More To Follow, Indeed

If his very close relationship with Peter Mandelson did not bar Wes Streeting from becoming Prime Minister or even from remaining in office, then this, from The Times, certainly should:

A clinical trial of puberty blockers for children has been paused after “new concerns” were raised by the medicines regulator.

Ethical concerns about the trial mounted as it emerged that children taking part would be asked if they wanted to freeze their sperm or eggs. About 250 girls and boys aged between 10 and 16 were to be recruited.

Puberty blockers are a type of medication called gonadotrophin-releasing hormone analogues (GnRHa), which pause the physical changes of puberty such as breasts, periods or facial hair.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency said: “With all complex clinical trials, MHRA’s top priority is the safety and wellbeing of the trial participants. It is part of the usual process that clinical trials are kept continuously under review and for us to have active scientific dialogue with the trial sponsors.

“The safety and wellbeing of the participants to be recruited into the Pathways clinical trial is paramount, particularly in view of the age of the children and young people who may be involved. For this reason, the MHRA is applying the highest scrutiny and taking a cautious and measured approach.

“We have raised some concerns related to the wellbeing of participants and scientific dialogue will now follow with the trial sponsor. We rely on the best scientific evidence to ensure all trials are as safe as possible for those participating.”

The Pathways trial protocol says that all those participating must be advised about fertility preservation options before starting on the drugs, as the hormone blockers may affect their ability to have children in future.

The trial document says children taking part “will be encouraged to ask questions and explore fertility preservation options” before commencing the drugs.

It says: “The risks to long-term fertility will be discussed with each CYP [child or young person] considering GnRHa by a clinician in or attached to their gender service who has specific training and knowledge about fertility risks and options available to them … The information will include options around sperm donation and egg retrieval.”

More to follow

Real Material Consequences

From Gordon Rayner and Martin Evans in the Daily Telegraph:

Lord Mandelson helped secure the job of UK trade envoy for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor against the wishes of the King.

The then Prince Charles expressed concerns about his brother’s suitability for the role, but the late Queen Elizabeth II overruled him with backing from the former trade secretary.

Mr Mountbatten-Windsor succeeded the Duke of Kent, his first cousin once removed, as special representative for international trade and investment in 2001.

The move was highly controversial because the prince already had a reputation for using his status to travel the world playing golf and was considered by many critics to be an unreliable playboy.

One newspaper headline at the time described the appointment as “another royal accident waiting to happen”.

Lord Mandelson, however, intervened, saying that the then Duke of York was “well qualified” for the role.

The two men knew each other by that point, having both worked on an NSPCC campaign.

Both also knew Ghislaine Maxwell and were friends with Evelyn de Rothschild, the City financier, and his wife Lynn, who in turn were friends with Epstein.

Maxwell, who is serving a jail sentence for child sex trafficking for Epstein, was photographed with Mr Mountbatten-Windsor at a “hookers and pimps” Hallowe’en party in New York before he was given the trade role.

She was also friends with Lord Mandelson, who had worked as a consultant for her father Robert, the one time owner of the Daily Mirror.

In 2000, both Mr Mountbatten-Windsor and Lord Mandelson were guests at the wedding of the Rothschilds.

According to Maxwell, Lynn Rothschild first introduced the former prince to Epstein in the early 2000s, and it was at the Rothschilds’ summer house in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, that Lord Mandelson was introduced to Epstein in 2001.

When concerns about Mr Mountbatten-Windsor’s forthcoming trade role were raised in 2001, Lord Mandelson, who was close to Sir Tony Blair, then the prime minister, said: “As a former trade secretary, I know of the great importance of trade missions.

“With a royal association, they can achieve a reach into overseas foreign markets which is of immense value to the economy of the country.

“In that context, the Duke of York will have a very important role, for which he is well qualified.

“This activity on behalf of the nation should not be confused with the commercial activities for personal gain which is associated with certain other members of the Royal family.”

Dozens of MPs unsuccessfully pushed for a register of royal interests to be established in order to keep a check on any potentially compromising business dealings by members of the Royal family.

In 2011, Mr Mountbatten-Windsor was forced to give up his trade role over his links with Epstein.

He was stripped of all of his titles last year when it emerged that he had lied about when he cut off contact with the convicted paedophile.

