159: The Grand Old Duke Of Yuck

0:00Thumbtack presents Home Overwhelm. Everywhere I go in my house, it feels like an unfinished project is heckling me. The uneven grout on the kitchen backsplash stares me down. Do I have to find a specialist to fix that tiling mess? The ripped carpet by the basement door snags my shoe. Do I rip out all the carpet or just replace that section? What do I... Wait. What if I just use Thumbtack? I can find top-rated pros for over 500 home categories and projects. Easily compare prices and read reviews on Thumbtack. Download the app today. When it's time to scale your business, it's time for Shopify. Get everything you need to grow the way you want.

0:37Like, all the way. Stack more sales with the best converting checkout on the planet. Track your cha-chings from every channel, right in one spot. And turn real-time reporting into big-time opportunities. Take your business to a whole new level. Switch to Shopify. Start your free trial today. page 94 the private eye podcast hello and welcome to another episode of page 94 my name is andrew hunter-murray and we're here to discuss all the latest goings-on in and out of the magazine and in the news over the last fortnight i'm here with helen lewis richard brooks and ian hislop helen we turn to you yes uh because we look to you our society correspondent to find out what's been going on with the royal family any news of them recently or have they been maintaining their usual monastic silence.

1:26Do you know the worst thing is that for quite a long time when I particularly when I worked at the Daily Mail everyone used to say that I look like Princess Beatrice in fact my leaving page from the Daily Mail is I'll be off. Anyway the worst thing about it now is that my poor brother turns out he looks like quite a lot like Prince Andrew. Luckily he's in New Zealand so it's fine they don't have the newspapers there. Anyway so I feel a personal involvement in this as a satellite branch of the Yorks. He is now of course Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. He's given up the knight of the garter, he's given up the princedom, he's agreed not to use the titles.

1:57Would you like to know when the relevant legislation for this comes from, for having your princedom taken away, or your titles? 1917. Because, of course, quite a lot of Queen Victoria's grandchildren had got British ducal or princely titles, and had ended up on the wrong side of the First World War, and so there were quite a few people called Ernst, and various variations of that, who got de-princed during the First World War. Wow. So that's the legislation that they will use as a template. Gosh. I mean, the previous version, he had just agreed not to use them. But the statement from the king and queen seemed to imply that they were actually going to move forward with an official debagging and de-princing.

2:38Yes, if you agree not to use them but you've still got them, that seems like a bit of a fudge. He wrote this email, the famous email to Epstein, I think really did for him, which proved that he had lied to Emily Maitlis. You know this one he wrote in 2011 that said... Is that officially unacceptable now? Yeah, right. He said, you know, we're in this together, he'd said, about the photo of Virginia Roberts-Giffray coming out. We're in this together. And it was the one that ended, I hope, will play again soon. But kind of more importantly to our purposes, it also was signed off Andrew York KG, right?

3:10HRH, Andrew York KG. So he had, even in a casual email at that point, Andrew liked to put all of his titles in it. So I do feel that this is a fairly fitting punishment in lieu of any actual other consequences. Yes, I did read that one of the last people to lose the Order of the Garter was Emperor Hirohito just after the Second World War. Wow. Which gives you an idea of the scale of the offence that this is being ranked alongside. So we know he'll be moving house. I mean, he may be moving to New Zealand. It's possible your brother will be getting some lookalike work before too long. Don't know how much in demand that's going to be.

3:44What party, what corporate event. Well, Halloween. but he's going to be plain old Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and I would just say to him it's dangerous putting a middle name in your name because people think you're posher than you are but that probably won't be a problem for him now the reason the reason we're still talking about this is largely of Virginia Jafre's book Nobody's Girl and she took her own life earlier this year before the book came out and it details her life as she put it being a sex slave for Jeffrey Epstein procured by Jelaine Maxwell now in prison serving 20 years she says in the book that she had sex with Andrew three times claim he's always denied but the details that have come out in the book and the details that have come out in other things like the emails of him sending his royal protection officer her name and social security number whether that's to discredit her account or dig up doubt on her I think is not completely clear but it just became clear this was no longer a sustainable situation.

4:44But it hasn't been for years. And is there ever a way this can be put on sustainable footing, short of Andrew cooperating fully with prosecutors in America or whatever that might be? I mean, the interesting thing is lots of it has come out through either court discovery or records being submitted to Congress. So, for example, her memoir was co-written with a journalist. However, bits of it are taken from a previous fictionalized account that she wrote that's called the billionaires playboy cup now this has become quite controversial because that wasn't fact-checked she herself says in the book that some of the details in that were wrong because she was trying to disguise them but it has become you're right there has been a kind of not exactly a full court press but there have been a lot of people kind of questioning the whole content of her story just because of the fact that she has she made mistakes along the way for example she she accused alan dershowitz of sexually assaulting it they then settled that out of court.

