Author’s Note: Reflections on a Disgraced Prince and Nobody’s Girl
Some stories leave a residue. They cling to you long after you’ve finished writing, staining your thoughts. This piece on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is one of them, not exactly because of the man himself — a greedy, grubby figure of spectacular, almost tragic, arrogance — but because of the ghosts that surround him, and the institutional rot he so perfectly embodies. And at the heart of that rot is a single, damning fact: the crime he was arrested for is not the crime that matters.
He was not arrested for his decades-long friendship with a prolific paedophile. He was not arrested for the alleged sexual abuse of a trafficked minor. He was arrested for misconduct in public office, for allegedly sharing state secrets with his filthy, well-connected friends. The state acted not when a child was harmed, but when the state itself was threatened. And that is the story. That is why we must never forget Virginia, and all the other girls and women whose lives were deemed less important than the secrets of the Crown. For us, as for so many, the story crystallised on a single evening in November 2019.
We remember curiously watching the Newsnight interview; a prince was going to explain himself. A senior member of the world’s most famous family was going to sit down and clear the air. And then he began to speak…
There was something immediately odd about him — you could sense he’d never had to explain a single thing to anyone in his entire privileged life. He demonstrated a profound, almost unhuman lack of empathy. He spoke of Jeffrey Epstein not as a monster who had destroyed countless lives, but as a social inconvenience, a man