On Thursday, he was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office following the publication of emails he sent to Epstein allegedly containing confidential information.

They included a memo on investment opportunities in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, where deposits of gold and uranium had been found, and where reconstruction work was being carried out by the Department for International Development following the war with the Taliban.

Following the publication of the latest batch of Epstein Files, Scotland Yard began an investigation into allegations that Lord Mandelson had passed sensitive government and market information to Epstein when he was business secretary.

On Feb 7, detectives from the Metropolitan Police’s specialist crime team carried out raids on two properties linked to the former Labour grandee.

The force confirmed that the raids were part of its ongoing investigation into allegations of misconduct in public office, but Lord Mandelson was not arrested. Officers were seen removing files, documents and computers from the properties, in Wiltshire and the Regent’s Park area of central London.

At the time, Dept Asst Commissioner Hayley Sewart, of the Met Police, said: “This will be a complex investigation, requiring a significant amount of further evidence gathering and analysis. It will take some time to do this work comprehensively, and we will not be providing a running commentary.”

To Henry Dyer and Dan Sabbagh in The Guardian:

A Labour minister who claimed to be “surprised” and “furious” at a PR agency’s work to investigate journalists on his behalf had been personally involved in naming them to British intelligence officials and falsely linking them to pro-Russian propaganda, The Guardian can reveal.

Josh Simons, who was running the thinktank Labour Together at the time, was also involved in telling security officials that another journalist was “living with” the daughter of a former adviser to Jeremy Corbyn. Officials were told by Simons’ team that the former adviser was “suspected of links to Russian intelligence”.

The extraordinary disclosures are contained in emails that Simons and his chief of staff at Labour Together sent to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), a division of the spy agency GCHQ, in 2024. A spokesperson for Simons, a Cabinet Office minister, said: “These claims are untrue.”

The emails, seen by The Guardian, lay out in detail what Simons and his team wrote to intelligence officials in an effort to get them to investigate the sourcing behind a story in the Sunday Times about Labour Together’s failure to disclose political donations.

When informed by The Guardian about what had been communicated about them to intelligence officials, some of those named in the emails accused Simons of orchestrating a “McCarthyite smear” campaign that left them feeling “violated”.

Simons commissioned an American lobbying and public affairs agency, APCO Worldwide, in late 2023 to investigate the “sourcing, funding and origin” behind the story.

He has in recent days claimed he was disturbed to find the APCO report had delved into unnecessary information about one of the Sunday Times journalists. But the emails show how, weeks after receiving the report, he was involved in naming the same journalist in an email to intelligence officials.

Simons and his chief of staff at the thinktank, Ben Szreter, told the NCSC they suspected the Sunday Times article may be linked to a wider “coordinated effort to discredit” Labour Together in order to undermine Keir Starmer and his then chief adviser, Morgan McSweeney.

Simons has been facing calls to resign over his decision to commission the APCO report into the story, which revealed fresh details about the £730,000 of undeclared donations to Labour Together.

The Electoral Commission had fined the thinktank more than £14,000 for failing to declare the donations. At the time of the undeclared donations, Labour Together was run by McSweeney. He used it in an effort to defeat Corbyn’s leftwing faction of the party and propel Starmer to power.

Simons is under investigation by the Cabinet Office’s propriety and ethics team, which is looking into his role in commissioning and disseminating the APCO report. His spokesperson declined to say whether Simons had disclosed his emails with intelligence officials, which cover a two-week period in January and February 2024, to the Cabinet Office team investigating him.

Facing growing pressure in recent days, Simons has said in statements to the press that he was “surprised”, “shocked”, “distressed” and “furious” to discover the report he commissioned had “extended beyond the contract by including unnecessary information about Gabriel Pogrund”, a journalist at the Sunday Times. He added that the information relating to Pogrund had been “immediately removed” by Labour Together before the report was passed on to intelligence officials.

However, the emails seen by The Guardian show that when Simons and Szreter passed the report to intelligence officials, they named Pogrund and his Sunday Times colleague Harry Yorke and suggested their story could be linked to a Russian disinformation campaign.

