- The Guardian
Friday 30 August 2019 3
Lost in Showbiz
Marina Hyde
Fat fi ngers
won’t get
you out of
this one,
Andrew
himself. Who can say? It wouldn’t be
the fi rst time, with the prince having
occasional form for going over the
heads of staff and issuing things
himself. Either way, let’s take a look:
“At no stage ... did I see, witness or
suspect any behaviour of the sort
that subsequently led to his arrest
and conviction.” The suggestion
seems to be that a court-convicted
sex off ender needs to commit his
crimes physically in front of Prince
Andrew for the prince to suspect he
might be guilty of them.
Moving on: “I can only reiterate
my regret that I was mistaken to
think that what I thought I knew
of him was evidently not the real
person, given what we now know.”
Without wishing to raise the tone
by quoting Steven Seagal in Under
Siege: what is this babbling bullshit?
You knew he had been convicted
of procuring a 14-year-old girl for
prostitution and served jail time
for it, in a case with huge amounts
of supporting evidence and the
testimony of more than 50 women
telling similar stories. The rest – all
the rest – is bullshit. Especially the
bit about caring about the victims.
You know the best way to look like
you give one hundredth of a toss
about the victims of sex cases?
Don’t be friends with the sex case
in question! Don’t stay with them
in their mansions, don’t get foot
massages with them, don’t get
fi lmed looking surreptitiously
round the front door as a procession
of very young women come and go!
It just looks ... bad.
As indicated, this stuff isn’t
complicated. But even if it were,
it’s important to remember that,unlike most people who pay
their taxes to support him being
helicoptered between golf courses,
Prince Andrew has a dedicated
team of people whose job it is to
advise him which one of his friends
is a weapons-grade scumbag. I’m
vaguely paraphrasing the offi cial
palace job description here. But
it doesn’t matter if we call them
public relations experts, background
vetters, wrong ’un sniff er-outers,
or simply sentient humans over the
age of 18 who can read. The royal
family has got a team of them, who
would have made these points
about Epstein very, very clearly
and very, very often.
Anyway, back to this week.
Surprisingly, Prince Andrew’s oddly
timed, unprofessional-reading
statement didn’t make all the shit
go away, just as grinning sweatily in
the car seat next to his mother on
the drive to the church at Balmoral
the previous weekend hadn’t made
all the shit go away, either. Again,to fall back on another news clich e,
the press release “raised more
questions than it answered”.
Yet worse was to come. On
Tuesday, more than 20 of Epstein’s
accusers gathered to testify before
a judge in a Manhattan hearing.
Outside the courthouse, Giuff re
declared of the prince : “He knows
what he ’s done and he can attest to
that. He knows exactly what he’s
done – and I hope he comes clean
about it.” Her lawyer added that he’d
made “multiple” requests to Prince
Andrew to “answer real questions”.
Well now. This is the route that
bring us to this Wednesday’s debut
of the “chubby fi ngers” defence.
Even as the rest of the media were
obsessing over the breaking news
that Boris Johnson was to ask the
Queen to prorogue parliament ,
the Standard went with a splash
headlined: “Prince Andrew hits
back over ‘witch hunt’: Duke of
York insists claims by Epstein’s
‘sex slave’ are ‘categorically
untrue’.” Yup, a three-scarequote
headline. Your basic fairytale.
Right off the bat, we need to
note the timing of this, coming as
it did as most media outlets were
understandably taken up with
prorogation – a course of executive
action so clearly batshit and
messed-up that Courtney Love is
boggling at it. (“I love your country.
This is insane. Crying,” she tweeted
later that day.) In short, Wednesday
lunchtime was a very good time to
bury bad news. You know what’s
best dealt with under cover of a
constitutional crisis? That’s right!
A nonce-titutional crisis.
And with that piece of kidding
around, it feels wise to proceed
straight to vehement ducal denials.
