Will Andrew and Epstein finally bring down the monarchy?

In a moment of dramatic irony, Prince Hamlet’s uncle Claudius, who has murdered his brother to usurp the throne of Denmark, hypocritically boasts that a divine protective force or barrier keeps monarchs like him from harm. “There’s such a divinity that protects a king.” For too long Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, King Charles’ disgraced younger brother, has been “hedged” by the British establishment from the consequences of his actions or possible misdeeds.

His arrest by police on his 66th birthday on suspicion of misconduct in public office removes one of the last of these protections. That is only right. One of the foundational principles of the rule of law is that government officials, politicians, and even princes, are not immune from legal consequences. There can be no exceptions to the legal maxim cited by British judges for centuries, “Be ye never so high, the law is above you.”

A charge or a court action does not automatically follow an arrest. Another foundational principle of the rule of law is the assumption of innocence unless proven guilty. But it does put Andrew on notice that he can no longer tell untruths about a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein that continued long after the financier was convicted and imprisoned for procuring a minor.

Release of the Epstein files in the US has shredded Andrew’s own airbrushed account of that friendship. It raises doubts about his credibility in a notorious BBC television interview where he denied having sex with Virginia Giuffre, a minor procured by Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. The consequences of legal perjury for Andrew would be dire.

Andrew’s cup of misery is overflowing. Allegations related to the Epstein files are that he forwarded confidential reports to the financier while he was a trade envoy for the UK. Police have been searching both his former home in Windsor and his new address in internal exile on the Royal Estate in Norfolk. Former UK prime minister Gordon Brown has also demanded that police investigate him as an accessory or witness to Epstein’s use of London’s Stansted and Luton airports to traffic women and girls.

I recently wrote that the flaws of Epstein’s other celebrity British pal – or rather prize catch – Peter Mandelson, were well known before his appointment as ambassador to Washington ended in an all too predictable scandal. Labour’s governing establishment, however, was determined to look the other way. Andrew’s vices have been hiding in plain sight for many years, too, and have been similarly ignored.

In my time working at The Sunday Times newspaper, we revealed in 2007 that an unknown Kazakh oligarch had bought the then prince’s former home of Sunninghill Park for £3 million ($4 million) above the asking price and an estimated £7 million more than the property’s market value. Made an official trade envoy by prime minister Tony Blair to indulge his mother, the late Queen Elizabeth II, Andrew had become patron of the British-Kazakh Society jointly with the country’s dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev. The sale has been subsequently linked to a Kazakh money-laundering scheme, but at the time Andrew refused to make any inquiries into the cause of his good fortune.

Not long after that story appeared, I was invited to a dinner by a go-between to meet the then prince. This was one invitation that was easy to decline. Courtiers at Buckingham Palace, prime ministers and Foreign Office officials forced to work alongside Andrew in his trade envoy role were not so fastidious. Deference to his mother, an icon of respectability, lay at the heart of it. Who at the time was policing the border between Andrew’s official duties and his financial affairs? Now it is alleged that his access to foreign leaders and financiers may have helped Epstein, too.

Some mothers are blind to the faults of their children. Andrew was the late Queen’s favourite. When Giuffre sued him in a New York court, accusing him of sexual assault, the Queen provided £7 million ($13.35 million) towards his £12 million out-of-court settlement, topped up with £3 million from her husband’s estate. Andrew strenuously denied all the charges at the time and still does.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, his own tenure of office in jeopardy after a series of scandalous appointments including that of Mandelson, is vulnerable to the accusation that he tolerates a “boys’ club” at No. 10. He won’t be providing any protection. Mountbatten-Windsor’s brother the King declares that “the law must take its course”. Can the monarchy survive the scandal?

The cynics will reply that the damage caused by Andrew to the royal family is catastrophic, but not serious. After all, the monarchy has been surviving scandals for decades, even centuries.

The memory of Queen Victoria’s “wicked uncles”, a notably bad lot of Regency rakes and scoundrels, was soon erased by her virtuous marriage to Prince Albert, a pillar of Germanic rectitude and intellectual high seriousness. Edward VII’s fondness for actresses and horses never did the institution much harm, and his grandson Edward VIII’s abdication in 1936 to marry an American divorcee preserved bourgeois propriety and yet gifted the world a glamorous royal love story. The collapse of Charles’ fairytale marriage to Princess Diana – which kept the glossy gossip mags in business for years – only enhanced the marketability of an institution called “The Firm” by royal insiders.

In every royal legend, Hamlet included, there has to be a wicked uncle who offsets the virtues of the good prince or princess. Andrew’s vices and those of his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, provide a perfect foil to the goody-two-shoes couple of his nephew William and wife Catherine, the Prince and Princess of Wales – or at least to their well-polished public image.

The great Victorian authority on the British constitution, Walter Bagehot, warned that exposure of the workings of the monarchy would let “daylight in on magic”. He didn’t foresee that the public’s hunger for a sacrificial Epstein villain might become an essential part of the performance.

Still, the cynics may have underestimated how this scandal trumps them all. We may hear more about Andrew’s unwise choice of company – allegedly including a Chinese spy – and the extent of his involvement in Epstein’s network at home and abroad. Unless he clears his name, the late Queen’s intervention in settling Andrew’s court case will increasingly look to the public like the payment of hush money. And you don’t have to be a moralist to worry that it took allegations about profiteering, not the cries of alleged victims, that brought Andrew to the attention of police.

Martin Ivens is the editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Previously, he was editor of The Sunday Times of London and its chief political commentator.