They also passed on highly personal information about Paul Holden, a freelance reporter who was credited in the Sunday Times report. In one email, Simons told officials that material published by the Sunday Times may be linked to “people known to be operating in a pro-Kremlin propaganda network with links to Russian intelligence”.

There is no credible evidence any of the journalists were involved in a pro-Russian campaign, or that their story, published in November 2023, was anything other than a public interest report on the prominent thinktank’s breach of electoral law.

‘Likeliest culprit is the Russian state’

The emails show Simons approached the spy agency in January 2024 in an apparent attempt to persuade it to investigate the sourcing behind the Sunday Times story.

Earlier that month, Simons had received the 58-page dossier he had commissioned from APCO. The contract stipulated that APCO would, for £36,000, provide “a body of evidence that could be packaged up for use in the media in order to create narratives that would proactively undermine any future attacks on Labour Together”.

As the investigative news site Democracy for Sale revealed earlier this month, APCO’s report suggested – without evidence – that the Sunday Times story was based on data hacked from the Electoral Commission, which it linked to Russia.

On 23 January 2024, Simons contacted the NCSC with information. A source close to Simons told The Guardian the approach was “to report concerns” that information in Holden’s book may have been obtained following an illegal hack.

When officials requested further information, the emails show, Simons replied: “I will review your questions with my team immediately and come back to you as soon as possible.”

Two days later, his chief of staff, Szreter, emailed the intelligence officials a response to their questions, attaching a truncated version of the APCO report and copying Simons into the thread.

Szreter’s email to the NCSC was written under the direction of Simons, according to a source close to the Labour minister. The chief of staff was “basically a PA”, the source said, and his emails to the NCSC paraphrased and quoted excerpts of the APCO report. A second source confirmed Szreter’s email was “drawn directly” from the report.

The email sketched a theory about the origins of the Sunday Times’s story on Labour Together, which he wrote was a “thinktank close to senior Labour party figures including Sir Keir Starmer and his adviser, Morgan McSweeney”.

The email noted the Sunday Times story had been “written by Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke” and pointed out it had credited Holden as having provided documents, which were also going to form the basis of a book by Holden and articles to be published by an American journalist.

“We suspect that the articles may be a coordinated effort to discredit Labour Together in order to undermine Mr McSweeney and, by extension, Mr Starmer in the run-up to next year’s general election,” wrote Szreter, who is now a Labour special adviser.

“We do not believe that any of the sensitive and closely guarded Labour Together information was leaked by an insider. We believe we have been the victim of a hack by ‘hostile actors’. As the information was disseminated to pro-Russian journalists linked to other ‘hack and leak’ operations, we believe that the likeliest culprit is the Russian state, or proxies of the Russian state.”

By then, GCHQ had identified China – rather than Russia – as being behind the hack of the Electoral Commission. In their emails, Simons and Szreter made other spurious connections to Russia, based on Holden’s private life.

“We understand that Paul Holden, the pro-Corbyn investigative journalist who obtained the documents, is currently living with Jessica Murray,” Szreter wrote. “Jessica Murray is daughter of Andrew Murray, a political adviser to Corbyn during his leadership of the Labour party. Andrew Murray is a highly controversial figure who is suspected of links to Russian intelligence by MI5.”

In the author’s note of his recently published book, Holden discloses “in the interests of transparency” that he has a family relationship with Andrew Murray, who is his partner’s father.

However, at the time of Labour Together’s emails to the NCSC, Holden’s relationship with Murray’s daughter was not publicly known. Contacted by The Guardian, Holden said that due to his role working on sensitive investigations, he had taken steps to protect the identity of his home address.

“It is hugely disturbing [that] this investigation even found out where I lived and with whom,” Holden said. He accused Simons of seeking to smear him in an “absurd and chilling” episode that “could have had real material consequences for ongoing sensitive work”.

A source familiar with APCO’s investigation said that Trace IQ, a fraud investigation tool, had been used to identify Holden’s home address and the names of other residents living there. APCO has been approached for comment.

In his emails with the intelligence officials, Simons also alleged that Holden, who is a member of the National Union of Journalists, was “part of a far-left network … which disseminates pro-Russian propaganda”.

