Andrew’s arrest: a British fit of morality
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Thomas Macaulay
Thomas Macaulay, the great political sage of the Victorian era, should be living at this hour. Every school student of 19th century English political history once learnt his most famous aphorism of 1830: “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.”
The latest revelations about the former Prince Andrew will only fuel the intense moralising mood Britain is still gripped by. His arrest and detention are a first for any British royal. London does not know what to do with all the royals who have grand titles and could call the late Queen Elizabeth “Granny”, but do not earn a proper living and sponge off the giant wealth of the British royals and payments from the British taxpayer.
Spare Royals are given international ambassador roles for trade, sport, or Commonwealth links. When I was a Foreign Office minister I was responsible for relations with the Far East China, Japan, Korea.
To my surprise I was asked in the summer of 2002 if I would like to go to Seoul for the opening match of the FIFA World Cup being jointly hosted by South Korea and Japan.
The job should have fallen to Prince Andrew who was then president of the Football Association.
I was told he had demanded a private plane to fly him out to and back from Seoul. He wanted to sit in the special FIFA box reserved for the Emperor of Japan and President of Korea and would have to leave at half-time to go back for a golf game in England.
The Foreign Office could not meet his expensive travel costs nor his arrogant expectation to have the status of a head of state, along with the President of South Korea. So they asked me to represent the UK at the opening ceremony of the 2002 World Cup.
Being a royal trade envoy helps perhaps to move British exports along a bit. For British ambassadors, having a royal in town fills the embassy with local influencers and business leaders.
The Government briefings Andrew would have been sent as a UK trade envoy are hardly state secrets. Their contents can be read in the business pages of most newspapers as well as trade journals.
Andrew is alleged to have sent them to a ghastly paedophile pimp in Florida who had the best address book of the super rich business world of anyone in America. His actions may be the breach of the rules but are hardly a threat to national security.
Admittedly, the arrest and overnight detention in a cell of Andrew is a disaster for the royal family and their friends. The media and political establishment, however, is highly selective about its moralising. The Foreign Secretary, Yvette Cooper, has been whipping up public fury against Vladimir Putin because he imprisoned his leading critic, Alexei Navalny, and then put him to death with a rare poison that British scientists have now identified. But the next in line to the throne, Prince William, has just been in Saudi Arabia on a three day jaunt which seemed to involve walking around with lots of men without a woman in sight. The Saudi royal family are just as tough as Putin with their critics and opponents.
In the last two years, they have decapitated nearly 700 people living in Saudi Arabia of whom the royal familiy disapprove. Smoking a joint, a far lower level of drug abuse than the cocaine snorters of recent Tory cabinets, is enough to have a head chopped off. Beheading some hapless pot-smokers and others, including five women last year, is just a price to be paid to show who must be obeyed in Saudi Arabia.
Of course Prince William did not raise this awkward aspect of Britain’s warm relationship with Saudi Arabia. What’s a few hundred beheadings between friends? Another great friend of the British royals are the Qatari royals. They provided evidence of that friendship in 2022 by giving the then Prince Charles three Fortnum and Mason shopping bags containing 3.2 million Euros.
Navalny was a journalist who criticised Putin and exposed his obscene wealth. So was Jamal Ahmad Kashoggi, a Saudi journalist who criticised the wealth and tyranny of the Saudi ruling elites. He thus became the target of the elderly and ailing Saudi king’s son, Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, a firm favourite of the international ruling elites in a manner Putin can only dream off.
Kashoggi went to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018 to pick up a licence for his forthcoming marriage. He was immediately grabbed by a 15-strong squad sent by MBS, according to US Intelligence agencies, who carried out an investigation once Joe Biden replaced Donald Trump in 2020. The Saudi goons strangled Kashoggi and then cut up the body to dispose of it.
But you can search high and low for any fit of morality over the heir to the British throne spending three days as the guest of MBS, the man who authorised this atrocious murder — and hundreds of others.
Where is Macaulay when you need him?
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