As the rest of the Royal Family prepare for the pageantry and pomp of their traditional Christmas, two ghosts have gatecrashed the party, in true Dickensian fashion. One phantom is that of the long-deceased Jeffrey Epstein, whose malign influence continues to stretch into the present day thanks to the release of the latest tranche of his emails with the great and good. And the second is that of a living figure whose reputation, rather the physical presence, is haunting the royals this festive season.
The latter is, of course, the embattled Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, whose reputation has been traduced by his actions involving Epstein over the past decades regarding which Andrew denies any wrongdoing. While he may have been ostentatiously stripped of his royal titles and standing by his elder brother earlier this year, it was always suspected that there were more embarrassments and difficulties coming when the Epstein files were finally made public. With the inevitability of death, taxes, and Santa coming down the chimney, this has now occurred.
The most embarrassing and damning of the emails that has come into the public domain is not explicitly from Andrew, but from a figure seemingly at Balmoral who signs himself alternately ‘A’ and ‘the Invisible Man’, who refers to having done a stint in the ‘RN’.
In an email sent to Ghislaine Maxwell in August 2001, this man writes: ‘I am up here at Balmoral Summer Camp for the Royal Family. Activities take place all day and I am totally exhausted at the end of each day. The Girls are completely shattered and I will have to give them an early night today as it is getting tiring splitting them up all the time! How’s LA? Have you found me some new inappropriate friends?’
The idea of ‘inappropriate friends’ – to which Maxwell, nimbly dodging his entreaties, can only reply ‘I have only been able to find appropriate friends’ – is of a piece with the image of Randy Andy, the licentious and uncontrolled Casanova who was once laddishly celebrated for his antics, and now has found himself roundly condemned for them. Yet if this ‘A’ figure – who also complains bitterly about the loss of his valet, saying ‘now my whole life is in turmoil because I have nobody to look after me’ – is indeed the former Duke of York (which is unconfirmed), it only contributes to the reputation-shedding sense of a priapic man-baby who associated with the worst possible people, and damn the consequences.
When the royals gather at Sandringham tomorrow, they may have hoped that the conversation would revolve around happier matters; the king’s recent revelation that his cancer treatment would lessen in intensity in 2026, for instance, and the public reputational triumphs and successes of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Yet the two ghosts will be haunting the festive lunch, and it is unlikely that any toasts will be drunk to absent friends – appropriate or, in the Invisible Man’s wishes, otherwise.
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