Holden told The Guardian the claims were absurd, saying he and his colleagues had “faced legal and extra-legal threats” as a result of their investigations into Russian oligarchs. He added: “[I think] it shows just how scared Labour Together were about my investigations into what really mattered: the deeply suspect circumstances around the failure to declare £730k in donations in violation of the law.”

Holden’s partner, Jessica Murray, said she was a “private person” and felt “deeply violated and vulnerable” after learning of the efforts to find where she, Holden and their young family lived. “To then connect it to false allegations about Russian criminality, which are then relayed to the security services, is disturbing, creepy and deplorable,” she said.

Andrew Murray said: “The allegation that I have or have ever had any links with Russian intelligence is a lie.”

He added: “This appears to be a McCarthyite smear by Josh Simons, who is clearly unfit to hold any form of government or public office, to attempt to divert attention from the failures of Labour Together to comply with electoral law and to prompt a spurious security service investigation based on nothing more than innuendo and falsehoods.”

Allegations briefed to papers

After a brief assessment, the NCSC decided not to investigate the allegations made by Labour Together about the origins of the Sunday Times story. In the emails, Simons appeared frustrated when intelligence officials did not address his concerns.

In an email on 31 January 2024, he told security officials: “Our evidence suggests that sensitive personal and political information obtained in this hack that was only held by the Electoral Commission and our lawyers has been disseminated to people known to be operating in a pro-Kremlin propaganda network with links to Russian intelligence.

“This has serious implications for British democracy and national security. The information obtained, we believe, could be used to destabilise and disrupt the UK electoral process.” He implored the officials to take action, adding that Labour Together’s information revealed the risk of “an attack on the UK political realm ahead of a general election”.

Simons added: “If NCSC do not wish to engage further, could you advise on the appropriate public body who can help to ensure Labour Together has not been caught up in a hack by a hostile actor on the regulator of UK election.”

The Guardian understands that the NCSC had a meeting with Simons, but ultimately advised him they would not investigate his report. They also pointed out that information leaked to journalists could have been obtained in various ways.

Simons appears to have been undeterred. In the following days, Labour Together and its representatives are understood to have briefed national newspapers – including The Guardian – with allegations about Holden, hacked material and Russia.

At the time, Holden was approached for comment. None of the allegations Labour Together was circulating about him were published by any news organisation. Holden recently showed The Guardian his source materials, which indicate the story was based on files leaked from the Labour party by whistleblowers.

Security Detail

As civilians, of course the Police should have the right to strike, which they enjoy even in the United States. At the same time, though, the great Paul Knaggs makes a point that I have been making since Prince Harry admitted to Class A drug use:

The Crown’s Bodyguards: Who Were They Really Protecting?

When Prince Andrew’s security detail watched him befriend a convicted paedophile, who were they serving? The public who paid them, or the prince who commanded them? Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the man formerly known as Prince Andrew, has finally lost his titles. The Duke of York, Earl of Inverness, Baron Killyleagh, all gone. Buckingham Palace, in an unusually blunt statement, cited “serious lapses in judgment” concerning his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The palace confirmed the King has “initiated a formal process” to remove the titles, and Andrew must now vacate Royal Lodge for “alternative private accommodation.”

Fine. About time. Now, where were the armed police officers we paid to watch him?

These weren’t bystanders. They weren’t palace servants. They were Metropolitan Police officers from the Royalty and Specialist Protection command (RaSP), armed, highly trained, and on the public payroll. Sworn constables bound by law, force policy, and the College of Policing’s Code of Ethics. Their job, their legal duty, was to protect life and uphold the law. Not reputations. Not royal privilege. The law.

So where were they when their principal, this senior royal they were paid to protect, maintained a years-long friendship with a man convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor? What did they see? What did they report? And to whom?

The answer, it seems, is nothing, nowhere, and no one who mattered.

The Officers Who Saw Everything and Said Nothing 

Let’s be precise about who these officers are and what they’re supposed to do. RaSP sits within the Metropolitan Police’s Protection Command under the Directorate of Specialist Operations. The command structure is clear and hierarchical: officers report to a Chief Superintendent who commands RaSP, who reports to the Commander of Protection Command, who reports to the Assistant Commissioner for Specialist Operations (Laurence Taylor), who reports to the Deputy Commissioner, who reports to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police (Sir Mark Rowley), who is accountable to the Home Secretary and the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime.

