Time to either prosecute Andrew or forget him.

[Bougainsillier]

Firstly let me say I am in NO way defending him; hes clearly completely awful in so many ways. Finally stripped of all titles and position, and dumped over in Norfolk, but still not charged with or found guilty of any crime.

But it’s starting to feel like he’s being tried by the press now to sell stories. Isn’t there enough evidence to prosecute? Is there a cover up? Or can we just leave him to himself now? It’s news headlines endlessly…

Mandelson in the other hand is another matter..

Is anyone on here connected with the police?

One would hope that teams of detectives are trawling the evidence to establish the grounds to bring Andrew in for questioning, and get a sense of whether there is evidence strong enough for an arrest. I understand that there is also more evidence not in the public domain, so perhaps the UK police are having to collaborate with their US equivalents to gain access to this.

There is a lot of evidence to trawl through.

Can anyone assure the public that this is going on behind the scenes?

So if William is acting on government instructions by going to Saudia Arabia and hobnobbing with Mohammed Bin Salman (as I was told the other day by a poster) , why can the government not instruct the RF to come clean with what they know about AMW's doings? Obviously I am well aware that it is not that simple but why can't they?

Some royal commentators are saying that AMW is being characterised as “unstable” by KC3, eg in the recent Sunday Times article, in an attempt to possibly go down the mh route of defence and get him institutionalised somewhere in a comfy “treatment facility” in Switzerland somewhere?

And thinking about it, that would kill two birds with one stone because it would get him out of testifying in the USA and it would prevent him from establishing himself at Sandringham too much, which is the King’s private property, and presumably may be inherited by William sooner than everyone initially thought?

Apparently, renovation work has halted at Sandringham which would fit , but who knows how they are going to combat the increasing pressure from the USA to testify?

I think it would be an absolute disgrace if the RF tried to make out that he is not mentally competent to be investigated or stand trial, because AMW was in perfectly good form when giving the Emily Maitlis interview, indeed he was not distressed at all and thought it had gone well, and the way Lownie describes his activities during his trade envoy years, he was certainly mentally agile enough to enter in to many different complex financial deals and was travelling frequently and had energy leftover to allegedly engage in highly dubious, probably criminal, sexual activities.

I have no doubt whatsoever that AMW is feeling very stressed and upset by his current situation as more details emerge from the Epstein files that validate Lownie’s evidence, but that does not equate to being too mentally incompetent to withstand questioning or stand trial.

They can. But they don't. Partly because they should have been doing it for the past probably 50 years and have failed to do so, so questions would be asked about what Parliament has been doing all this time. George Osborne and David Cameron were asked by David Dimbleby in his documentary why they agreed contracts that were detrimental to the taxpayer and they couldn't answer. This is a much larger derogation of duty. They think we have an absolute Monarchy.

I have no doubt whatsoever that AMW is feeling very stressed and upset by his current situation as more details emerge from the Epstein files that validate Lownie’s evidence, but that does not equate to being too mentally incompetent to withstand questioning or stand trial

While I agree, @Readythiswayplease, it was always likely an "illness" would be brought to bear if a realistic chance arose of Andrew being properly questioned ... in fact as I said when the Epstein thing started to emerge I'm only surprised it hasn't been tried before

Whatever it takes, the Queen "remembering a conversation", files sealed, lies told or anything else, the Windsors won't subject themselves to the impertinence of being questioned by the "little people"

Yes. Probably. There will be some sort of fudge.

The only tiny possibility of there being a trial as far as I see anyway, is if the investigation in to the cover up generates too much heat for the monarch, and/or possibly if more Epstein e-mails reveal even more hideous things, then the KC3 might have to throw AMW to the dogs to save himself. Or abdicate in favour of W.

But I agree that the RF will try and do everything in its power to avoid a trial because it knows that it possibly wouldn’t survive that level of scrutiny.

I agree. And who remembers when the DoJ was trying to serve papers on Andrew years back. He dodged from royal estate to palace to royal estate all with 2 or 3 landrovers trailing after him, security supposedly

It was kinda pathetic. He had to accept the papers in the end

The boys will be boys excuses are nothing to do with him being royal, they are simply the way that a lot of men excuse other men. Men rarely covering their friends or associates about patterns of behaviour that is demeaning or abusive towards women. Wouldn't it be amazing if Charles or William actually came and out and made a public statement about misogynistic attitudes and how they lead to and excuse abuse? If I was running their PR that's what I'd want to see them do, use Andrew to being what is hidden into the public light.

