The Labour smear campaign that exposes Starmer’s ‘Stasi’ government

0:02The Telegraph

0:10Another day, another Labour scandal. This time the campaign group that helped to get Keir Starmer elected, Labour Together, stands accused of intimidating journalists. What's more, the person who commissioned the sinister North Korea-style smear campaign is now a Cabinet Office minister. Is there no end to the unpleasantness at the heart of this government? And pressure is mounting for a full police investigation into Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor after more evidence emerges of him passing on confidential information to Jeffrey Epstein while he was a trade envoy. It's morally revolting and a complete abuse of power, so why didn't anybody raise a red flag at the time?

0:47Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Camilla Tomeny. And me, Jacob Rees-Mogg.

1:02Jacob Rees-Mogg Welcome back to The Daily Tea Great to see you Do you have a good weekend? Lovely weekend It's always a pleasure to be back on Thank you I had a nightmare I thwacked myself in the forehead with my own tennis racket during a doubles match on Saturday I was nearly concussed I had to apply huge amounts of arnica so if I'm not making sense or I suffer from brain fog. That's why. I was just trying to scoop up a little. A drop shot. Didn't even get it. You always make perfect sense, but it's a warning against taking exercise. I never take any exercise, and therefore I don't have these problems.

1:33You do occasionally walk your dog, you must confess to me. I do, yes. But never in leisure wear. Can we talk about whether aliens are real? Because the former president, Barack Obama, thinks that they are. You obviously agree with him. Well, you know why I always wear double-breasted suits. Why? Because if I unbuttoned it, you would... Oh, no, I've given away the... I'm so sorry, I've now told everybody, after all these years in hiding. Well, Obama's statement. He's saying there are no aliens at Area 51 that may be the contents of any of the alien films that we're used to, Men in Black and such like, which I'm sure you free-based on your own television.

2:07But he does think that life exists on other planets. I think he should rename himself Obama rather than Obama. Oh, Jake. Aliens and all this sort of stuff. It's all fun science fiction, if you like, that sort of thing. but there aren't aliens. The Americans don't have aliens kept in a base. It's all silly nonsense. There may be other life on other planets. Ah! But... But if there's life on other planets, there are, ergo, aliens. Well, not ones who are coming to us in spaceships and taking people up and, you know... Take me to your leader. Take me to your leader. Gosh, poor things if they had to come meet Keir Starmer.

2:43Anyway, leaving that to one side. Yeah, imagine invading Earth And the first person you're introduced to is Keir Starmer. Keir Starmer. You'd think it wasn't worth the effort. You'd go back again pretty quickly. So, no, I don't believe in aliens. I, of course, believe in celestial bodies. Yes. I mean, I believe in angels. Do you? Of course I do. Have you ever seen an angel? No, no, of course I haven't. Do you believe in ghosts? Very interesting. I've never seen a ghost, but I think so many sensible people have seen ghosts that not all of them can be fake, but almost any individual example is fake.

3:18Who's the most sensible person that's ever seen a ghost? That's a very good question. There's a very good book on it that I was given for Christmas by a Times journalist on a ghost hunter, somebody who was sceptical about it, and investigated cases and almost invariably found that they were bogus. But there were one or two after a career of doing this that he couldn't quite explain. Do you believe as a good Catholic that priests and others can exorcise demons out of people. You've never been commanded with a crucifix to go along to a house in Croydon. Of course I believe in teaching the church.

3:55So if exorcism is a rite of the church, it must serve a purpose. And our Lord exorcised demons. So demons exist, yes. There are evil spirits. And priests can therefore exorcise them. This is surprising and staggering me. You are allowed to exorcise but not exercise. No. Get us back to where we started. You see, this is why you are so good on this podcast with me. And you also mentioned the Times earlier, which I'm going to just creak into a little segue into this extraordinary story about Labour Together. Let me try and summarise it as succinctly as I hopefully accurately and legally safely can.

