Show caption A photograph of Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein in Central Park, New York, in 2010 that was headlined ‘Prince & Perv’ by the New York Post. Photograph: Jae Donnelly/News UK Opinion Poor Prince Andrew is ‘appalled’ by Epstein. Let that be an end to it Marina Hyde Perhaps a royal wedding for Princess Beatrice might offer a welcome distraction for a man-of-the-world under unfair scrutiny @MarinaHyde Fri 23 Aug 2019 17.05 BST Share on Facebook

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It’s basically your classic men-of-the-world vignette. Lying in business dress in the New York mansion of his friend Jeffrey Epstein, Prince Andrew is receiving a foot massage from a young, well-dressed Russian woman. Other men are in the room while this is happening, and they include Epstein (also being foot-massaged by a Russian woman) and the literary agent John Brockman, who runs a foundation connecting scientists and intellectuals with billionaires. As the young Russians work on their feet, Andy is complaining about his lot. “In Monaco,” he says, according to Brockman’s account, “[Prince] Albert works 12 hours a day but at 9pm, when he goes out, he does whatever he wants, and nobody cares. But, if I do it, I’m in big trouble.”

Waa waa waa. What could be a more effective heartstring-tugger than “other European princes have it better than me”? It’s right up there with Chandler’s line from Friends: “My wallet’s too small for my 50s, and my diamond shoes are too tight!”

The scene is recalled in an email revealed by Brockman’s soon-to-be former client, the tech author Evgeny Morozov. He is one of many divesting themselves of even tenuous Epstein association in the wake of the billionaire financier’s suicide in a Manhattan jail earlier this month, as he awaited trial for sex trafficking, underage and otherwise.

But what of Andy? Under some scrutiny, he and ex-wife Duchess Fergie private-jetted away from Balmoral last week, then on to the luxury bit of Sotogrande, where they are said to be gracing private barbecues. Briefings suggest, distractingly, that they might be getting back together. Andrew has been snapped on an exclusive golf course. His daughter Princess Beatrice might be getting engaged to her boyfriend. “They’re going to get married,” royal expert Ingrid Seward declared this week, divertingly. “I was told by a member of the family.” So, on go the Yorks. It really is the full fairytale. By which I mean: fairly Grimm.

Back to the foot massage scene, then, where the chaps seem to have got on to Prince Albert’s night-time freedom via the subject of Julian Assange. Brockman reports Andy saying: “We think they’re liberal in Sweden, but it’s more like northern England as opposed to southern Europe.” Is the implication that Swedish authorities investigating sexual assault allegations are being illiberal?

Either way, you don’t get all that nanny state stuff on Epstein’s private Virgin Islands property, reportedly known locally as “Paedophile Island”. Or as Buckingham Palace finally put it in a statement denying any impropriety on behalf of the prince: “The Duke of York has been appalled by the recent reports of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged crimes.”

I’m slightly sorry for the royal flunkies who had to issue this line, given that most of us are suffering eyeball strain from all the rolling we’re doing. Even so, I do feel we need further clarification on what precisely the Duke is appalled by. Is it just the “recent reports”? Because if we’re meant to believe that Prince Andrew is appalled by ALL of the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein – both the ones alleged and the ones he served actual jail time for – then allow me to treat this statement with all the dignity it deserves. To wit: BULL. SHIT. Bullshit Prince Andrew didn’t know what sort of guy his friend was when he was snapped walking with the Tier 1 sex offender, after he got out of jail, in a photo the New York Post headlined “PRINCE & PERV”. Bullshit he didn’t know why his close friend WENT TO PRISON FOR A YEAR, but kept hanging out with him anyway. Bullshit if, as Brockman recounts, he lay on his back in that guy’s house, with a Russian attending to his feet, talking over her head to men of the world about the nocturnal licence afforded to minor European royals, and he didn’t know roughly what he was swimming in. Bullshit. I get we have to pay for Andrew’s lifetime of jollies; but we don’t have to have our intelligence insulted by him.



Please Sorry, your browser is unable to play this video.Please upgrade to a modern browser and try again. Prince Andrew denies sex allegations

I’m not even going to wheel out that old writing device where one says that either Prince Andrew is stupid or deeply compromised, and wonder archly which it is. Guys, he can be both! In fact, the one feeds the other.

The plain fact is that Andrew continued to be friends with Epstein even after he pleaded guilty to procuring an underage girl for prostitution. I guess it was the old she-said, he-said thing. Or as the then-Palm Beach police chief put it: “This was 50-something ‘shes’ and one ‘he’ – and the shes all basically told the same story.” Obviously, Epstein got away lightly with his grotesque plea deal, because 50-something:1 isn’t the ratio you need. Even last year, they still needed 60 accusers to stop Bill Cosby. Donald Trump’s 17:1 she-he ratio is nowhere near enough to keep him from the highest office on the planet.

As for where we go from here, perhaps a multimillion-pound royal wedding would indeed be helpful. It should be quite the opposite. Where Princess Anne pointedly didn’t, Prince Andrew demanded all the titles and trappings for his two daughters – security details, civil list money, full royal weddings – and was furious when denied some of them. Yet Beatrice and Eugenie still live like … well, princesses.

So instead of distracting from the miserable stories of the female attendees of various Epstein mansions, these gilded lives should throw them into even more shameful relief. They suggest the kind of man – and we’ve all met them – who has a two-tier view of the female sex. There is a world for their daughters, hopefully insulated from men like their friend Jeffrey, and then there is another world for the girls who service their friend Jeffrey.

Yet decent, humane people know there aren’t two kinds of women and girls – there are just women and girls. I’m reminded of the climactic line in All My Sons, where the wartime profiteer Joe Keller has been finally made – by his own son’s suicide note – to see how his actions were responsible for the fate of so many other young men. “I think to him they were all my sons,” Keller reflects. “And I guess they were. I guess they were.”

And so with the girls in the stories that swirl around Epstein and his circle, which includes the Duke: either broken, or yet-to-be-broken. But ultimately, breakable. They are all daughters, too, your Royal Highness. The Russian masseuse on your feet, the 17-year-old runaway on whose bare hip you have your hand in that fateful picture in London, the terrified 14-year-old who ran screaming from your great friend’s house in her underwear, who you must have read about at the time, because I did, and I didn’t even know the guy. And all the others. They are each someone’s daughter, or they were once. They all once played at princesses and castles and imagined their own fairytale weddings. Funny how dreams die, isn’t it – and who helps to crush them.