5:37The American lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, she accepted that she had never been abused by him. He accepted that she'd made an honest mistake. And if you read the memoir, it's a very difficult read for a number of reasons. One of which is that between it being submitted to the publishers and it coming out, she accused her husband of domestic violence. He denies that. There's litigation ongoing about the estate. But there were kind of clues in the narrative that the relationship wasn't all that happy. There's lots of very volatile arguments. And of course the other thing that comes out is that there's money involved in this.

6:10There's a lot of debate about her settling her estate, for example, and who's entitled to that. In the book she writes about the fact that she was living really scratchy existence in Australia until she got the settlement from Epstein, the initial one, and then the settlement from Andrew. So this really complicates it. And I think she also is, like many abuse victims, obviously deeply traumatized by it that's what emerges from the narrative and hasn't actually always made her case in a kind of completely cast-iron compelling way which again is not unusual in abuse cases. The people who are accusing her and there are other victims who are saying and who are suing her and then halfway through their narrative you realize they've been given $50 ,000 by a fund, they've lived their lives on the basis of a settlement and so accusing each other of being abusers rather than victims.

7:03It turns into an incredibly sort of messy story. That's one of the really messy things. The Sunday Times had a piece by Rena Oh, who's another Epstein victim, in which she said, you know, she's suing the Geoffrey estate. And she said, you know, I've been accused of, you know, procuring girls for Epstein. Now, actually, within the same piece, she admits that she did do that. This is one of the things that Epstein would do to women. he would encourage them to go out and recruit more women. Jiffre writes about that in her book and says she regrets it. And Reena O did the same thing. And obviously she says that doesn't make me any less of a victim.

7:33She says she was raped by Epstein. But it does really complicate that picture. Everybody needs to be very firmly, for moral and financial reasons, end up in the kind of victim rather than collaborator camp. And there was an attempt, I think, even to do that with Jelaine Maxwell. So one of the more bizarre reviews of the book was The Spectator got Ian Maxwell, Jelaine's brother, to review it. Under the headline, don't take Virginia Giuffre's memoir at face value. Which I thought, I mean, okay, always a good thing to do in cases like this, but I feel like you may have a certain personal interest in this one.

8:04And, you know, as we've written about in the magazine, the very strategic leaks ahead of the manuscript kind of coming out do all point back to a journalist who was one of the very few who has interviewed Maxwell in prison. And she got transferred from a Florida jail 2-1, a low security, minimum security one in Texas, some point after having a conversation with a senior official at Trump's Department of Justice. So there is a kind of semi-conspiracy theory, but I don't think it's a completely ridiculous one, that actually all of this becoming a Prince Andrew story is actually very helpful for former friend of Jeffrey Epstein and current president of the US, Donald Trump.

8:41Yes. Where was Virginia Giuffre working when she was first picked up by Maxwell? Mar-a-Lago. She was working in the spa in Mar-a-Lago as a very young teenager. Yeah, so, I mean, this is a Trump story, and I've covered it in the US column before, because it's been kind of fascinating how it was the massive conspiracy story, an obsession of the MAGA right, released the Epstein files. And then Donald Trump, first of all, tried releasing some old file logs that everyone had seen already, and then said, I've actually looked at it, there's nothing really to see, and sent the swivel-eyed FBI director, Kash Patel, out to say, actually, I've looked at it and it's all completely fine.

9:17Yeah, it's a very mysterious and murky story. Another complication that comes out in the book is that Virginia Dufresne hired as her lawyer David Boyes. Now, you may know he's an incredibly aggressive New York litigator and his other thing you might know of him, he was on the board of Theranos, which if you're interested in money stories, fraudulent blood testing company collapsed, also had Rupert Murdoch on the board. It was a real government of all the talents, that one. But also acted for Harvey Weinstein, in which capacity he renegotiated a contract with a spying agency to essentially do background checks on all of Harvey Weinstein's accusers and also the journalists who are working on the story for The New York Times.