4:34Labour Together is a lobbying organisation stroke think tank stroke campaign group which actively campaigned for Keir Starmer to become the next Labour leader after Jeremy Corbyn and win the last general election. It was previously headed up by Morgan McSweeney, who went on to be Keir Starmer's chief of staff and departed recently from Downing Street because of his links to Peter Mandelson. Some time ago, the Sunday Times and two journalists, one of whom used to work here, Harry York, and another called Gabriel Pogrand, both very highly respected, the latter just recently nominated for a press award, along with me.

5:13They reported a story to suggest that under McSweeney's watch, around£700 ,000 in donations wasn't adequately declared. Subsequent to that, the person who inherited the leadership of this organisation, a man called Josh Simons, a Labour MP, now a minister, very much seen as the future of Labour, possibly even a future leader, is alleged to have commissioned a US firm and paid that firm 36 grand to try and dig dirt on the two journalists that wrote this story, including references to Poghwin's Jewishness, suggestions that they may have been influenced by Russian propaganda and such like. It was a muckraking exercise that has in turn, as this is the word, du jour, exercised most of Fleet Street.

5:59Why would you have an organisation like Labour Together using these Stasi-like tactics? So intrigued by your view, not only as somebody that's campaigned for freedom of speech and expression, but also as the son of the former editor of The Times, William Rees-Mogg. Well, I think it's deeply sinister. I think it's one of the most concerning stories I've read in recent months, even in spite of all that's been going on. When you get a political party that is deciding that what it wants to do is to find dirt on journalists who've written disobliging stories. You're going into the sort of things that totalitarian states do.

6:33Yes. I've always argued that we have to distrust the state, not because the people leading it are particularly bad, but because they could be bad. And this is a very useful reminder that the state can be bad and that people with power will abuse it. And Labour Together use£36 ,000 to try and undermine two very respected journalists. I will confess I've only had one set of dealings with Gabriel, who's not somebody you want to hear from. And he was one of the most serious-minded journalists I've dealt with. He rang me up about something he'd been told about me that wasn't true. I explained to him exactly what the situation was, and he understood what I was talking about.

7:13He's very thorough. He's very proper. He's not somebody who makes things up to get a hatchet job. He does his work. And to try and undermine somebody like that. and for Labour, a party tainted, criticised by the Equalities Commission for being anti-Semitic, to be raising questions about the Jewishness of a journalist. I just think this is deeply sinister. And our viewers and listeners should be very concerned about this. This is not how the British state behaves. And I know Labour Together was not at that point the state, but it was about to become it. And this is the background how Kirsten Armer leads.

7:49Simons is in real trouble. I do not see how somebody who has been involved in this sort of thing can stay in office credibly, that he has been trying to do something that absolutely undermines a basic freedom in this country. Just to be clear on the details, so as well as falsely suggesting that the journalist may have been part of a Russian conspiracy or had relied on emails hacked by the Kremlin, its findings were shared with senior Labour figures, including advisors, a branch of GCHQ and current members of Sakhir's top team. Starman now calling for an investigation into this, including into Simon's.

8:24Simons, the Sunday Times has said there were almost 10 pages of quotes, deeply personal and fake claims, particularly about Mr Poggrind, including false claims about his upbringing and his personal and professional relationships. We can't directly link the Prime Minister to this commissioned report. We don't know that the Prime Minister had any involvement in commissioning it. It might have been the case that he may have seen it or somebody in his team has seen it, as the Sunday Times suggests. But are we just putting two and two together here and adding another conspiracy on top after scandals and sagas and U-turns?

9:03Clearly, it doesn't look good for the administration. But if the prime minister has said, yes, we must investigate, then that's the right course of action for him, isn't it? Oh, it must be the right course of action for him. And it's interesting that it was passed on to the security services. What is the date of this report? Because this matters considering who was advising Keir Starmer prior to the election. So the Sunday Times originally reports a suggestion of erroneous declaration of£730 ,000 of donations. That relates back to a period of 2017 to 2020, when McSweeney was in charge of Labour Together.

