Cottage Industry?

There are rather bigger issues in housing than the occupancy of Frogmore Cottage, but Harry 'n' Meghan no longer live in Britain, and they could easily afford an hotel when they came here. Prince Andrew seems the ideal replacement for them. This time next year, you will all be pretending that you had defended him from the first.

I do have a good record of rat-smelling where this sort of thing is concerned. That has nothing to do with liking anyone. The beatification will presumably be the occasion of a Papal Visit to Australia, but if possible I shall be in Rome for the canonisation of Cardinal Pell. To keep Julian Assange's work going, then I would die in his stead. While I am opposed to the marrow of my bones to the political cause to which Alex Salmond has devoted his life, I expect that he and I would get on.

But I doubt that Ched Evans and I would find much to talk about. I know that Freya Heath's victims and I would have more than enough for a very heated discussion indeed. And while I cannot imagine that the United States would allow a white liberal American citizen to be treated as Andrew Tate is being, I am sure that I could stand no more than a few seconds in his company.

Yet I was right about Cardinal Pell, about Assange, about Salmond, about Evans, and about Heath, whose conviction was merely set aside on a procedural technicality. I would not be at all surprised if little or nothing ended up coming of the Tate furore. And it is increasingly obvious that I have been right about Prince Andrew.

After Alan Dershowitz, Virginia Giuffre's credibility was already in free fall. The prosecuting authorities in the United States did not prosecute Ghislaine Maxwell in relation to Giuffre. Prince Andrew should never have given her a penny, and he should get back with interest, costs and a penalty every penny that he had given her.

People who did not happen to think that they were somehow advancing their republican principles by joining in the vilification of Prince Andrew would be fighting his corner just as tenaciously if he were anyone else. Giuffre had to file a civil suit because she would have stood no chance of winning a criminal case in a jurisdiction that still had a proper burden of proof, unlike England and Wales, where, in my direct personal experience, the concept of conviction beyond reasonable doubt has been unilaterally abolished by the judiciary.

Even from his cell, Jeffrey Epstein was still making donations to "Petie" Mandelson. Hey ho, like Epstein before her, Maxwell is now on suicide watch. Prince Andrew is an utterly unimportant person. Epstein's British connection that matters is to Mandelson, who pretty much ran the Labour Party when it was last in government, and who is back running it now, having solicited a large donation from Epstein's cell as a convicted and incarcerated paedophile.

In the meantime, Mandelson has been European Commissioner for Trade, President of the Board of Trade, Lord President of the Council, and First Secretary of State. In all but name, he was Deputy Prime Minister under Gordon Brown, and arguably under Tony Blair as well. Prince Andrew has never even run his own bath. Mandelson, however, is now running Keir Starmer, who is the most inexperienced politician ever to have become the Leader of the Opposition.

Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions when the decision was made not to prosecute Jimmy Savile. Due to Savile's fame and connections, of course it is inconceivable that that decision was made by anyone other than Starmer, just as of course he was sly enough not to have left a paper trail.

And there are the Royal Family and the political elite again. The rest of us live our entire lives without ever encountering a paedophile, yet our betters have the misfortune to trip over them every time that they go out. As with illegal drug use, they extrapolate from their own experience and present such behaviour as normal, not even so much because they want it to be, as because they sincerely believe that it is. 

Although every specific allegation that Jeremy Corbyn was an anti-Semite has been easily refuted, the idea lingers in the air. It never made any electoral difference. Starmer's change to Labour's Brexit policy caused both the 2019 General Election and its outcome, or else an Election last spring would have delivered a hung Parliament with Labour as the largest party. But it was there, and it still is.

The lingering idea of Starmer and "oh, something to do with paedophilia" would, however, have a great deal of electoral cut-through if anyone were prepared to push and twist the knife hard enough. Between Savile and Mandelson, that ought not to be difficult to do. Why did Starmer let Savile off? Why is Starmer so dependent on Epstein's closest associate in Britain, indeed one of Epstein's closest associates in the world? What sort of person therefore wants Starmer to become Prime Minister?

The age of consent in London was and is 16. In New York, it was and is 17. And how prepubescent does the then Virginia Roberts look in the infamous photograph of her with Maxwell and with Prince Andrew? How genuine does that photograph itself look? It has never been tested in court. The more you look at it, the more you think that expert witnesses called by Prince Andrew's London barrister or New York attorney would tear it to pieces.

In relation to Dershowitz, the now Virginia Giuffre has effectively admitted her own incredibility. Prince Andrew should sue everyone who had called him a paedophile, a paedo, a nonce, or anything in that vein. And he should demand the late Queen's money back.