‘Show me the man, and I’ll find you the crime’ is the can-do attitude attributed to Stalin’s chief of the secret police, Lavrentiy Beria. There’s more than a flavour of that attitude, I think, in Thames Valley Police’s investigation into Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Two days ago, the news was led by a story, briefed by the police, that the scope of the investigation into the former Duke of York for possible Misconduct in Public Office was being widened to include questions of sexual misbehaviour. Yesterday, the cops let it be known that they were looking into an ‘allegation that he behaved inappropriately towards a woman at Royal Ascot’ in 2002, and appealed for any accusers – related to this incident or, apparently, incidents as yet unknown to the police – to come forward: ‘Whenever a victim-survivor is ready to engage with us, we’re ready for you, at whatever point that may be.’
The police’s attitude does not speak to me of thoroughness but, rather, of increasing desperation. Is it really routine and proper for the police to be scaring up front-page headlines with a running commentary on the scope and progress of a live investigation?
We were given to understand when Andrew was first placed under arrest that the investigation into his behaviour was to focus on the question of whether, while working as an unpaid UK trade ambassador, he had passed confidential and market-sensitive government documents to his friend, the child-trafficker and financial spiv Jeffrey Epstein. This will have disappointed those who hoped for a full press trial of the allegations of sexual misconduct by the then Prince, and the shedding of some light into the murky story of his relations with Virginia Roberts Giuffre. But it made sense. You prosecute what you think you have a good chance of proving; and what falls into your jurisdiction.
But now the goalposts are shifting, and weirdly so. The police’s attitude does not speak to me of thoroughness but, rather, of increasing desperation. Is it really routine and proper for the police to be scaring up front-page headlines with a running commentary on the scope and progress of a live investigation? More than that, is it remotely routine and proper to be trying to add to the charge sheet by publicly appealing not just for witnesses to existing alleged crimes, but fishing for whole new ones? I thought the deal, on the whole, was that you placed somebody under arrest, and then set about quietly and methodically gathering evidence that you then present privately to the CPS and – should it clear that bar – publicly at trial.
It’s as if Thames Valley Police, rather, have decided that they need to appease public loathing for a deeply unpopular man by finding something, anything to clobber him with, and that meanwhile the papers can be kept happy by dangling the whiff of sex stuff in front of them like a herring for a performing dolphin. Having hit on ‘Misconduct in Public Office’, but discovered that they may not have the evidence to nail him on the financial stuff, they seem to be expanding it to ‘any bad stuff our guy did during the decade or so he was in public office.’ Are we really expected to believe simultaneously that (as we were also briefed, perhaps by way of expectation-management) the ‘bar’ for prosecution over Misconduct in Public Office is very high; and that behaving ‘inappropriately’ at a race meet – as often as not a matter for the HR department – is something with a realistic chance of clearing it?
I think we can draw a couple of conclusions from all this. The main one is that the police are struggling to get much hard evidence to back up the allegations of financial misconduct over which Andrew was arrested with such publicly humiliating fanfarado. We cannot necessarily fault them for this. As Andrew’s biographer Andrew Lownie has pointed out, the US Department of Justice (for reasons of its own) is being extremely unhelpful in sharing evidence; and the Foreign Office and Department for Business and Trade haven’t been much more forthcoming.
But the second conclusion to be drawn is that they are starting to panic as a result, and that they are therefore deciding to prosecute Andrew in the court of public opinion by using his high profile and deep unpopularity against him. That strikes me as a prime instance of playing the man, not the ball.
There may be some who think I’m making this case out of a sneaking sympathy for the former Prince’s plight. I’m not. He strikes me as an oafish, venal and ridiculous figure at the very least. Even should he turn out to be wholly innocent of the many crimes and wrongdoings of which he is accused, and which he so strenuously denies, he has already told enough lies on the record that he forfeits any claim on our sympathies at all.
But let us suppose, as many do, that he is a double-dyed villain, a crook, a child-molester and all the rest of it. If that is the case then he should go to jail. And it probably doesn’t take a professional lawyer to recognise that any conviction for a crime, should one eventually arrive, is going to be a lot safer if the investigation that preceded it was conducted more like a professional and impartial policing operation and less like a public-relations campaign.
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