9:41They report that in November of 2023, so this is ahead of the general election that we don't even know is being called at that point. And then within days, Simons, having inherited McSweeney's role at the helm of Labour Together, clearly very angry about the organisation being besmirched in the Sunday Times. Not besmirched. Besmirched implies wrongly accused. Correctly accused. Correctly accused of some problems with its accounting, let's put it like that, then commissions the smear report. And the smear report is? The report is then produced in January 2024. Which is about the time that Sue Gray becomes Chief of Staff to Sir Keir Starmer, who is widely believed to have links with the security services.

10:25Yes. And then it gets past the security services. Yes. And we really need to understand all of what happened. A thoroughgoing inquiry. Simon's position, I think, is very difficult to have approved this report. He's now saying that they went beyond their brief. we need to know whether ACPO followed the law. It raises all sorts of questions about what Labour Together was willing to do, how it viewed the law of the land, why it got an American firm to do it. I don't know the answer to these questions, but all these questions come up. Isn't there a British company that could do this sort of thing?

11:00Yes. Also, what is the nature of the relationship between Labour Together and this Labour government? And I say that because we need Tim Stanley back to do his spidergram on the whiteboard. We have a number of former fellows of Labour together who go on to be elected, Lisa Nandy, Steve Reid. We have Morgan McSweeney obviously elevated from that position into a prime position in number 10. We had Mr Simons at the time that he was at the helm being spoken up as somebody great and obviously he wins a seat. And really, in light of these revelations and the Kremlin-esque tactics that have been employed, shouldn't the government say we can have nothing to do with this group?

11:43Well, but shouldn't we ask about Starmer's view of journalists? Because as director of prosecutions, he prosecuted dozens of journalists. Starmer hates journalists. He hates free speech. Almost all the cases he brought failed. Yes. But he went after journalists because Labour has a hatred of the press. It goes back to the Kinnock days and the feeling that newspapers destroyed them. Actually, even back to Harold Wilson. It wasn't our fault Kinnock nearly fell in the sea at the Labour conference. Quite, quite. But there's a hatred of the press. And Starmer's DPP was prosecuting more journalists than totalitarian regimes were.

12:20Remind me of that. That was around the time of Leveson. It was around the time of Leveson. Some of it was in relation to hacking. it was particularly in relation to journalists gathering information from civil servants. Yes. And the civil servants had behaved wrongly in leaking the information. Yes. But the journalists were all, with one exception, acquitted. Yes. And this is a great reason they don't like jury trials either, because they showed up Starmer for being the journalist hater that he is. The journalists were acquitted on the grounds that receiving and publishing information is a perfectly legitimate thing to do.

12:52Only China locks up journalists for receiving information that is inconvenient to the state or Iran and countries like that. So this is all part of a pattern of labor-hating free speech. And it's why we should be very worried about it. I completely understand our business is maybe sitting there thinking this is just an internal Fleet Street story. It's a couple of journalists who don't interfere with their daily lives very much, who have been looked at and tough, that's life. But there's much more sinister than this. It's using the power and the authority of people who are about to take over the state to try and destroy people who've written a disobliging story.

13:32Yes. That's really serious. And if they'd found real evidence that this had come from the Russians or anything of that kind, we would have heard about it. The other irony always in all this is prime ministers who don't like journalists and who don't like press scrutiny and yet are perfectly happy to have their people brief aggressively in the case of West Streeting. I mean, this is the other thing. Oh, you don't like the scrutiny, but of course you use the press when it suits your own purposes. Yes, indeed. When it comes to advancing your own aims, when it comes to all of those people, all of those allies that were quoted about how he was cleaning up the party post-Corbyn, how he was the next messiah, pardon the expression, all of this, you know, you're quite happy to turn these taps of publicity on when it suits you.