This isn’t ambiguous. These are police officers with a clear chain of command that leads directly to the Home Office. They are state assets, funded by the public through the Sovereign Grant, which itself comes from the Crown Estate’s income and is approved by Parliament. When we talk about Andrew’s security detail, we’re talking about public servants spending public money.

And their mandate extends far beyond standing next to someone looking tough. Close Protection Officers are trained in threat assessment and risk management. They analyse their principal’s daily routine to identify vulnerabilities. They assess risks associated with specific locations and travel. They research past threats and incidents. They plan for contingencies. They are, in essence, the Crown’s intelligence antennae, tasked with identifying and mitigating risks, including self-inflicted ones.

In the context of protecting senior royals, “risk” doesn’t just mean assassination attempts. It means threats to national security, diplomatic relations, and the institutional standing of the Crown. Protecting the integrity and reputation of the monarchy is an implicit component of their mandate. These officers weren’t just there to take a bullet. They were there to prevent Andrew from doing exactly what he did: dragging Britain’s institutions through the mud.

So when Prince Andrew maintained contact with Jeffrey Epstein months after Epstein’s release from prison in July 2009, when he exchanged emails in April 2010 expressing a wish to “catch up in person,” his security detail knew. They had to know. They were always present. That’s the job.

And they said nothing. Or if they said something, it went nowhere. Either way, the system failed catastrophically.

The Woman Who Had the Run of the Palace 

The most glaring operational failure involves Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s primary associate and convicted accomplice. Former RaSP officer Paul Page testified that Maxwell was granted such “free access to the palace” that the security team internally speculated she and Prince Andrew were in an intimate relationship.

Read that again. Ghislaine Maxwell, a woman publicly known to be Epstein’s closest associate, had unrestricted access to royal residences secured by armed police officers whose job included strict gatekeeping protocols. This wasn’t a lapse. This was policy. Someone, somewhere in that command structure, made the decision that Maxwell’s presence represented no threat worth preventing.

Either they were catastrophically incompetent at identifying a severe reputational security risk, or they made a deliberate decision to ignore it because the principal wanted her there. Neither option is acceptable. Both represent a fundamental failure of duty.

These residences are taxpayer-funded. The security is taxpayer-funded. And we paid for officers to stand aside whilst Epstein’s accomplice came and went as she pleased, normalising Andrew’s entanglement with a criminal network within secure, public buildings. 

The Prince Who Treated Police Like Lackeys 

Understanding how this happened requires understanding the environment these officers worked in. Former protection officer Paul Page described Andrew as “the most difficult and unpleasant to deal with,” detailing instances where he was “verbally abusive” towards staff. One notorious anecdote involved his precise arrangements for “50 or 60 soft toys” on his bed, with failure by staff to return them to exact order eliciting shouting and abuse.

This wasn’t eccentricity. This was a system of control. By creating an environment where protection officers risked professional or personal conflict by challenging his decisions or reporting compromising activities, Andrew effectively neutralised their ethical obligation to report behaviour detrimental to the state. He turned sworn police officers into acquiescent facilitators. He blurred the line between state protector and personal servant until the distinction disappeared.

And his command, from the Chief Superintendent through to the Commissioner, allowed it. They allowed their officers to be co-opted into a system of royal whim. They allowed professional boundaries to erode until police integrity became subordinate to royal preference.

 This is the environment in which the most damning allegation emerged.

When a Prince Allegedly Turned Police Into Private Investigators 

In 2011, reports claim that ‘Prince Andrew’ asked an officer assigned to his detail to “dig up dirt” on Virginia Giuffre, who had accused him of sexual abuse when she was 17. The alleged request involved Andrew supplying confidential data, Giuffre’s date of birth and Social Security number, hours before a UK newspaper was set to publish a photograph linking him to her. The objective was reportedly to find a criminal record or damaging information to discredit his accuser.

If confirmed, this represents the most severe level of institutional compromise imaginable. It’s not just unethical. It’s potentially criminal.

Using police databases or accessing official information for a principal’s private defence is gross misuse of state authority. Accessing personal confidential data without legitimate policing purpose violates UK data protection law. Seeking illegally accessed information to discredit a victim potentially constitutes perverting the course of justice or harassment.

