Comment: The strange and unconvincing case against Prince Andrew
Prince Andrew has many faults. But people shouldn’t lose their jobs because of a bad taste in friends.
By Ian Dunt
He’s not an easy man to defend, really. That entitled air, the remnants of grating comments and irritations he leaves in his wake, his overly-lavish trips to plug British business: Prince Andrew is not really the guy you want to go out on a limb for.
There are real complaints to be made against the UK’s business envoy. The avalanche of Wikileaks revelations last year contained a little nugget – basically ignored at the time – about his reaction to the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) investigation into BAE systems, which was accused of trying to bribe its way into securing an arms deal with the Saudi government. Tony Blair disgracefully cancelled the investigation – just another example of his feverish commitment to human rights and democracy.
Prince Andrew, meanwhile, demanded a special briefing from the SFO and accused it of “idiocy”, all in front of a US diplomat. Not only was the idiocy his, but he was busy engaging in an act of explicit political interference ten times worse than any of Prince Charles’ stumbles into the worlds of architecture or environmentalism.
Meanwhile, the creepy, desperate videos of his former wife, the Duchess of York, apparently trying to blag money through his connections, while not a slam-shut case against him, raised all sorts of questions about how accurate her claims were. Other allegations about his use of a trip to secure the sale of his Surrey mansion, which eventually went to a Kazakh billionaire, do little to drum up support now, in his time of need.
But dig into this, his latest and most serious controversy, and the less there is to find. Prince Andrew is accused of being friends with a sex offender. Billionaire American financier Jeffrey Epstein was convicted in 2008 of soliciting a minor for prostitution. That allegation against the prince, complete with a photo of him with an arm around a masseuse who would later make allegations of her own, ultimately amounts to an allegation of guilt by association.
He plainly has no better taste in friends than he does in wives, but that is not a crime. To demand a man steps down from his job because his mate did something wrong puts all of us at the mercy of events quite outside of our control. I can think of friends of mine who would be highly problematic if I thought my professional career rested on their moral compass. Soliciting an underage girl for sex is of a different magnitude, of course, but the basic principle remains: we are not judged by the activities of our associates, but by our own. Unless something comes up that relates to him specifically, this is a row over nothing.
The charges over his relationship with Saif Gaddafi, son of the Libyan dictator, are even more underwhelming. The prince is accused of meeting him several times after 2007 and once just three months before the current wave of unrest began.
There is something of a retrospective witch hunt going on as regards Libya. The prince and a series of academic institutions – most notably the London School of Economics (LSE) – are coming under serious fire for accepting donations from the Libyan regime.
It’s all terribly unconvincing. The people and institutions which formed links with the Libyans post-2007 were led by the government, which embraced the regime for a mixture of economic and political reasons. The economic reasons, concerning the country’s oil, need no explanation. The mere threat of complications during the moves to secure the release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi were enough to prompt a flurry of emails from Whitehall about the UK’s ‘national interest’.
But it was political motivations which dominated UK policy. Coming from the Iraq war debacle, Blair quickly needed evidence that his insane foreign policy gamble had paid off. He needed a Middle East/North African dictator to come in from the cold. Gaddafi was first in line and Blair sat, humbled and sad, in his tent. He put the UK’s reputation on the line to save his own.
If you want someone to be angry about over Libya, pick Blair. There’s really no use blaming education institutions or a business envoy for following his lead.
For a man with so little to recommend him you would have thought that a major row would consist of more than just a bad choice in friends and a decision to follow the prime minister. Alas, it’s not to be. We’ll have to wait a little longer for a scandal which equals Prince Andrew’s many faults.
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