14:18When people are coming forward that have historically always been sympathetic, you win power from the Tories. What was it Andrew Marr said? The grown-ups are back in charge. You're quite happy for all of that rhetoric to be in the press, but as soon as it gets a bit dicey because actually you're not doing a very good job, it becomes tricky. I mean, we see him becoming very prickly actually in press conferences. But isn't the same true about these celebrities who are at court in the moment, for whom I've got very little sympathy, because you use the press when it suits you and then the press is interested in you and sometimes it writes disobliging stuff.

14:50And this just doesn't work. You've got to either lead a completely private life, which we're all entitled to do, or you engage with the press and then you engage with the bad as well as the good. Yes. To be fair, I agree with the celebrities who are taking on journalists that actually hacked their phones. People break the law, that's different. People broke the law and they were illegally gathering information. And that's an aberration. And actually, phone hacking has been such a stain on our industry, especially for journalists like me who weren't involved in it at all, and then you get tarred with the same brush.

15:20But there's a lot of naivety as well, the idea that friends don't brief about. Oh, I know. I mean, for heaven's sake. Oh, for heaven's. We were discussing last time you were on that you worked on the diary column. We all know who leaks what. I mean, people leak extraordinary things about their nearest and dearest. Absolutely. So I agree with the celebrities trying to take that on. But no, when it comes to, oh, I don't really like this headline. Again, Brooklyn Beckham has recently been accused of exactly the same as Harry and Meghan. On one hand, you're claiming privacy, privacy, and on the other, you're engaging in these strange sort of...

15:51Last week, he and his wife, the Beckhams, the Beckhams pelts, I should say, were pictured like carrying a load of dogs, looking so conspicuous. If you want to lead a quiet life, maybe don't parade around Hollywood Boulevard with dogs in handbags, where the paparazzis are quite happy to snap you up. They're quite boring, really. What, the Beckhams? Yes. They're not as interesting as the Rees-Molls. Not Sir David and Lady Beckham, but the Beckham offspring are not particularly exciting, I don't think. It's far too much newspaper coverage of a fundamentally uninteresting story, I think. Well, you can understand more than most what it's like being saddled with a famous surname.

16:29Not of that degree. I mean, lower down the scale. We're going to keep a very close eye on the mini-mots as they progress through life. Keir Starmer's been out and about this morning and he was asked about this whole sorry scandal. Shall we have a listen? There will be a Cabinet Office investigation into the allegations, and quite right to. And so that is already in place. I didn't know anything about this investigation and it absolutely needs to be looked into. So the Cabinet Office will be establishing the facts. The calls for an investigation are coming thick and fast at the moment, Jacob, because coming up next, we're going to discuss who should investigate Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

17:23I think the king thought that the problem of the former grand old Uke of York would be solved by exiling him to Norfolk. It's not really turning out to be the case, is it, Jacob? Well, I think the king acted swiftly and effectively by taking away the titles and getting him out of the Royal Lodge. and it was the first time that the king had got ahead of the story rather than being behind it. Yes. And that was really, really important. Just think if he was still the Duke of York and still a Knight of the Garter as this latest batch had come out. Still turning up at royal events. And there were some people who thought when the titles were all taken away that that was getting a bit too far.

18:04And actually the king was absolutely right. He got ahead of what was happening. But it's got worse and more information has come out. And we have to look at the information in, I think, a number of different categories. First of all, there's moral opprobrium. And that, I think, is justifiably quite high. I think most people think that a middle-aged to older man with young, though above the age of consent, girls is fundamentally sleazy. and that Epstein seemed to be a procurer of women. Yes. Whether for the former Duke of York, I don't know, but that's what he seemed to do. So let's just put that...

18:43But that is morally appalling and something that the country is rightly shocked by happening so close to the royal family. Say we categorise that as the former prince's private behaviour and what I'm talking about now is revelations from the Epstein files... He doesn't have any private behaviour. No? He's a prince of the blood royal. I'm afraid that's the deal. Yes. This is why his behaviour is attracting so much more attention than anybody else's because royals basically don't have any private life. They are, by virtue of birth, entirely public. Their birth is announced to the nation. Their baptism is announced to the nation.