The Metropolitan Police confirmed they were “actively looking into claims” that Andrew made this request. That was years ago. There has been no public disclosure of the investigation’s outcome. No statement about whether the officer complied. No announcement of disciplinary action taken or not taken.

This silence is deafening. When serious allegations of police misconduct arise concerning an officer attached to a figure of royal privilege, transparent resolution is essential. The continued silence suggests institutional protection, that the investigation’s outcome was buried to avoid embarrassing disclosures. It ensures no one is held accountable for allegedly compromising their duty to serve the Prince’s private interests.

And it gets worse. Court documents revealed that Met officers allegedly frustrated legal procedures in 2021 by initially refusing to accept papers intended to serve a civil suit against Andrew. Not just failing to prevent his misconduct. Actively shielding him from legal process.

The Accountability Vacuum 

Here’s the real scandal within the scandal: we can’t properly scrutinise any of this because of “security concerns.” Government policy strictly prohibits disclosure of security costs or protective arrangements, justified by national security. While HM Treasury is accountable to Parliament for Sovereign Grant expenditure, and the Comptroller and Auditor General audits the accounts, parliamentary scrutiny of security spending itself is severely limited.

This creates what can only be called an Accountability Vacuum. Taxpayer funds, estimated at up to £3 million annually based on the cost of Andrew’s replacement private security, were spent protecting a man who brought disgrace on the nation. When he engaged in demonstrably high-risk, reputationally damaging behaviour, the democratic mechanisms for questioning whether this expenditure was justified or effective were disabled by secrecy policy.

The mechanism designed to ensure operational security functioned as a shield, insulating inadequate risk management and institutional negligence from democratic review precisely when it was most needed.

Who Did They Serve? 

This is the question that won’t go away. These officers had a choice at multiple points. When Andrew maintained contact with Epstein after his conviction. When Maxwell had free access to royal residences. When Andrew allegedly requested illegal use of police data. At each juncture, they could have reported up the chain of command. They could have refused orders that violated police standards. They could have protected the integrity of the Crown and the state rather than the convenience of one entitled royal.

They didn’t. Or if they did, their reports went nowhere, which is just as damning of the command structure.

The only logical conclusions are either catastrophic incompetence, officers so poorly trained or managed that they couldn’t identify obvious risks, or deliberate subordination of police duty to royal privilege. Either the system failed through negligence, or it worked exactly as designed: to protect royals from consequences whilst spending public money doing it. 

The Cost We Bear 

Andrew no longer receives publicly funded protection. He must now pay for private security himself, though reports indicate King Charles will foot the £3 million annual bill. The public no longer bears the direct cost. 

But we bore it for years whilst Andrew’s behaviour escalated. We paid for officers to facilitate his friendship with a convicted sex offender. We paid for security at residences where Epstein’s accomplice came and went freely. We potentially paid officers who may have misused police systems for Andrew’s private benefit.

And we’ve received no accounting. No explanation. No apology. No assurance that reforms have been implemented to prevent this happening again.

The officers involved remain unnamed and apparently undisciplined. The command structure that oversaw this failure remains intact. The Home Office, which is ultimately accountable for Metropolitan Police conduct, has offered no transparency about what went wrong or how it’s being fixed.

What We Deserve 

A Metropolitan Police statement explaining the professional obligations of protection officers when a principal associates with convicted offenders, and how concerns are escalated.

Home Office transparency on how reputational and ethical risk factors into protection decisions for public figures, not operational details, just policy.

Publication of the investigation’s findings into the “dirt digging” allegations concerning Virginia Giuffre. Full transparency about whether laws were broken, whether discipline was imposed, whether the system worked or failed.

Confirmation of whether any changes have been made to RaSP protocols to prevent this happening again.

And ultimately, a public inquiry. Not into Andrew, his disgrace is established. But into the institutional failures that allowed publicly funded police officers to facilitate, enable, or turn a blind eye to behaviour that brought the Crown and the nation into disrepute.

