Article from Charles Moore in the DT today.
'When the whole world condemns someone, it is a journalist’s duty to look at the other side. I therefore want to make the case for the Duke of York in his Newsnight interview. If you start from the position of a juror, rather than of our judge-and-jury media, you believe that the accused is innocent until proved guilty. On that basis, Prince Andrew did all right.
Given his state of knowledge at the time, he was not automatically wrong to be friendly with Jeffrey Epstein. It is the misfortune of being a famous person that lots of other famous people want to be your “friend”. Although you should be wary, you cannot always know dark facts about them.
Many famous people were Epstein’s “friends”: that, it turns out, was the way he operated. Prince Andrew seems to have taken Epstein on trust because he (the Prince) was a long-standing friend of Epstein’s friend, Ghislaine Maxwell, who vouched for him. I wonder why the interviewer, Emily Maitlis, did not pursue the subject of Ms Maxwell.
The Duke explained why he went to stay with Epstein to tell him – after the latter’s criminal conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution – that he could no longer have contact with him.
He admitted this had been a misjudgement; but it sounded believable that he had thought that merely telephoning the man would have been “a chicken way of doing it”. If a person has committed a crime, even a foul one, anyone with a Christian upbringing is taught that they must try to forgive and treat that person fairly.
As for Prince Andrew’s denials of meeting Virginia Roberts, drinking and dancing with her, and sleeping with her, they seemed firm and backed by some evidence. The fact that a photograph exists which seems to show him with his arm round her waist does not – in the wicked world of photo-shopping – prove anything. Given the risks involved, it is surely hard to believe that Prince Andrew was lying on this point: if it is proved that he did, that is the end of him.
He was also wise not to speculate on Ms Roberts’s motives. In the interview, he appeared slightly crass, but never nasty. He was not under any duty to express shame about the fate of Epstein’s victims, because his behaviour – if his account is true – never affected any of them.
Overall, he quite convincingly portrayed what it is like to be a well-meaning but not very able minor royal swimming in the shark-infested waters of international fame. His performance was not, to use the phrase everyone now parrots about all interviews with people they don’t like, “a car-crash”.
A fly caught in a web
Nevertheless, the Duke should never have given the interview, and particularly not in Buckingham Palace, which made it look like a matter of state. In his mind, I suspect, it was something seen in isolation – a way of stating his case which could clear the air. He and his advisers seem to have made no allowance for how the BBC – and the media in general – work.
Although he trusted the BBC with the interview, it immediately rubbished him once it had aired. By Monday morning, the Today programme had Nick Robinson trying to browbeat Andrea Leadsom into condemning the Prince, which the shadow minister, Barry Gardiner, going way outside normal political limits, had just done on the same show.
A journalist, who had himself interviewed Prince Andrew in 2017, came on air to say how “arrogant” he was. The usual sharp American lawyers who thrive on such cases popped up to express shock. Emily Maitlis, presumably without consulting the Duke’s office, revealed the background to the interview in a newspaper. The royal fly was caught in the spider’s web.
One could not help being grimly amused by the harrying of the Prince, who has so little power to fight back, by a corporation which for many years ignored the sexual predations of its employee Jimmy Savile. It was Newsnight, the very programme on which the Prince appeared, which ditched its investigation into Savile under pressure from the top of the BBC.
In her piece, Maitlis absurdly claimed that this was a more amazing interview than the famous 1990s ones with the Prince of Wales and with his ex-wife, Diana. This suggests that she prejudged the case against the Duke; if she believed that his only offence was staying with Epstein, she would recognise this as an interesting, but minor story of a man who is only eighth in line to the throne.'
I don't know if PA is innocent or guilty, but I find it hard to credit that a member of the RF, who was also an RN Officer, and would have been trained not to be in compromising situations, should put himself so squarely in one, with all the possibilities of blackmail that that entailed, especially as he has daughters, who would be tainted by this.