19:23Their weddings are public events. They are not private people in the same way as anybody else's. And that's the curse of royalty, but it goes with the great advantages that they have. But I'm kind of putting it in the private column. Things like him maintaining a personal relationship with Epstein, going to stay with him in New York post-conviction, inviting in 2010, allegedly, according to the Epstein files, three young women named only as Sue, Sarah and Vera, one from Russia, another from Romania for dinner with Epstein at Buckingham Palace while the late Queen is in Balmoral. It's in a private column.

20:02It had been kept in that column. I am now agreeing with you. Why was this ever private? Who observed this behaviour? Why didn't anyone raise a red flag? That's right. And it is morally wrong, damaging to the crown, and it is clearly an abuse of power. Yes. There's then the issue of secrets. Yes, his behaviour. So say if we put all that in the personal column, let's put this in the public duty column. Everything he did when he was a trade envoy, which he did from 2001 to 2011, a prominent role globetrotting on behalf of, as it then was, queen, country and state. And the question there is going to be a difficult one for the police to determine as to whether he held a public office.

20:52Being royal is not a public office. But then trade envoy? He's working in tandem with the Department for Trade? Yes, this is where misconduct in public office is such a difficult crime. You'll remember with all the expenses scandals, they couldn't go for MPs for misconduct in public office because being a member of Parliament is not a public office. That's so weird. It's just, as I understand it, the way of the law. I think the real questions end up being the trafficking of people. Were people being trafficked? Did he know about that? Was he involved in that? That's very serious, but they're only allegations at this stage, obviously.

21:30But there's awful moral conduct. There is what he did at trade and whether that was public office and whether there is there for anything to be looked at there. Yes. And whether he really had secrets. Well, let's have a look at what he leaked. Let's just go through what he leaked. So we've got emails uncovered that show that he leaked sensitive information about the Royal Bank of Scotland, which he had learned from meetings with bank executives about how it was restructuring after its£45 billion government bailout. I mean, you've operated in this world. He's giving this information to a New York financier who has been convicted of crimes against minors.

22:07OK, but this completely depends on the circumstances under which he was told. I'd be absolutely astonished if the Royal Bank of Scotland had told him market-sensitive information, had technically brought him over the wall, so as to speak, and made him an insider. But if he was trading on inside information or was passing information on to be traded upon, that is a clear criminal offence. But you have to know that you are an insider if you're not a market professional. If you're me, you're a former farm manager and you know how this works, you would be in trouble pretty much straight away if you passed on any of this information to somebody betrayed because you know how it works.

22:50If some executive tells somebody in the pub that they're doing something, the executive is guilty of an offence. But the person who's heard it is most unlikely to be because doesn't have the. I know, but then I appreciate exactly what you're saying about the high bar to be reached to even bring charges of misconduct in public office. But this wasn't a guy in the pub. He was exerting his influence to further his own aims. And so I think to investigate it is perfectly reasonable. I think it's very unlikely you'll get anything on this. I don't think the level of information he had was high enough.

23:25He passed on information about Aston Martin claiming there was internal tensions because of a slump in sales. OK, we've also learned how Epstein influenced who Andrew met with while on a visit to China in 2010, including organising a secret meeting with Jess Staley of JP Morgan, who we later learned was the paedophile's personal banker and another Chinese model. Very disparagingly nicknamed P, which I won't even go into explaining what it stands for. But think of the worst word you could use to describe women that was once adopted by Donald Trump. There were apparently organised via Mountbatten-Windsor's advisor, David Stern, these meetings, who told the paedophile he would add meetings with organisations requested by him.

24:09Then, during the trip to China, Stern sent Epstein photos of Andrew meeting young women that looked like they were taken discreetly. This is the other curious thing about all this. My husband said to me over the weekend, somebody was taking photographs and recording footage the whole time. We assume Epstein was a blackmailer of some kind, don't we? We had more revelations in the Telegraph over the weekend. Andrew is alleged to have forwarded a confidential Treasury briefing to a banker friend, having asked his Deputy Private Secretary Amanda Thurst to get an internal government memo about the Icelandic financial crisis.