Because here’s what this comes down to: these were our police officers, paid with our money, bound by our laws. When they stood next to Prince Andrew, were they serving the public interest or royal privilege? When they watched him maintain friendships with convicted criminals, were they protecting the Crown’s integrity or one man’s reputation? When they allegedly misused police systems at his request, were they upholding the law or breaking it for someone who thought himself above it?

We paid for protection that protected the wrong thing. We funded security that secured royal convenience rather than institutional integrity. We employed officers who, whether through intimidation, incompetence, or corruption, failed in their most basic duty: to serve the public, not the prince.

Andrew has lost his titles. He should have lost them years ago. But until we get answers about the officers who watched it all happen, who were there for every compromising decision, who had the power to report and apparently chose not to, we haven’t addressed the real scandal.

It’s not just that a prince befriended a paedophile. It’s that the police we paid to protect us from exactly this kind of disgrace either couldn’t or wouldn’t do their job. And someone, somewhere in that chain of command from Andrew’s detail through to the Home Secretary, decided that was acceptable.

When close protection police officers, sworn to uphold the law, stand by whilst their principal allegedly breaks it, who are they protecting? When they shield royals from consequences whilst working people face them for far less, whose side are they on? And when public funds pay for private privilege, who really serves whom? These aren’t rhetorical questions. They demand answers. And until we get them, every claim that British justice applies equally to all remains the lie Andrew’s security detail helped him live.

Andrew’s so-called indiscretions were witnessed, and the people witnessing them are in the public’s employ, not the royals.

Anyone for a republic?

Only if these things never happened in them. Otherwise, why change?

Ruled Out

There are no rules anymore. Ann Limb retains her peerage. Peter Mandelson is still on the Privy Council. Yvette Cooper, Steve Reed and Josh Simons are all still in office. Neither Mandelson nor Simons has been arrested. Mandelson's close friend Margaret Hodge is being lined up to chair Ofcom; as Leader of Islington Council, she not only presided over what amounted to a network of child brothels, but she did so while advertising in The Lady for a nanny.

Antonia Romeo has been appointed Cabinet Secretary. "The Queen of Woke" has been welcomed by Reform UK's probable candidate for Foreign Secretary, Nadhim Zahawi. The Lord Advocate, Dorothy Bain KC, told John Swinney the details of the case against Peter Murrell before they had been made public, prompting it to be delayed until after the Holyrood elections. And on and on it goes.

Resilience and Uncompromising Principle?

An MP from 2010 to 2024, the 56-year-old Jack Lopresti has joined the Azov Brigade. Ukrainians are among the very few people with a safe and legal route to asylum in Britain, so expect an influx from the Ukraine of that and of Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, the Kraken Regiment, and all the rest of the displayers of the Sonnerad, the Wolfsangel, and the plain old Swastika.

That is the Ukraine that in Ternopil has named a football stadium after Roman Shukhevych, on a street named after Stepan Bandera. It is the Ukraine of Andriy Biletsky, to whom “the mission of Ukraine is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival against the Semite-led Untermenschen”. And it is the Ukraine of Pavlo Lapshyn, the 2013 murderer of 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham. Lapshyn went on to put bombs outside three mosques in this country. He belonged, and presumably still does belong, to the Wotanjugend, which is closely allied to the Azov Brigade, being led by its “political ideologist”, Alexey Levkin. In August 2020, Lapshyn pleaded guilty to a count of preparing an explosive substance in his cell.

In Britain, as at least across Europe, the Greens are right behind the war in Ukraine. Of course, they have deep reactionary roots, and they and the Far Right cross over on the ground of paganism, occultism, pseudohistory and pseudoscience. Therefore, it is not merely laughable that Zack Polanski has claimed to be able to hypnotise women to make their breasts grow larger. That is potentially as pernicious as Julius Evola. Likewise, the court of Tony Blair featured Carole Caplin and her clairvoyant mother, the Temazcal of Nancy Aguilar and the stone circle of the wonderfully monikered Jack Temple, Cherie’s BioElectric Shield that had been given to her by Hillary Clinton, and much else besides.

We knew that centrism and right-wing populism were con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war, while Fascism was inherent in both of them, only ever arising by their joint enterprise. We pointed out that they constituted a single milieu. But we were right beyond our worst nightmares. Whereas QAnon hallucinated that God had raised up a deliverer in the person of Donald Trump, the Epstein Class is made up of centrists, right-wing populists, right-wing elitists, and the world’s only famous anarcho-syndicalist and libertarian socialist.

