Andrew's arrested development

Posh rich man arrested - a new first for Britain

Britain seems to be developing a taste for defenestration after several hundred years of impunity for our richers and betters. Prince Andrew, already busted down to plain Andrew in November last year, has now been given a nasty 66th birthday present - six unmarked police cars arrived at his Sandringham home to arrest him on “suspicion of misconduct in public office”. It’s not for sharing Epstein’s underage girls, but sharing underage documents with him, ones that were still too sensitive and vulnerable to be out in public. The way Epstein liked them.

He’s perhaps the first royal to be arrested since Charles I in 1647. Of course there’s still a big difference in Britain between being charged with an offence and there being any consequences (just ask Manchester City), but it’s certainly a start.

I’ve quite enjoyed Andrew’s gradual humiliation which started in earnest back in November 2019 with his Emily Maitlis interview. That interview gave us his attendance at a party at Pizza Express in Woking, his inability to sweat due to an adrenaline overdose in the Falklands War, and “just a straightforward shooting weekend”. But it seems there’s still quite a long way further for him to fall. I wonder if just being referred to as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is enough, and that he will now lose his surname as well, and by law must be called Andrew Crook-Pervert. And the king will probably try and winkle him out of that big house too, and maybe set him up in a starter home in Woking within walking distance of a spicy American with an extra dip, or perhaps a Sloppy Giuseppe if he’s in the mood.

Traditionally, when the rich and powerful are disgraced, we tend to think that “stripping” them of their title is punishment enough. Think back to Fred Goodwin, the extravagant RBS boss who was not shown to be a crook but was possibly the most incompetent banker ever, managing to lose £24 billion for his bank in 2009, the largest corporate loss in UK history. The British government were implacable, forcing Goodwin’s pension to be slashed from £555,000 a year to a mere £342,000 a year plus a £2.7 million lump sum. And then if that wasn’t punishment enough, Goodwin was stripped, stripped of his knighthood in 2012. Eye-wateringly, heartbreakingly cruel - 12 years a Slave has nothing on this story.

Then last year Paula Vennells, presiding arrogantly and vindictively over the wrongful prosecution of 900 sub-postmasters, wrecking thousands of lives, was stripped of her CBE and has been forced to resign from several non-executive positions. That was punishment enough - she’s been allowed to keep her £2.2 million bonuses and her sizable Post Office pension. Unlike the speedy and vigorous delivery of sub-postmaster prosecutions on her watch, any criminal proceedings coming her way seem to have got lost in transit.

Will Lord Mandelson face justice for sitting in Cabinet while advising bankers to threaten the Chancellor so as to undermine government policy, and possibly sharing market and price-sensitive information with his “best pal” Jeffrey? We don’t know, but there were immediate calls to strip him of his lordship, though this apparently requires an Act of Parliament and therefore will be virtually impossible for Keir Starmer to accomplish without a delay of several years and multiple U-turns.

So it’s refreshing to see a posh, rich bloke get his come-uppance. In the past, even when rich people came a cropper for their villainy they were often self-made men - there was a sense they weren’t quite PLU, people like us. Jeffrey Archer, for example, though a big wheel in the Conservative Party, boasted of his father’s military record when actually he was the son of a fraudster and conman who impersonated another war hero of the same name. Businessmen that have been jailed have also tended to come from humble origins (Joe Lewis, Asil Nadir, Ernest Saunders, Gerald Ronson etc). And it’s surely only a matter of years before rags-to-lingerie-to-PPE Glaswegian baroness Michelle Mone gets her just deserts.

I can only find the example of Jonathan Aitken, the dishonest cabinet minister jailed in 1999 for perjury, who was genuinely posh and temporarily rich, but who still got jailed. But then according to this article he actually had very little money despite his aristocratic family, and he soon went bankrupt once his lies unravelled, leading to this excruciating exchange on Have I Got News For You. Ian Hislop told Jonathan Aitken he owed him £13,702 in unrecovered legal costs, because Aitken had dishonestly sued Private Eye for libel then gone bust before he could cover them. “Sorry about that” Aitken simpered. It’s from about 19 minutes in:

America used to be a place unafraid to jail the rich and famous, albeit in luxury - Martha Stewart, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein (eventually) and lots of rich black people. But since the new president has come in everything seems to be negotiable. The SEC were building a fraud case against crypto-billionaire Justin Sun (the idiot who bought that banana duct taped to a wall for $6 million then ate it) but dropped charges soon after the current president was inaugurated and shortly after Sun had purchased $75 million worth of tokens from World Liberty Financial, a crypto-venture controlled by the President’s family.

And the President pardoned ex-Honduras president Juan Orlando Hernandez who had been convicted under Biden’s watch of being a key figure in a drug trafficking operation which flooded the US with 400 tonnes of cocaine. The pardon occurred round about the same time that the President was authorising a military raid against Venezuela to capture their president for similar alleged offences. There is no evidence of Hernandez making payments to the President or his family’s businesses.

As for the Epstein scandal, the only people suffering adverse consequences appear to be non-Americans - there’s just one person in jail and predictably it’s a woman, and a British one. Mandelson was sacked and Keir Starmer nearly lost his job for appointing him. And we’ve already discussed Andrew Crook-Pervert. This article mentions people who have lost their jobs as a result of Epstein connections, and they appear to be, in total: one American woman, two Canadian men, one Norwegian man, one Dubai man, one British man (Mandelson) and Brad Karp.

Brad Karp? He is an American man, who stepped down as chairperson of law firm Paul Weiss. What is he thinking resigning over Epstein? Just brazen it out like everyone else. Though he’s clearly somewhat of a protoplasmic invertebrate jelly, with Paul Weiss being notorious for their supine behaviour towards the American president, agreeing to provide $40 million to the US government so they could keep security clearances and access to federal buildings. $40m and he didn’t even get his name redacted. There’s really no justice.

But back in Britain there’s justice all right. We give you titles but we might very well strip you of them if you do something bad enough and make us all angry enough. And now it looks like we are turning positively French - arresting members of the royal family. Vive la revolution!