9:57So you have all of this. This is this is kind of speaks to the Andrews protection. Yeah. If you want to, you know, realistically to get justice in a lot of these cases, you have to hook up with a very aggressive civil litigator because it doesn't end up in a criminal court before Epstein died. Right. He got that very, very sweet plea deal in Florida and then died in prison before seeing the inside of a proper criminal trial. So these are really mucky and contested waters in which often there is a lot of reputation management or reputation kind of besmirching going on through PRs behind the scenes.

10:34The idea that there's unreliable narrators around in anything to do with the Maxwell family is hysterical. I do genuinely think that that was the original Jelaine play was I've been sucked into this terrible web of sin. And then it just became, unfortunately, it teetered over in the face of the overwhelming evidence that she did know everything that Epstein was doing. And therefore, that's why she's now in prison. Do you think this is really hypothetical? Do you think this would have happened, the Prince Andrew element of it, if that photo had not existed and been made public of him, age 41, with Geoffrey, then age 17?

11:10No, I think you're right. I think that concretised it in a way. He has always denied that that photo is. He sort of vaguely talked about Photoshop and all this kind of stuff or whatever. But I think people just went, oh, no, you're standing next to her. She looks like a teenager. She's dressed. She talks in the book about where she's wearing these trousers with a horse print on. She's wearing the kind of things that young girls would wear. Right. She's not a sophisticated adult at that point. And I think at that point people went. And then in a very concrete way, it's about that photo coming out that he sends that absolutely killer email to Epstein.

11:42that ends, let's play some more, we're in this together, Andy KG. So I think that photo absolutely precipitated the downfall. And she talks in the book, she just had gone to grab an instant camera because she wanted to record the fact she was with a prince. I mean, it's before the advent of the smartphone, so the survival of that photo is also quite fragile. But I think you're right, because that is the image that's used to illustrate every news story of it, really, or her as an adult holding that photo up. Until then he'd said he hadn't met her and then after that he had to say I just can't remember it I think that's the problem, his story has evolved shall we say and also just his unbelievable tone deafness Did you watch when the BBC News were covering his story?

12:26Obviously they're delighted to have all the clips of the Newsnight interview so they aired as many of them as possible and then Emily Maitlis asked him Do you regret meeting Geoffrey Epstein? and he thinks about it and then he says on balance, no, because all the things I learned of the people that I met, it's the most unbelievably tone-deaf performance you've ever seen. And actually watching it in retrospect, it's even more boggling now than it was at the time. It's up there with the honourable comment, isn't it? That he was doing the honourable thing. So many great... I mean, the simple shooting weekend is an incredible...

13:01The I don't sweat anymore is also an incredible... I mean, everything about it. But he tried the honourable thing again when he said he would voluntarily relinquish the titles. And I think the turning point came that, you know, the royals may be tone deaf, but Charles can hear someone shouting at him in public and he is not used to turning up at an ordinary event and someone shouting, how much did you know then? It was really fast after that. And if I was pushed, I would say he decided then this process of slowly acting, which the royal family tends to do, doesn't work anymore. Flunky, who's our royal correspondent, pointed out last issue a lot of royal correspondents say no, it's incredibly difficult for him to strip away these titles and you need a huge amount of parliamentary time and we can't possibly do that.

13:52We actually de-kinged someone once in the abdication and the amount of parliamentary time was one morning. We can do this stuff if we want to. I should say that's the second time we've de-kinged someone and the first time was actually even faster than that in 1649. Oh, yeah, I thought we were doing Charles I, but you wrote we were doing Edward VIII. Yeah, OK, right, good. But it's the same, you know, like the post office story. That couldn't really be dealt with and it was all very slow until people in power's reputation was on the line. Then we can act incredibly quickly, you know, and we can exonerate hundreds of people at one fell swoop.

14:28But this is my theory of why people like dictators. because they just like the idea that one person might be able to make a decision and it would actually happen. And you might have to bribe that one person, but at least you know who the one person is who could make that decision. Are you saying it's anyone who's got experience of a meeting and what it's like is more prone to accept dictatorial rule? But I do think there is a feeling that everything in modern life is so sclerotic and turgid. And I think it's why people like Trump are appealing to their base, because his promise is action. Right?

14:59And actually, what does Keir Starmer's labour offer you? But, oh, we're going to do pip? No, we're not going to do pip. Oh, we're going to do winter flu? Oh, we're not going to do winter flu? Oh, we've got these taxes? Oh, we're not going to do these taxes. And that's why I think people just go, I wish something would happen. Unfortunately, when it does happen, it's often bad. I'm Kiana, and I leveled up my business with Shopify. Once I figured out that Shopify was a thing, I never turned back. I can create a site with my eyes closed. Shopify thinks ahead of us, you know, and it thinks about the customer more than anything.

