richard and Andrew is that by the time Richard, who was the cousin of the late Queen Elizabeth II, had gained majority in the early 1960s, his prospect of becoming King Richard IV was roughly nil. Deference had shattered in the wake of the Profumo Scandal and the satire boom:
So the prince probably knew for certain that he had to get a proper job, which is what he actually did. It is ironic that it was the birth of Andrew in 1960 that pushed Richard further down the line of succession, yet when Andrew himself started moving down the line, he did not make the same choice. Perhaps by 1982 he was too old to change.
But it also may be because of Andrew’s choice of a job. He joined the Royal Navy and served Queen and Country during the Falklands War, flying helicopter missions to decoy Exocet missiles away from Task Force ships. Postwar, post-navy, and post the birth of William and Harry, he had little to do. As royalty, he was likely a target for hypergamous women and had a playboy lifestyle. In short, he was rather like Prince Richard’s father before Prince Henry settled down after marrying Lady Alice Christabel Montagu Douglas Scott, but, unlike Andrew, the opportunities to do work connected to his position were considerably greater.
And this is where conjecture emerges. While Jeffrey Epstein has been portrayed as a millionaire who leveraged his wealth to indulge in his perversity, the same evidence also suggests he was a skilful blackmailer, specialising in creating and then springing honeytraps. Epstein wired up all his dwellings with surveillance systems to secretly observe his houseguests. All the evidence that condemns Andrew as a willing participant in Epstein’s sordid activities could also be interpreted as him being an unsuspecting victim of Epstein’s secret ploys.
The crime of blackmail is one that has been arguably the least impacted by advances in police detection techniques. Successful detection implies successful exposure. While the blackmailer may face justice, the victim may not escape the public shaming they have taken steps to avoid.
The conduct of the US government in the wake of the death of Epstein can be reasonably explained by Epstein being a blackmailer, who made sex slaves out of minors and created situations from which his male victims could not reasonably extricate themselves, forcing them to dance to Epstein’s tune. The first duty of the state is to protect its citizens, and this protection extends to blackmail victims. The US government is likely performing a damage limitation exercise to protect its citizens. This protection would not extend to non-US citizens, as the US government has no obligation towards them. This would explain why the US government is restricting the disclosure of material seized from Epstein’s residences. Epstein may not have been running a secret club servicing the desires of elite paedophiles; but instead he was running an extortion operation. The list of Epstein’s alleged clients is a list of more of Epstein’s actual victims.
Unfortunately, there is little public sympathy for victims of blackmail who have committed sex acts against young women and girls who were coerced into intercourse. Public sympathy is exclusively with the sex slaves, even when some of these unfortunate females were recruiting more girls to be corrupted and coerced by Epstein. But this is what Epstein would have been counting on. The male victims would have been on a lower rung of victimhood, but they are victims nonetheless. While they could be regarded as authors of their own misfortune, it is reasonable to suppose that their only error was to willingly but unsuspectingly walk over the threshold into one of Epstein’s wired-up residences. Once they had done so, the trap was closed, and they were doomed.
So it is reasonable to consider that Andrew was a purposeless ageing playboy of decreasing means who was ensnared by Epstein’s opulence and social presence through his agent Ghislaine Maxwell, whom Andrew had known of old. While Andrew may have been poor in resources, he was rich in contacts and could help Epstein gain more elite access.
There is also the issue of Epstein’s unexplained wealth. The paper explanations show that he accumulated money, but not how he created wealth. There is no mention of astute investments, nor insider trading. He was not importing vast quantities of cocaine from Colombia, nor did he have an impressive secret factory churning out industrial quantities of crystal meth or fentanyl, or both. The blackmail angle is a reasonable explanation as to why so many doors were opened for a college dropout who became a teacher. Bill Gates was also a college dropout, but he created Microsoft and became immensely wealthy. What did Epstein do to make his money? Why did some men sign over their wealth for Epstein to manage any way he saw fit?
So Andrew may have been a victim of a blackmail scheme and his fate is a cautionary tale for the other victims of the same scheme. His only remaining asset is keeping silent that it was blackmail all along, because admitting that it was would condemn him even further, but also it would erode the protection that the US government is giving to its citizens, as they would be equally condemned.
While some may regard Andrew’s life as privileged, there is also tragedy. He was born to secure a royal line of succession and was unable to have any other purpose once that was no longer needed. He was meant to use his position to carve out a life as his predecessors in his position had done but could not as the world around him moved away from automatic deference, and the end of empire diminished official and ceremonial roles he could perform. His sex life was his downfall as his access to women could have been leveraged by a master blackmailer. It may be hard to be sympathetic for someone who enjoys such comfort, even when shorn of position, but surely it is now time to leave the poor (in the non-financial sense of the term) man alone. He has surely suffered enough especially since his story has all been in public and lasted over half a decade. Move on.
Paul T Horgan worked in the IT Sector. He lives in Berkshire.