Reviewing What Is Possible

Paul Knaggs writes:

On Tuesday night, victims minister Alex Davies-Jones told BBC Newsnight that Andy Burnham was “looking into” a public inquiry into the UK activities of Jeffrey Epstein. The Prime Minister would meet Epstein’s victims, she said. He was “taking this very seriously.”

By Wednesday morning, the Press Association had been told that no public inquiry is being actively considered by No.10.

Twelve hours. No statement to Parliament, no explanation to the survivors who had heard a minister of the Crown suggest their day might be coming. An anonymous briefing, delivered before breakfast, closed the door the minister had opened on live television.

Asked about a potential inquiry on Wednesday morning, Justice Minister Jake Richards told Sky News the prime minister “will look into it.”

“He’ll take his time, no doubt, to think about the best route for victims, but also to crucially ensure lessons are learned, to make sure that these sorts of things never happen again,” Richards said.

But in a statement to journalists issued later on Wednesday, a Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “The Prime Minister is committed to meeting with victims, but a public inquiry is not being actively considered.”

The spokesperson said the department is “reviewing what is possible and will look at all options to support victims and survivors.”

Davies-Jones, who accused the previous Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government of failing to listen to Epstein’s survivors, told the BBC’s Newsnight programme Wednesday that Burnham had already agreed to meet the late financier’s victims.

“We are looking into this, we are reviewing what is possible,” Davies-Jones said. “I have been assured that the prime minister is taking this very seriously. He will meet with those victims and he is looking at what is possible, now he has access to all of the information as prime minister to see what action we can take.”

What would an inquiry examine, that it needed strangling in its cot?

Epstein Used British RAF Bases Unchecked 

The proposal on Burnham’s desk came from Labour campaigners on violence against women and girls, whom the BBC’s reporting does not name, and its scope was precise: Britain’s borders, and how a convicted sex offender was able to fly in and out of this country on a private jet, sometimes landing at military airfields, allegedly with trafficked women aboard. An early day motion calling for an inquiry into Epstein’s British links, tabled in February, carries the signatures of ninety-five MPs. This is a parliamentary demand, not a fringe one.

The paper trail already exists. Flight logs obtained by the Telegraph show that in December 2000, Epstein’s Gulfstream flew from Teterboro to Paris, then to Luton, and on 7 December landed at RAF Marham in Norfolk. Aboard were Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and other passengers, one of whom appears in the records as a single word: “female.” No name. No age. Nothing.

From Marham it is twenty miles to Sandringham, where Epstein and Maxwell stayed as guests of the then Prince Andrew before flying out of Norwich three days later.

Marham is not an aerodrome for hire. It is one of the RAF’s frontline stations, home then as now to strike aircraft. Private jets use RAF Northolt routinely; a commercial pilot told the Telegraph that landing at a frontline base was unusual. Someone arranged that landing. Someone approved it. Someone watched the passengers step down and asked nothing.

A BBC investigation has established that 87 flights linked to Epstein arrived at or departed from UK airports between the early 1990s and 2018, some carrying British women who say they were abused by him. Gordon Brown has spent months inside the files released by the US Department of Justice. In February he wrote to six police forces, from the Met to Norfolk, listing nine British airports Epstein used and demanding that airline staff be questioned and Ministry of Defence records handed to investigators. Whatever else is said of Brown, former prime ministers do not write to six police forces about nothing. 

The MoD Lost and Found Epstein Flight Records

The Ministry of Defence has given two answers about Epstein and its airfields, and they sit uneasily together.

When the BBC first asked about the Marham landing, the department said it was standard practice for spare capacity at RAF airfields to be sold to private aircraft, subject to fees, and indicated that no records were available to account for the flights or identify who came through the base.

Then the Justice Department released more than three million pages, the arrests began, and Brown’s letters landed. In late February, Defence Secretary John Healey ordered a review of all departmental records relating to Epstein flights at RAF bases, telling officials to leave no stone unturned across twenty years of documents. The department that could not account for the flights now had two decades of material to search, because while RAF flight logs are reportedly deleted after three months, emails between officials and private travellers are kept.

Sit with that reported detail for a moment. Under the Investigatory Powers Act, this state compels the retention of every citizen’s internet connection records for a year. Your browsing history is a database entry awaiting a request. But the flight log of a sex offender’s jet landing at a strike base was, we are told, routinely wiped inside ninety days.

Five months on, no findings from Healey’s review have been made public.

Epstein’s British Links Reached the Heart of Government 

What the files have already produced is without precedent in modern Britain. In February, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested at Sandringham on his sixty-sixth birthday, on suspicion of misconduct in public office, after released emails appeared to show he sent confidential information to Epstein during his years as trade envoy. He was released under investigation, has been charged with nothing, and denies all accusations. Four days later, Peter Mandelson was led from his London home by plainclothes officers and arrested on suspicion of the same offence, over claims he passed market-sensitive government information to Epstein. He was bailed, faces no allegation of sexual misconduct, and denies any criminal wrongdoing. Both cases are active and both men are presumed innocent.

But the arrests settle one argument regardless of their outcome. This was never celebrity gossip. The Epstein story in Britain runs through the machinery of the state itself: trade envoy trips, government information, military runways. The question an inquiry would ask is the one Tony Benn taught us to ask of all power: in whose interests was it exercised, and to whom were these men accountable?

Part of the answer lies in a room the public has never entered. In the interview tapes released by the Justice Department, Epstein tells Steve Bannon in his own recorded voice how David Rockefeller personally invited him onto the Trilateral Commission, and how he scanned a membership list containing Bill Clinton and “every great leader in America” before writing his own entry: “Jeffrey Epstein, comma, just a good kid.” Keir Starmer joined the same organisation while in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and never registered it with Parliament. Mandelson belonged too. We mapped that network in February and make no claim of conspiracy from membership. The point is narrower and harder: access to Britain of the kind Epstein enjoyed is granted by introduction and reputation, and introductions happen in enclosed rooms, off the record, beyond any electorate. An inquiry worth the name would ask who vouched for him. The vouching happened somewhere.

Andy Burnham’s Hillsborough test and the Epstein decision 

Andy Burnham did not create this. He arrived in July with the wreckage already smoking, his predecessor’s premiership among the casualties of the files. But of all people, Burnham knows what happens when the British state investigates itself reluctantly. His claim is a reputation was built at Anfield in 2009, when he stood before the Hillsborough families as a Labour minister, heard them chant for justice, and then fought inside government for the disclosure that became the Hillsborough Independent Panel. It took twenty-three years for the truth of that day to be established, and it was delay, not ignorance, that kept it buried. 

The survivor Lisa Phillips said this week she hoped a meeting with the Prime Minister would begin a new chapter, one where survivors are heard, and institutions held accountable. Between her saying it and this morning, Downing Street briefed that the inquiry is off the table. 

Every institution with something to lose will tell Burnham an inquiry is unnecessary, disproportionate, a distraction from delivery. The MoD will say it. The Palace will say it. His own party’s elders will say it. They said the same to the Hillsborough families, and Burnham heard them say it, and he knows exactly what it meant. 

The woman on the Marham manifest has been the word “female” for twenty-five years. A state that can produce your browsing history in seconds, enter your bank account and extract money at will, claims it cannot say who she was, and this morning that state decided, anonymously and before breakfast, that nobody should be appointed to find out. Believe that this ends here, and you will believe whatever No. 10 briefs you next.