15:32Every day I'm thinking about some other new business, but Shopify is doing it to me because it's so easy to use. It's like I can't stop. I'm addicted. Start your free trial at Shopify.com. My name is Shannon Maldonado. I'm the founder of Yaoi, a gift shop from the lens of artists and handmade objects. I chose Shopify because when I was testing other platforms, it was definitely one of the most user-friendly. It was important to me to think about where we would be in the future. All of the tools for reading your sales, like planning inventory, are just right there on your dashboard. For anyone starting a small business, the biggest thing I can tell you is it doesn't have to be perfect.

16:08Shopify can help you build upon it. Start your free trial on shopify.com. Right. Now let's come to, very excitingly, there is a new column in PrivateEye. It's in the back of the magazine, confusingly just after the in the back section. And it's in the money. And it comes after the very, very long running in the city column has ended. And that was written by Slicker for many years. This new one is written by Gold Digger. And Richard, I understand that Gold Digger is you et al. Yeah, I didn't realize I'd be outed after one issue. Sorry. Yes. It's a collection of financial stories that I'll be writing and pulling together from other people as well.

16:54The lead story in the latest issue of the mag was about sanctions on Russian firms or on Russian shipping and how often they're actually enforced and what kind of fines are dished out, even on the rare occasions that people are found guilty of this kind of thing. And it's kind of staggering, the scale of the sums that are dished out in fines compared to the scale of the offence. Yeah, I mean, like a lot of the stuff we do elsewhere in the MAG, it's about showing the reality against what we're told is happening. So with sanctions, we've been told several times that we're stopping the Putin war machine.

17:30He won't have any money to spend. And then years on, you find that, oh, we've got to do something else. You know that machine we stopped 18 months ago? We're going to stop it again. So that's where we are with sanctions. And we should say you have a lot of experience of this because of your, can we call it a dark past? As a financial criminal. Shady history. As a bank robber. Working for HMRC. Yeah, until 20 years ago. I mean, you were part of the blob, weren't you? Well, I think I'm part of a smaller blob now.

18:06I always felt that put you in quite a strong position as a journalist because you know how it works. or it doesn't work in so many cases. Back then, when I stopped being a tax inspector and started working for the I, there was a sort of prevailing mood and attempt really to stop tax collection working almost. It was sort of politically unpopular. It was, you know, it wasn't very nice to people who were dodging their taxes. It wasn't in the sort of partnership spirit of the day. So there were a lot of cushy deals for big companies and people hiding their money in Switzerland and places like that.

18:44And without going into too many details and getting into any trouble, it was that kind of thing that led to me changing jobs. Can I ask you a question about tax, which is not actually a bit of help on my VAT registration. This could be difficult. It was 20 years ago. No, no, no. About our tax code now, actually. Is it too complicated? Because one of the things I think that happened, Rachel Reeves, as we're talking, has just gone into trouble with her registration as a landlord for renting out her property. Obviously, Angela Rayner previously in trouble about council tax on her second home. Nadim Zahawi had to settle a very large bill with HMRC.

19:16Should we have any kind of sympathy with politicians who run into tax problems? Or are you cold-hearted about all of this kind of stuff? No, I think there is room for some sympathy. Administratively, it is complicated. One of those I wouldn't have any sympathy with, Nadim Zahawi. I'll draw the line there. and also Rachel Reeves I think she should probably have been a bit more careful she should be saying look I'm Chancellor are we sure we've got all this right her husband found some emails and she probably should have been saying are we sure we've done everything we need to because it's not the first little mistake that she's made is it?

19:56You know when you look at her the book she wrote and the slightly puffed up CV the puffed up CV, you know there's a kind of string of these now And it's a bit rich, you know, post Boris, who we all had a go at about detail, to say, look, we're in government, we're in detail. Yeah. I mean, that's what we wanted this time round, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. And the question for them is how would you have reacted if Boris Johnson had done this? Yes. I think that's a valid question. We've got this budget coming up and lots of people are getting their defences in early. All sorts of special pleading articles and columns are being written.

20:32why you cannot possibly tax blah. Yeah. I saw a piece at the weekend which was all about how actually if you tax the gambling industry anymore, betting shops will have to close and they are an absolute lifeline for elderly, vulnerable, often very lonely, frequently men. I saw that article. It was like they were running some kind of like rotary club or something. It's like what you do is you get these people in and then you keep them in as much as you can in order for them to spend money. Like, come off it. It's a kind of like, and I'm sure a lot of people who've been going there every day for 20 years do find it really valuable and would be incredibly sad if it was closed down but that's not really the point of the gambling industry or paying tax so i'm going to say that about pubs given the incredibly complicated tax system that we do have because there it is complicated and there are lots of different loopholes is it possible for a radical change to happen in the budget that's coming up in a few weeks time no it's not possible in the budget, it's a longer term job.