24:43He passed it on to Jonathan Rowland, his close friend and the former chief executive of Bank Haviland. At the time, Bank Haviland was connected to a major investigation by Icelandic authorities, though never faced any charges. And we've got more emails appearing to show that Andrew tried to facilitate a meeting between Epstein and then-Libyan dictator Gaddafi in autumn 2010. All of the names in this, Gaddafi... The whole web, the whole Epstein web, is just unbelievably scandalous, isn't it? and all sorts of people were embroiled in it and did things that they ought not to have done and formed associations that they ought not to have had and passed on information that ought to have remained confidential.

25:33We don't know any more than that, do we? Epstein's the spider and Andrew seems to be the fly. Yes, indeed, and has behaved appallingly badly and has forgotten that his primary role in life is to support the Crown and the Constitution. That's his point, I'm afraid. Well, let's also, in a moment, just get on to the effect of all this on the monarchy. But before that, then, so we've got different investigations that could be carried out. We could have a parliamentary investigation potentially into his role as trade envoy. Would that be appropriate? But what would it... I mean, Parliament's entitled to investigate what it likes, but what would that say?

26:13OK. Vince Cable, former Liberal Democrat leader, coalition partner with the Tories once, has said that he should be investigated for corruption, what, by police? Well, if there's evidence of breaking laws, he should be investigated. That's really straightforward. He's not exempt from the law as a member of the royal family. Vince Cable is a sensible man, actually. And Stephen Parkinson, the director of public prosecutions, has said nobody is above the law. And that's an important point. but you need to establish very clearly what you think has been done that is actually criminal as opposed to bad behaviour, that the two are not the same.

26:55Yes. Dame Priti Patel, I spoke to her on my GBNU show yesterday. She said, everyone that's been involved should be subject to the right kind of inquiries, police investigations. What has taken place and happened is absolutely abhorrent and it's right that everyone is scrutinised in terms of their roles. What has happened? Information, papers that may have been shared and disclosed. The problem for the king and the rest of the family is, and we can look at those two columns, both the personal and the public, so to speak, notwithstanding your point about all royals having no privacy at all, really.

27:28Who saw what? When? Are you telling me? I always thought this about I was actually at Pizza Express in Woking. If the restaurant didn't have the records, he would have been accompanied by taxpayer-funded bodyguards at that point. Are we saying that the police don't have records of where he went, who came to Royal Lodge, who came to the palace. There are people in the palace all the time. What did they see? Did they turn a blind eye? Again, that doesn't criminally imply any intent at all. I'm merely making the point, isn't the institution going to have to answer some questions about why a man nicknamed either Randy Andy or Air Mars Andy, whose reputation was known?

28:11I mean, journalists like me were often told about, oh, Russian girls at the gate. You can't prove any of this stuff. You can't get the police to talk to you about it because of post-Levisonian bribery laws and such like, you know, take a copper out for lunch and see if he can tell you some information about the Duke of York. Can't do that. Most of the staff sign NDAs. We always heard these whispers of bad behaviour. We knew about the historic links to Epstein. The only reason we can report all this now so freely is because it's been lodged in publicly released documents that are afforded a huge amount of privilege.

28:44What I'm saying is, aren't you concerned as to who saw and knew what? Well, I'm absolutely confident that neither the late Queen nor the King would have known what was going on. Well, the late Queen allegedly part-funded a£12 million settlement to Virginia Giffray. She knew the allegations against her so-called favourite son. Why did she give him that money? Yes, I've always wondered about this favourite son thing. The son she had for herself after she had given birth to the heir. All right, but most parents don't have favourite children. No one does wonder whether the late queen was perfect, so it's most improbable that she had any imperfection.

