Kings, Queens & Jack Of Dirty Trade
The arrest of a man formerly known as prince, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, is consequential because the affairs of this scandal-scarred brother of Britain’s reigning monarch seem a grotesque link between old world and new, the entitled aristocracy and modern-day plutocracy.
The case of this fallen British royal symbolises the deep intertwining of extreme privilege and extraordinary deference with exceptional impunity. In his former role as Britain’s trade and investment envoy – a job for which Buckingham Palace reportedly lobbied hard despite Andrew having no discernible qualifications – the globe-trotting prince appears to have shared sensitive commercial documents with the late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Andrew is now being investigated on suspicion of misconduct in public office, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
These events have come to pass seven years after Andrew went on television to brazenly acknowledge a relationship of sorts with Epstein. He denied wrongdoing but conceded that his equation with the convicted paedophile included private planes and islands and “the people that I met and the opportunities that I was given to learn either by him or because of him were actually very useful”. For Epstein, the trade-off included, in Andrew’s memorable words, “a straightforward shooting weekend” at Balmoral, the British royal family’s private Highland estate. It was a clumsy attempt to explain that Epstein hadn’t been a guest at a glamorous royal party so much as a companion in the muddy pursuits enjoyed by the English upper classes.
The tone-deaf revelation spoke to the 21st century interplay of celebrity power and predation. Epstein schmoozed both new royalty and old, connecting freshly minted kings of business and politics with old-style princes of many realms. Thus, no matter how much it was shaken, the kaleidoscope continued to settle into a two-tier world – thin upper crust, thickly underlaid by chaff.
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This piece is published in The Times of India
