From Woking to Whitewash
I was wondering how long it would be before Annabel Denham popped up to defend Andrew again. Denham is a columnist at the Telegraph who spends quite a few column inches trying to persuade us that (ex) Prince Andrew’s really not so bad. Warning us to "Beware the excessive hounding of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor."
Back in October Denham was asking whether she was the “only one feeling sorry for Andrew.” Now here she is again, dismissing his, er, “unbecoming” behaviour as merely immature and arrogant.
I’m not sure whether she’s really, really dim or she just thinks her readers are. It’s true that Andrew hasn’t been convicted of any crime, but that’s because the Metropolitan Police have refused to investigate. And the royal family’s not about to ever have him appear in court. In case she’s forgotten, or failed to do a spot of basic journalistic research before penning her piece – the Firm forked out a reported twelve million quid so Andrew could avoid seeing the inside of a courtroom.
She calls his scandal “seediness,” as if the former Duke of York were caught sneaking a cigarette behind the bike sheds. No matter how slapdash a journalist Denham is, she surely knows that there are credible accusations of criminality against Andrew. Wouldn’t an editor have taken her aside for a quick word in her shell-like when she first submitted her draft?
“Thing is, he was accused of having it off with trafficked girls, not just being friends with Epstein. Be great if we can mention that. Just to keep up the pretence of being a proper paper.”
Andrew was credibly accused of having sex with (that’s one way of putting it) a victim of sex trafficking. How many times do we have to say it? A victim of sex trafficking. A VICTIM OF SEX TRAFFICKING. Virginia Giuffre’s written a whole book about it, if Annabel cares to hear both sides of the story. Everything that followed from Andrew was to cover up that central fact.
When Andrew lied to the nation about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, it was to convince us that it never happened. Just as when he told us he was at Pizza Express in Woking, not having his photo taken with a young Virginia. And when he told us he never saw young women around Epstein – documents and testimony show otherwise: Andrew was not only in Epstein’s homes, he was seen crawling on the floor with girls he apparently never saw. Or when he sanctimoniously said that his role as patron of the NSPCC’s £250 million “Full Stop” campaign, meant he would have noticed anything exploitative or criminal going on.
Never met Virginia Giuffre, despite being photographed with her ... never noticed any girls, despite being photographed with them. I wonder what else he never did, despite being photographed doing it (or even filmed, if rumours are true)?
With his level of attention to detail, are we sure Andrew has even clocked that the word ‘Prince’ has been quietly dropped, or that he’s holed up in Norfolk rather than Windsor? It might explain those grinning photos of him out riding, snapped with perfect irony just as the Epstein files were splashed across the press. Blissful ignorance could be the crown he’s still wearing.
Denham must surely have heard about all this (you know, from proper journalists round the office), yet she still minimises Andrew’s behaviour. It’s almost as if she’s spreading Palace propaganda. She comes for the “character of our society”. Not for failing to investigate a powerful man accused of heinous crimes against vulnerable girls, mind you, but for it’s “priggishness, schadenfreude” and “rush to judgment.”
“What this saga really reveals is not the questionable behaviour of two powerful men, but the character of our society”
Um, not to me Annabel. Not to quite a few of us, actually. No, what it reveals to us is that if you’re powerful enough, if you’re royal enough, you won’t face police investigation much less a court of law no matter what you’re accused of.
Andrew lied. He lied about Pizza Express. He lied about Epstein. He lied about what he saw. Perhaps it’s time for Annabel to consider that maybe he also lied about what he did. Maybe our reaction isn’t “pearl-clutching, hectoring virtue-signalling.”
The public doesn’t need another apologist dressing up abuse as “seediness.” We need justice, accountability, and an end to the grotesque double standards that let a member of the royal family side-step the law while still being treated as a victim of mere gossip.