Here’s a
potential witness for the police officers investigating Andrew: the police
Marina
Hyde
Forgive
me if I’m not congratulating officers for investigating Andrew now – instead
of, say, many years ago when they were with him in Jeffrey Epstein’s house
Fri 22
May 2026 13.01 BST
How noble
that Thames Valley police has let it be known 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.
Obviously,
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 some other friends in
their 40s, and one young-looking 17-year-old girl. Then waited outside till he
decided it was time to come home. But as the saying goes: the second-best time
is now. No wait, the second-best time was probably when Andrew paid a reported
£12m to settle out of court with Virginia Giuffre, despite maintaining he had
no recollection of meeting her. (He denies any wrongdoing.) Ach no, the
second-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. Sorry, wrong again, the second-best
time was a full 12 years ago, when Giuffre alleged that she was sex trafficked
to and assaulted by Andrew on that night mentioned above, as well as on two other
occasions.
What are
we supposed to say now? Well done, officers? Better late than never? Do me a
favour. Virginia Giuffre took her own life just over a year ago at a remote
Australian farmhouse, unable to outrun her demons. She was 41. But she spent a
really, really, really long time – 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.
You hear
a lot 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, and who might very well have passed the time wondering what His Nibs
might be up to, or – to pluck an example – 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.
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. And it
also goes for the politicians who seem to have spent for ever 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.
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. Gosh, after all this
time, I don’t know where you’d 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. Great job! etc. Looking back
to one column I wrote in 2015 (long time covering this subject), I mentioned
that I’d 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”. And 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. As 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.” Oh dear. There’s
a reason why football managers and trophy wives – and, apparently, concerned
royal mothers – prefer it when their headstrong charges are playing golf. And
that is because when they are doing that, they are not doing any of the other “things”.
What were you thinking, Captain Blair?! 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.
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’s 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.
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