Andrew's Email Scandal Will Not Be Investigated

0:01Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor cover-up allegations flare, Meghan Markle's mum wins a lawsuit against a TV network, and King Charles is reducing his cancer treatment. program. I'm Jack Royston, Newsweek's Chief Royal Correspondent, and this is Newsweek's Royal Report. Hello listeners and welcome to the show. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, is not going to be investigated by the police over an email he sent in 2011 in which he asked a Metropolitan Police Close Protection Officer to dig up dirt on his accuser, Virginia Jeffrey, who is of course the woman who says that she was sex trafficked when she was 17 years old by Jeffrey Epstein and Gillian Maxwell to London, New York and the US Virgin Islands and made to have sex with Andrew.

0:46So obviously, Andrew denied those allegations. She sued him and they settled out of court. He denied liability, but he paid her a massive amount of money reportedly in the kind of millions or tens of millions, effectively buying her silence or buying an end to the court case back in 2022. So what is this email about? And is there any substance to these allegations of a cover-up. So essentially what happened was that the allegations, Virginia's actual allegations date back to 2001. March 2001 was the London allegation and the next are over the following few months. But in 2011, the whole scandal started exploding onto the public eye.

1:27So 2010, Andrew got photographed walking through Central Park with Epstein. By April 2011, Virginia had done her first interview with the British newspaper with the Mail on Sunday, and she gave this incredibly harrowing account of her whole life, including being homeless and having to have sex with men for food and all of these kinds of things. And they published for the first time this photograph. She supplied them of Andrew with her arm around her waist. The day before that came out, Andrew clearly knew about it. Their mail on Sunday would have gone to the palace for comment. And Andrew asked, he sent an email.

2:05The email actually was to a palace press officer saying, I have asked, in fact, let me read it. I will actually read it word for word what it says, because it's quite important to know. So he wrote, it would also seem she, i.e. Virginia, has a criminal record in the States. I have given her DOB, as in date of birth, and social security number for investigation with, and then the name of the police officer is redacted, but he explains that that person is the on-duty PPO, BPO standing for police protection officer. So in other words, he's saying, I have asked this on duty police officer to carry out inquiries into whether Virginia might have a criminal record.

2:48Clearly, the implication is that Andrew would then take that information and use it as part of a kind of PR fight back to try to clear his name by undermining the credibility of the woman who accused him. So that is, in the eyes of a lot of people, that would be a complete dereliction of duty, if you like, by the police officer had they gone ahead with it. Now, nobody has said publicly whether there's any evidence they did perform a search or not. You might infer from the fact that the police are not investigating that they didn't uncover any evidence that the police officer actually actioned this request.

3:25But let's talk about what this means anyway, irrespective of whether the police officer did, for example, search the police national computer. So I think the starting point is to look at what the actual potential offence would be. And that's something called misconduct in a public office. And this is slightly unhelpfully. It's a law that dates back hundreds of years. So for American viewers, you've got to remember that Britain is a really old country and certain aspects of the British legal system predate the modern concepts of law and legislation And were never actually Acts of Parliament, but rather, you know, they're part of what we call the unwritten constitution.

4:03They're just like old treatises and things written by old dead dudes. And so they don't have the format of modern laws. And in that respect, the law of misconduct in the public office isn't formalised and doesn't have formal defences like kind of explicitly built into it where it spells out exactly what constitutes an offence and exactly what constitutes a defence to an allegation. So this is what the CPS website says about what misconduct in a public office is. The offence concerns serious, willful abuse or neglect of the power or responsibilities of the public office held. There must be a direct link between the misconduct and abuse of those powers or responsibilities.

4:48The Court of Appeal has made it clear that the offence should be strictly confined, and it can raise complex and sometimes sensitive issues. So the key things are it has to be serious, it has to be willful. So willful means that the person committing an offence has to know that what they're doing is wrong. And it says here, abuse or neglect of the power or responsibilities of the public office held. Now, I covered a lot of court cases earlier in my career when journalists were being prosecuted for this offence. I was in court hearing the arguments play out and looking at the Court of Appeal rulings on it.

5:26and what was said at the time was it has to be shocking or outrageous to the public. So it's not about what your boss thinks if you're a police officer and it's not about what the king thinks if you're Andrew or the queen. It's about what the public think, the public's concept of whether you've breached the trust that they placed in you as a public official. So, you know, police officers are not supposed to gather evidence on behalf of the people who are being accused with a view to that evidence being used in a PR campaign to undermine people who make allegations of criminal offences. That is not the job of the police.