The Epstein Files call to mind Eusebius in Book I, Chapter XXXVI of his Life of Constantine: “But the crowning point of the tyrant’s wickedness was his having recourse to sorcery: sometimes for magic purposes ripping up women with child, at other times searching into the bowels of newborn infants. He slew lions also, and practised certain horrid arts for evoking demons, and averting the approaching war, hoping by these means to get the victory. In short, it is impossible to describe the manifold acts of oppression by which this tyrant of Rome enslaved his subjects: so that by this time they were reduced to the most extreme penury and want of necessary food, a scarcity such as our contemporaries do not remember ever before to have existed at Rome.”

That was Maxentius in 312, on the eve of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, the eve on which Constantine received his famous vision of the Cross. In that Sign, Constantine conquered, and Christendom began, bringing at least some degree of restraint to intercourse with Saint Paul’s elemental spirits, which are Saint John’s fallen angels, and which the human race worships in the absence of Abrahamic monotheism, not as worthy of worship, which they are not, but as deserving of fear, which to an extent they are. They are real, and the startlingly similar accounts and depictions of demons on different sides of the world arise from different people’s and different peoples’ encounters with the same ones. They always return to the fore when the Faith is in retreat.

The extreme depravity did not go underground. It went, as it were, overground, continuing in circles so elite that the rest of us could not usually see them. But we have seen them from time to time, and this is one of those times. Such are both the roots and the fruits of the refusal of the recapitulation in Jesus Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism, and the Roman Empire. In hoc signo vinces.

The Bare Minimum

“Falling inflation” means only that prices are going up by less than the last time that anyone officially checked. They are not coming down.

All this, and 5.2 per cent unemployment, too. Tell us again how there cannot be both mass unemployment and galloping inflation. There can be, there is, and from the point of view of the people responsible, there is supposed to be. Almost all Labour and other MPs regard that as neither a failure nor an accident, but as something to be engineered and celebrated, as it has been and is being, since the fear of destitution is fundamental to their control of the rest of us. They are the Heirs to Blair, whom Margaret Thatcher identified as her greatest achievement.

Thus, while the unemployment rate of 14 per cent among those aged 18 to 24 has arisen without the equalisation of their minimum wage with everyone else’s, the solution is assumed to be the abandonment of the Labour manifesto commitment to that equalisation. 30 years ago, we used to wonder how, if the arguments used against a minimum wage were correct, then County Durham could manage to have both the country’s lowest wages and its highest unemployment. That point was unanswerable. But no one would make anything like it now.

Instead, all parties are far more likely to concur with Clean Up Britain that Universal Credit claimants, one third of whom were in work while another quarter had met the extremely arduous conditions to be found medically unfit for it, should be compelled to spend at least four hours per month picking litter. If there is litter picking to be done, and there is, then it should be someone’s properly paid job. It sometimes is. Are those workers to be sacked and put onto Universal Credit so as to do it for free? We did not work for free in prison. And why does anyone with a full-time job have to claim Universal Credit, as millions do?

Not that anyone is offering any change. Robert Jenrick texted a copy of yesterday’s speech to George Osborne, generous host of Peter Mandelson, with the message: “George, trust you’re well. Here’s a copy of a speech I gave today on the economy. It commits to the OBR and to fiscal responsibility, which I hope you will approve of.” On his podcast with Ed Balls, Osborne responded, “I say yes, I do.”

Butt of Malmsey

And suddenly he can sweat after all. They will have taken his DNA, so they now know for certain whether or not he is a lizard. But none of this is unprecedented, even in recent years. Princess Anne has a criminal record, having been prosecuted by her mother.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is a patrilineal descendant of Elimar I of Oldenburg, yet he has to call himself that. Only the related line of Borbón y Battenberg surpassed this combination of the sublime and the ridiculous, and even that had the House of Bourbon in its name. Mountbatten-Windsor? Cruel and unusual punishment.

In any case, he is at least Lord Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as the son of a Duke, and indeed Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, as the son of Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark. Now, since the Police are on a roll today, did someone mention Peter Mandelson?