As the Standard had it: “A source
close to the Queen’s second son
responded to accuser Virginia
Roberts – who declared yesterday:
‘ He knows exactly what he’s done’ –
by saying: ‘Yes, he does know exactly
what he’s done ... nothing.’” As this
defender went on: “He is guilty only
of showing misplaced loyalty to a
friend.” Mmm. Is this a version of
the classic job interviewee’s answer
to the question “What’s your worst
quality?” “I would say loyalty’ ”?
Damn straight. If loving our friends
is wrong, then which of us wants
to be right?
Anyway: fat fi ngers. One “source”
cited the famous photo of Prince
Andrew with Giuff re and opted
to tell the Standard: “Look at his
fi ngers in the photo. The duke has
quite chubby fi ngers, they don’t
look right and nor does the height
of the duke and the girl.”
Is this ... is this really, honestly
what they’re going with? Finger
girth? If so: wow.
It feels very late in the day to be
pointing this out to Prince Andrew
and his “close friends”, but he
is a senior royal, on the civil list,
and the allegations surrounding
him and the close friend he knew
was a convicted sex off ender are
of an order requiring something
more than a fi nger girth theory.
Until that is grasped, the search for
something to make all this shit go
away continues. Do consider this
COVER PHOTOGRAPH: DAVID LEVENE/THE GUARDIANILLUSTRATION: ANDY WATT story as “developing”.
W
ho has the
fattest fi ngers:
Prince Andrew
or the person
who types
his press
releases? Without wishing to shock
you, it’s possible that these two
individuals are sometimes the
same person. Furthermore – and
if your mind is already close to
blowing, please look away now – it
could be that the entities described
as Prince Andrew’s “friends” in
a sympathetic Evening Standard
story on Wednesday are ALSO
Prince Andrew himself. I know! He’s
literally never worked harder. At the
age of 59, he’s fi nally got a full-time
job. Unfortunately, it’s convincing
people he’s not a sex case.
The Duke of York is, absolutely
indisputably, a friend to sex cases –
or sex case [sing ular], in the form
of his late friend Jeff rey Epstein.
No point cavilling there. That
particular aircraft carrier has sailed.
Still, before we go on, all this clearly
demands a recap.
As you may know, Prince Andrew
is currently what convention
demands we style as “in the news
for all the wrong reasons”. The
story has long concerned his
friendship with Jeff rey Epstein,
the convicted sex off ender who, at
the time of his death in jail earlier
this month, was awaiting trial for
running an international underage
sex-traffi cking operation. It also
concerns Virginia Giuff re (then
Roberts), who alleges she was
recruited as a child as Epstein’s
sex slave, and on whose bare hip
Prince Andrew’s hand is picturedin a now-infamous photograph.
Giuff re claims she was forced to
have sex with the Duke of York
three times when she was 17. He
categorically denies this.
But rather than Epstein’s
apparent suicide making it all go
away, the focus on the prince’s
friendship with him, and its nature,
has intensifi ed. Some of Epstein’s
private-jet logs, on which Prince
Andrew’s name reportedly occurs
several times, have been uncovered,
while footage of the prince peering
cagily round the door of Epstein’s
New York mansion, some time
after he was released from jail,
has emerged. Last week, emails
emerged in which a literary agent
recounted seeing Andrew in said
mansion, receiving a foot massage
with Epstein , apparently from
two well-dressed young Russian
women. The duke was said to be
complaining about public focus
on his night-time activities.
Perhaps troubled by the
continuing inability to just make
this shit go away, Buckingham
Palace chose Sunday afternoon
to put out a press release in which
Andrew attempted to – what’s the
euphemism? – clarify his position
on a number of points. This turned
out to be a curious document,
diff erent in layout from typical
palace communications, and best
described as a wildly disingenuous
word salad. Milton it was not –
although it did have the fl avour
of something proof read by him
in his fi nal years.
Having been pored over, it was
suspected by some royal watchers
to be the work of Prince AndrewAt the age of
59, he’s fi nally
got a full-time
job: convincing
people he’s not
a sex case
RELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws