Read Our Monthly Magazine
And support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system
Does he really think we’ll believe it?
It was the question that sat in our heads as we watched the then Prince Andrew give his fateful interview to Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis on his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein in 2019, months after the sex offender and trafficker was found dead in a New York prison.
Does he really think we’ll believe that he couldn’t have danced with a 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre in Tramp nightclub in London because he lost the ability to sweat during the Falklands War?
That he never met her because he was actually visiting a Pizza Express in Woking that night, which was “a very unusual thing” for someone like him to do?
That he only knew Epstein through his friend, and Epstein’s partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, even though he stayed at Epstein’s New York townhouse after his first conviction and was a guest-of-honour at a dinner party during the visit?
That Andrew has a “tendency to be too honourable”, and that was why he decided to visit Epstein in person to tell him it was “inappropriate for us to be seen together” again?
That a strong, smart adult woman who recounted, in detail, how she was trafficked to have sex with Andrew on three occasions as a teenager, had faked a photo of them posing together with Andrew’s hand on her side and Maxwell lurking madame-like in the background?
“Why would somebody have put in another hand?” Maitlis observed.
The answer is that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor expected us to swallow it all, even if he didn’t think we would believe it.
This is laid bare by the release of the latest Epstein Files, which include photographs of the late Queen’s favourite son on all fours crawling above a woman lying on the floor.
It is confirmation of how the powerful protect their impunity through contempt for those they seek to exploit and manipulate.
Even if his litany of explanations about never meeting Virginia Giuffre sounded highly implausible – and the dogs in the street knew they were, frankly, ridiculous – Andrew expected the public to simply accept that he was providing an alternative account of these matters. It was enough that he was casting doubt on Virginia Giuffre’s sworn testimony in a US legal deposition, which states that he raped h