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Tina Brown's observations, rants, news obsessions, and human exchanges.
Epstein and the New Dirt on Andrew
The Epstein files are like an archeological dig that keeps yielding new veins of awfulness from the same protagonists. Just when sacked UK ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson was planning his comeback from being unmasked as one of Epstein’s fond consiglieres, the new revelations about his sharing government secrets in real time plunged Mandelson into head-smacking, terminal career horror that’s now embroiled him in a police investigation.
Then there’s Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. One might think that the erstwhile Duke of York had no reputation left to lose. Virtually everything he said in his ruinous 2019 BBC interview about ending his ongoing friendship with Epstein has now been exposed as a lie. But the January 30 file dump reveals that Andrew’s conduct as UK trade envoy from 2001 to 2011 has new abominations for us to savor.
Royal Grift
Flashback: For a full decade, HBH, “His Buffoon Highness,” as he was known around the British Foreign Office, was allowed to swan around the world on a private plane at government expense, brokering nefarious self-dealing side deals with dodgy oligarchs and partying at their homes with big-breasted beauty queens. Andrew’s adhesive contact with a string of international lowlifes like the late Saif Gaddafi, son of the Libyan despot, and the onetime Tunisian dictator’s billionaire son-in-law Mohamed Sakher el Materi, later sentenced to sixteen years for corruption, was the despair of the British diplomatic corps. A 2011 letter sent to Downing Street by former UK ambassador to Tunisia Stephen Day reflects official panic. “Materi was, as we all know, the worst of all the crooks in the presidential family,” wrote Day, on learning that Andrew had hosted this insalubrious figure for lunch at Buckingham Palace. “Thank goodness there was time for the press to be told it was not done on official advice.” Andrew courted more reputational risk goose-hunting with the then-Kazakhstan strongman, Nursultan Nazarbayev, whose son-in-law inexplicably paid £3 million more than the £12 million asking price for Andrew’s white-elephant property Sunninghill Park. “Kazakh oligarchs are the sort of people we generally don’t touch with a bargepole,” a source at Coutts, the Queen’s bank, commented when Andrew tried to hook them up with one of his Kazakh associates. Andrew’s lack of any “discernible mental activity upstairs,” as one senior Tory put it, was as much on display on home turf when he couldn’t comprehensibly articulate his pitch for fewer traffic lights to then-London mayor Boris Johnson. After the lunch with Andrew, Boris commented, “I’m the last person to be a republican, but fuck. If I ever have to spend another lunch like that, I soon will be.”
In light of this history, former UK business secretary Sir Vince Cable’s comments last week that Andrew’s “totally unacceptable” behavior warranted a full police inquiry might feel a day late and a dollar short. But now, the Epstein files show that Andrew was not simply a useful idiot for Epstein’s socio-business climbing; he was all but an Epstein embed, facilitated by a palace aide named David Stern, who seems to have regarded Epstein as as much his boss as Andrew was.
In a June 2013 message, Stern wrote to Epstein: “PA [Prince Andrew] in Silicon valley on 25. & 26 June. Anyone you want him to see?”
Epstein wrote back, “Yes, Steve Sinofsky,” CCing the former Microsoft executive.
Sinofsky responded: “Please let me know how I can help.”
In November 2015, ahead of a trip to Asia, Stern emailed Epstein about new Barclay CEO Jes Staley. “On my way to Asia with PA,” he wrote. “Any news from Jes?”
Epstein answered: “Have PA invite him to the palace etc.”
“Sitting with PA in Vietnam,” Stern wrote. “He just texted Jes. You may want to check.”
Stern wrote Epstein weeks later, “Jes told PA to meet in Jan when he’s settled in.”
And in November 2010, Andrew forwarded official reports from visits to Hong Kong, Singapore, Vietnam, and China to Epstein five minutes after he received them. In December 2010, just three weeks after that notorious stay at Epstein’s New York house—the purpose of which, Andrew claimed, was to end the relationship in person because he “felt it was the honourable and right thing to do”—he forwarded Epstein a confidential brief on gold and investment opportunities in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. Jesus.
Slime Time
It was Epstein’s gift to convert the insecurities of his marks into a strangely abject desire to service his reptilian demands with useful information. One can picture the tousle-haired pedo sitting in his sweats at his emperor’s desk in Manhattan, pecking out his terse, typo-laden communiqués to the needy titans and wannabes twisting in his net. Epstein always knew the right psychic buttons to press. He exploited Andrew’s grievance as the ever-descending second royal son. He made the deluded duke feel that he had joined the big time: the deals, the girls, the plane, the sexy Manhattan world, no longer tied to the bank of HRH Mummy.