I don't think they will because I think that is for too forward thinking and radical for the culture of the institution at the moment, but a girl can dream.

Really - was William's visit to Saudi Arabia wise when you read this?
Mind you, Bea hosted an afternoon tea in that exact hotel back in October. Did nobody tell her what had happened there a few years previously?

www.middleeasteye.net/news/jeffrey-epstein-was-told-keep-close-eye-saudi-arabia-amid-ritz-carlton-purge

And this sentence from that report is stomach churning;

Among senior Gulf figures, however, it is Dubai Port’s World CEO, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, who figures most prominently. His ties to Epstein have been documented in several emails.
DP World is owned by the emirate of Dubai. It has expanded across the Middle East and Africa with the support of the UAE’s foreign policy. DP World's operations have come under renewed focus amid the UAE's rivalry with Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea.
In one email exchange, Sulayem writes to share his views on the Quran with Epstein before noting that he is “off the sample a fresh 100% female Russian” on his yacht.

Likewise.

There’s more to come out, so it’s not over for Andrew yet…

And at your goverment, and at the six guys named yesterday who are being protected by the American DoJ's redactions, and all those other American guys who flew the Lolita Express.

Instead we get a press laser focused on a guy who had no hand in decisions made by the older generation being asked random questions in an attempt to generate headlines.

I don’t think the UK police will assign ‘teams’ of detectives to this at this stage. It sounds like Thames Valley police is looking into it but I imagine the team might just be 2-3 people at most at this point.

Investigations like this take a long time though as they’d need to verify the evidence that Lownie says he has sent them - plus anything coming out of these millions of Epstein files.

If I was running their PR that's what I'd want to see them do, use Andrew to being what is hidden into the public light
Its obvious their PR has told them that they need to talk about their concern for the victims. The problem is that they cant seem to do it without a written statement, or without minimising, then sounding like they think they are the victims! PR can clearly only go so far when you dont actually give a fuck about anything but saving your own skin.

Because he can do something going forward. Asking if he thinks the RF have done enough keeps the pressure on them to change the way their household behaves and the attitudes within the institution, which is to use the entire establishment to cover up their behaviour They cant just carry on as before and claim they knew nothing and had nothing to do with it. William is next in charge.

Instead we get a press laser focused on a guy who had no hand in decisions made by the older generation being asked random questions in an attempt to generate headlines.
We have been told for years that William is 'the power behind the throne'.

If William is the power behind the throne, then why is everyone complaining that he doesn't work? Shouldn't you be assuming that he's holed up somewhere with lots of monitors running the country? Wouldn't that explain why he isn't opening supermarkets at the drop of a hat?

Because hes shroedingers Prince. Simultaneously ' the power behind the Throne' and completely helpless and unaware of anything going on anywhere in the RF, being forced to shove his wife into the back of a car and drive his pervy uncle around by his mean daddy.

I am hoping that W is furious with the situ, and as outraged as the rest of us at the depraved network these men - including his uncle - built.

I am hoping that the fact that he gets asked these questions when he's just out doing the business-as-usual glad-handing required of him means that he can come back to Windsor and put a rocket up the arses of those who are guiding RF PR at this point.

He - William - needs to get a grip on this situ while he can still claim innocence of the deeds, before he gets further compromised by the cover- up.

Really? What I've been getting is him being frustrated at the glacial pace at which any meaningful change happens.

That didn't stop him telling everyone how he was going to change his own workload when he was King (to do much less). If the Palace move at a glacial pace its because they have too many staff, too many 'yes men' too many properties which they clearly cannot effectively manage and employ people who they don't listen to if they tell them something they don't want to hear. If they cant manage their own households despite having huge numbers of staff, many more than any other public sector organisation then they need to review their procedures and have a clear out of the forelock tugging 'We'll do anything to keep the Monarchy's secrets' courtiers.
Nothing from BP about them lifting a finger to review their own internal practices or preferably get someone else in to review them. Just 'nothing to do with us' and 'we're sooo shocked at the revelations' about something their own staff and lawyers covered up and threatened people over for years, either authorised by the Head of State/ beloved Mummy/Granny or completely without their knowledge, despite their dozens of homes crawling with staff and security personnel. None of them knew a thing until a week ago!

I think that whatever any of us "gets" is dependent on which bit of PR we happen to hear at any given time.

Which is probably why we all believe things that contradict each other.