21:28The problem with the budget, as with every budget for decades now is that they're very constrained. Rachel Reeves and her predecessors are working with the Office of Budget Responsibility, which takes a very conservative view of the effects of economic measures. So it sort of hems her in and she's left tinkering, looking at differences of$10 billion here,$5 billion here what's going to raise this what's going to give away that over a pretty short term over a forecast period that's four or five years so it's very difficult to take the kind of steps that you would need to transform the system and which might pay off in 10 20 years but you know and that's not just in terms of the tax system itself but the whole you know economic system so it's very difficult to launch a big investment program and expect credit from that because the OBR is going to say, well, we can't be sure for the next three or four years.

22:27You look at changes to employment rights. There's a very good argument that stronger employment rights in the long run will be good for growth. You have a higher wage economy, better industrial relations and so on. But there are people lobbying and they might have the way the Tories are lobbying to say, no, the OBR has to say that's going to hit growth and and it may well do in the next two or three years but the office of budget responsibility is presumably advisory I mean it's not an entirely democratic institution is it we don't have to do what they say on the grounds that well they it should be for them did we it should be but we've given them so much power and if you don't do what conforms to what they think, then you end up in a Liz Trust position.

23:13Yes. I'm not entirely advocating that. But there is a... I'm just questioning its role. That's right. It has been given a really central role and Rachel Reeves has made it even more important by putting in law that you must consult whenever you have a big announcement you must consult the OBR. You probably should do that anyway, but you should also recognise it's not the only view. And there's probably a case for not leaving it just to the OBR to do the fiscal and economic forecasts, the official ones, to have the Treasury do them again. Of course, they're going to be politicised. But have them, have the opposition do them, have a range of views.

23:50So you can say, well, look, this is our view. And we think these longer term measures we're taking, whether it's on investment, education, simplifying the tax system, we think they will work over 10, 20 years. And then let somebody else make the opposing argument. but at the moment having one very small c conservative body hold sway is given us this sort of sclerotic system where we can't actually do anything. Do you think this has been one of the most frenetic pre-budget periods that you can remember? I'm just trying to think whether or not I've just dipped out of British politics for the last couple of years and therefore I've kind of forgotten the horror of it.

24:28But this one seems to have been really, really frenetic. You know, all the things that have been floated like doubling the top two bands of council tax, deciding that working people is only people earning£45 ,000 or under a year so you can put tax over that. Swapping national insurance and income tax burdens. What else have they? They've talked about an exit tax for high income. But it just feels like there's... They always say there's kind of kite... Like the big budget cliches, right? You move from kite flying to rolling the pitch to the rabbit. That's the usual way that it proceeds. But it just seems to me that there seems to be something very torrid going on this year.

25:05It's got that feeling, you know, like Christmas getting earlier every year, hasn't it? You know, pre-budget, everybody's trying out their pet idea. And the media have a big part in it as well. Well, it's like football transfer system, isn't it, for nerds, basically, in that it's unfalsifiable, like Rachel Reeves may be considering any number of things and no one can kind of say she's not. You're in a sort of state of almost constant speculation, which isn't good for economic decisions. People investing, people employing people. It's, you know, this uncertainty. This was the point of the PIRDA system.

25:38Yeah, yeah. You know, this is when some of us were growing up, obviously, that nothing was said about it. And then it was announced. And you could criticise it or you could not like it. Now we have a system where you seem to be saying, let's get public opinion to all these ideas for months beforehand. And there was a joke piece in the last issue. And if you want public opinion, it's that nobody wants to pay any more tax. Thank you very much. They want everyone else to pay more tax. That is acceptable. But you can't make policy on the grounds that everybody else should pay more. and if you float those ideas and particularly with the press and the media at the moment you will get everyone saying no, that won't work before they've listened to the idea any amount of tax raising will be followed by someone saying I don't want this so what I don't understand is why you don't get to a system where the Chancellor says this is what we're doing that's it for a year but this happened last time with the Rachel Reeves ISA grab which turned out to be largely illusory but it was preceded by weeks and weeks of people saying, well, this is how to save yourself from Rachel Reeves' ISA tax grab.