29:22I think she's very likely to have believed her son when he said this is all untrue and the picture is fake, which we now know it wasn't. Yes. But that comes out after the queen's died. Yes. They want to settle it because they don't want that hanging over the jubilee. That didn't work very well. That didn't work very well. Well, I mean, the Queen then died, of course, so it didn't work at all well. But I think the Queen would have believed her son. But she wouldn't have been over the years following who was coming in and out of Buckingham Palace. Buckingham Palace has hundreds of people going in and out every day.

29:58And neither the late Queen nor the King would know in detail who came. Now, to your point, there probably are records. and those records could almost certainly be checked. But to labour the point, three young women in their 20s named only as Sue, Sarah and Vera turn up for dinner at Buckingham Palace with Epstein and Andrew. I mean, you and I have been in and out of Buckingham Palace a lot. Well, not a lot, no. But I have been in and out once, twice. Obviously, because of my royal correspondent days, I've been in and out of there quite a lot. I know what the vetting procedure is like. I know the hoops you have to jump through to get through the gates, even if you're well known.

30:41Well, I did have one very funny occasion when there was one of those eco-revolts going on. Oh, lovely. And we had a Privy Council and I was with the then Chief Whip, Mark Spencer, and we had to walk through the middle of the protest. We got out of our government car, climb over a fence and get to the gate, whereas normally you arrive the government car and it's all very smooth and we said hello wherever the Privy Council the police were marvellous they accepted us at our word and we got in probably because you didn't look like

31:12so yes they have procedures and they have lists and I'm just saying I'm just saying just just imagine the scenario he's appearing at whatever gate with three young I mean maybe scantily dressed women but what do you do aren't looking at it and going oh I wonder what's going on here perhaps he's doing an educational programme for improving relations with Eastern Europe. But I think you're being hard on the police on the gate because their job is to secure Buckingham Palace. It's not to vet the then Duke of York's guests. They're not there to say, I don't think you should be... I'm basically, I suppose what I'm...

31:49Let me just cut to the quick here. I think it is highly improbable that people around Andrew... be they staff, friends or family, didn't have an inkling as to what he was up to for years and years and years. Yes, and I'm sure there was gossip in the police mess about, oh my goodness, who he's brought in. But I don't think anyone would have thought that it was trafficking or underage or any of the things that become crimes. Well, they thought it was playboy prince behaviour. It was deeply sleazy, I expect. Yes, OK. I mean, this is revolting. Yes, I know. Mustn't get away from. And the treatment of the women is appalling.

32:33It's deeply, deeply revolting. But you're there as a security man. Probably, by the way, being regularly shouted at. Do you remember that occasion where he rammed the gates because they didn't open them quickly enough? Quickly enough. And he comes in, and unless you saw him committing a crime, you're not there vetting his guests. No. So, yes, you talk about it and you probably go home and you say, oh, my goodness, you won't believe this. It's getting worse that they used to be 30 and now they're 20 or whatever you say. Yes. But you don't think it's criminal. So there's not an official role. And you certainly don't tell the Queen.

33:11Can you imagine being the person who went to the Queen and said, look, Your Majesty, your son is bringing in young ladies late at night. It's just inconceivable that somebody would have said that. that it's not what the Queen would have wanted to hear. Yes. And she was the Queen and people treated her accordingly. And likewise, they wouldn't have run off to the now King and said, your brother's bringing these people into Buckingham Palace because he wasn't in Buckingham Palace. It just wouldn't have arisen. No. But isn't it problematic for the Crown that we are even discussing what role the late Queen, who had a completely unblemished record of more than 70 years of service.

33:54It is deeply problematic for the crown. Deeply, deeply problematic. I'm very worried about it, actually, and I think the king has handled it well so far. But something more needs to be done. And I don't know what that is. I don't know what... I mean, you can't drown your brother in a buttermarmsy anymore. No. Which is what Edward IV did. That solution is no longer available. but should former Prince Andrew go into exile, should he be investigated by the police? If he's investigated by the police and the police say there aren't any charges, are people satisfied with that? Probably not. I can't see why he should go to America.