But Mummy, alas, was the key to the worsening Andrew debacle. Foreign Office dismay with the Duke of York’s conduct could never penetrate the royal enclosure Queen Elizabeth had erected around her favorite son. And her closest courtiers strenuously avoided telling her things they knew she did not want to know. As a former adviser told me, “I remember once being told, don’t ever give the queen a difficult decision to make because she’ll have to answer to that.” And Prince Philip, her brusque, forbidding consort, usually the family disciplinarian, the adviser said, was “too damn intimidating.” He was “properly scary, so people wouldn’t have bothered him with it, because he might have just said, ‘Oh, fuck off.’ ”
It was only after the New York Post published the infamous December 2010 photo of Andrew and Epstein strolling in Central Park that Queen Elizabeth’s trusty private secretary Christopher Geidt gave a quiet nod to the Foreign Office that Andrew’s days as international trade ambassador were over. Thank God, because in March came the publication of the even more damning photo of a grinning Andrew with his arm hornily round the waist of the then-17-year-old Epstein trafficking victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre. The picture’s timing could not have been worse. The impending April nuptials of Prince William and Kate Middleton had to be protected from any sleaze from the imploding House of York. Queen Elizabeth acted with a deft sleight of hand, bestowing on Andrew the highest gong of all, the Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, and the hounds of hell from the tabloid press went suddenly quiet. It’s unsettling to think that the Epstein cover-up class had reached as high as Buckingham Palace itself.
Norfolk Non Grata
But not anymore. Poor, beleaguered King Charles now has to keep demonstrating fresh ways to show he’s appropriately appalled. Having stripped Andrew of every title and booted him, under the cover of darkness, out of the 30-room Windsor mansion, Royal Lodge, the king took the dramatic step last week of saying he will cooperate in any police investigation of his brother. In the Epstein files, we learn that two members of Andrew’s private protection detail, as their duties dictated, had to stay with their boss at the pedophile’s Manhattan townhouse on that fateful visit in December 2010. If they are required to testify, Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor’s goose could be cooked.
Andrew, for the moment, is holed up in Prince Philip’s old haven from the world, Wood Farm, on the Sandringham estate, while the much gloomier, ramshackle Marsh Farm, on the edge of the royal property, is prepared for his arrival. It’s unlikely Andrew will be granted membership at any of the snooty golf courses on the Norfolk coast. (Nominating committee to Andrew: “Is there anything about your application that might bring unwelcome publicity to our club’s reputation?”) And his other favorite pastime, horse riding, faces the snag that there are only racehorses stabled at Sandringham. The king is said to be considering the unwelcome thought that he might have to pay for a couple of nags and a groom to keep Andrew out of trouble. Marsh Farm, meanwhile, is located on flood-prone, low-lying land. “It’s in a frightfully precarious position,” one of his new Norfolk neighbors said, without regret. “If the waves break through the walls, there’s a very good chance it will be swept out to sea.”
Tina Brown's observations, rants, news obsessions, and human exchanges.
Why am I here?
Welcome everyone to my Substack diary which is simply a place - in the third trimester of my life (as I prefer to think of it) - to unload my observations, rants, news obsessions, and human exchanges with the wildly eclectic cast of characters who populate my seething inbox.
I’ve been a transatlantic media diva for close to four decades – editor in chief of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Talk, founder of The Daily Beast news site, and The Women in the World Summits, author of two best-selling royal tomes The Diana Chronicles and The Palace Papers, and The Vanity Fair Diaries, creator of Truth Tellers, an annual investigative journalism summit in London in honor of my late fabulous newspaperman husband Sir Harry Evans. Thanks to the crazy creative roller coaster of my life, I’ve collaborated and collided with so many great writers, culture shapers, newshounds, and iconoclasts over the years. So at a time when we awake every day to a news alert from Hades, I now have a place to share some of my intel and invite you to join the conversation.
What to expect
Mostly I shall write in notebook form because Big Think columns require three linked ideas and a pithy conclusion which, after a day of the required intellectual toil, can be instantly erased by some new cloudburst of crap in the unceasing news cycle.
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