34:29I think this is a British matter, not a foreign matter. There's nothing to legally compel him to do so. No lawyer in their right mind would advise him to do it. There's nothing to do with the Americans. It's to do with us. He's our prince or former prince. He's not theirs. And this is about what he may have done in this country. I'm mainly concerned about this country and I'm concerned about the constitution. That is the priority in the crown and that is fundamental how this country is governed. And when you think our previous conversation, you've got a prime minister who prosecutes journalists and hates journalists.

34:57Having the safeguard of a constitutional monarchy is actually quite important in case you get very bad people in charge. So we want to maintain that safeguard. But Prince Andrew is a danger to that and it therefore needs to be dealt with. how do you deal with it? Investigation is one option. Exile is an option. Exile to Norfolk is probably not enough. But I don't know, what do you do next? If you're advising the king... You agree to cooperate. Well, because so far... Well, I'll say two things. First of all, this mantra of never complain, never explain isn't working. Prince William's mantra has become leave less unsaid.

35:36And that is why the Prince and Princess of Wales last week came out with their we are deeply concerned. because William wants to distance himself entirely to preserve his reign from this saga, which has, let's be honest, has plagued the last decade of royal life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Second of all, if you are going to come out with a rhetoric along the lines of, as both the current Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Edward, and William and Kate have, think of the victims, then as an institution or members of an institution, if there is an inquiry, you must cooperate in full. Yes, of course. Should the palace say, we better carry out our own inquiry into these matters?

36:18Well, yes, but would anybody trust the palace to carry out its own inquiry? No. So do you have to bring in somebody external? An eminent privy councillor who is morally upstanding. But look where they've got Boris when he brought in Sue Gray. Come forward, Sir Jacob. You could go and see these matters. I'd be of laissez-majeste. But I think they probably ought to have their own inquiry. They ought to look through their own records. They ought to look at whether they should have different procedures for people coming into palaces and things like that. I have a nasty feeling you won't find the smoking gun.

36:57You won't find that senior members of the royal family had any idea what Prince Andrew was up to. They probably knew he was a bit of a playboy. Yes. Well, the whole world knew he was a bit of a playboy. But I doubt even the police on duty were working the whole thing through. It is worth repeating again, as we always do, that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has denied any wrongdoing. The other thing as well, just to conclude, is they knew he was a playboy who had a reputation for clocking up air miles. And he was also nicknamed Randy Andy. and he was given a role as a globetrotting trade envoy subsidised in part by the taxpayer to basically facilitate his own already suspect behaviour.

37:42And that was done by Tony Blair's government. So we conclude on blaming Labour for all this. We can always blame Labour. So it's a good point for Telegraph viewers and listeners to think about. But yes, and he was given a lot of leeway because to be fair to Prince Andrew, words that nobody's using at the moment, he was also a war hero. And he was very brave in the Falklands War. But I think that's why people gave him so much leeway for so long. And it's important to bear that in mind, that he wasn't just a playboy prince. He had done something for his country and was hugely popular in 1982. And he is not now.

38:26I mean, that's all gone. But that's part of the reason, I think, that he was thought of 20 years later, early 2000s, as being suitable to be an envoy. I think it's because of what he'd done in the Falklands. And he's basically lived off that ever since. And finally, people have said, well, this is ridiculous. This is not good enough for this really unbelievably shabby behaviour. I'd say, I don't know, the stuff one reads about the Epstein files, it's revolting. It's just so deeply unpleasant. And also we need to bear in mind that those two Eiffel Towers full of documents. I mean, I think we're only just at level one.

39:01We've only reached level one, you know, that level we can get out, have a glass of champagne and a croissant. We haven't started ascending the stairs. We're nowhere near that. So more revelations to come. More revelations to come. And what are we going to find out about Bill Clinton and Bill Gates and all these other people who are listed in them frequently? Well, we'll be covering it all and we will be back tomorrow, 5pm.