6:06The job of the police is to prevent and detect crime, which they are supposed to do without fear or favour. Now, clearly, had this police officer carried out this request from Andrew, they would have been favouring Andrew. and also it's been said and I'll read you the quote that the job of a protection officer is not actually to be a detective they're not supposed to detect crime that's the job of detectives police protection officers are there to protect people that is the boundary of their duty so I'm going to read you now Di Davis is a former head of Royal Protection at the Metropolitan Police this email from Andrew it first became public actually via the mail on Sunday back in October and at the time they asked Di Davis former head of royalty protection, what he thought of this email.

6:52And this is what he had to say. It is time for Scotland Yard to launch a full criminal investigation into Prince Andrew. This was before he was stripped of his Prince title. Asking a police officer to investigate an alleged victim is outside of their duties, whether that is calling the FBI, your mates in the US, or searching out themselves to find out whether someone has a criminal offence. that it is in my view a criminal offence. Asking a public servant that includes anyone from the palace or police to commit those inquiries is inciting them, aiding and abetting them to commit misconduct in a public office.

7:28It should be investigated and he should be interviewed under caution. So there's one point there that Di Davis is hinting at but not making explicit, which is I suppose that there's a question over whether Prince Andrew countered as a public official back in 2011. So the police officer very clearly does, and a palace press office very, very clearly would too. But is a royal actually a public official, or are they something more loosely defined? So when he says aiding and abetting, what he's talking about is that even if you're not a public official, you can still be charged with this offence if you are part of a conspiracy with a public official to carry out that offence.

8:07And a lot of journalists got done that way. You know, they weren't public officials, but they got done with for misconduct in public office because they were being they were paying police officers or prison guards or whoever. So they got hauled through the courts anyway. So, you know, for me, I don't think it'd be a particularly difficult sell to try to tell a jury that that royals are public officials. And Andrew actually was a trade envoy at the time. But the key thing for me, so in other words, he was not just a royal family member, but he was working for the British government in an additional capacity as a trade envoy, which is very clearly a public office.

8:43But crucially, he only has a Metropolitan Police Close Protection Officer because he was a royal and particularly a working royal. You know, we've had this whole thing with Harry and his police protection, which was taken away from him when he quit and moved to America, when he moved out of the role of being a working royal and went and lived in another country. So Andrew was a working royal at the time. You know, that's what we call it. There's a lot. There's a huge basis on which to make the argument that a working royal who receives payment from public money is performing a public office. And so you don't really need to be, in my view, in a conspiracy with a public official.

9:27So I would argue that it's really, really simple. Andrew was a public official at the time, and he gets close protection officers because we don't want to see a royal family member assassinated. And he abused that position in a way that would very clearly be outrageous, scandalous and shocking to the public. and that he breached the trust that the public placed in him by trying to use that benefit, that privilege that he has as a working royal in order to gain an advantage over a woman who accused him of a criminal offence, which is really actually exactly the opposite of what a police officer is supposed to do and the real definitive essence, incontrovertible essence of that.

10:15and for American viewers it might actually be a little bit different in America but in Britain if Virginia had had a criminal offence and her family say she didn't and it's never come out that she did but let's say for argument's sake that she had a criminal record that would not actually be admissible in court in Britain if let's say the case had come to court her allegations that she was sex trafficked and made to have sex with Andrew were tested in court he was in the dock as a defendant it would not be admissible in court that she had a criminal record for an, if it was unrelated, right? Like if she had a criminal record for perverting the course of justice, which is a trust-based defense in relation to Epstein allegations, that could be admitted as evidence in court because it's materially relevant.

10:59But if she got done for shoplifting or, you know, I don't know, she threw a glass at someone in a bar once, right? That would not be admissible in court as evidence in a UK lawsuit, in a UK criminal case, right? So in other words, he was trying to smear her. Like that's what he was trying to do. He was trying to dig up dirt on Virginia so that he could win a PR war to protect his own reputation. And that is abusing the trust that is placed in him by the public, because it's not the public's intention that royal family members use their close protection team in this way in order to basically bully people.

11:36You know, that's what it is, plain and simple. So to me, it is very, very simple. And that is based on the CPS's own analysis of what misconduct in a public office is, coupled with my experience of covering actual court cases where the charge was misconduct in a public office. Obviously, you know, the police did not agree. So let's see what they had to say. Ella Marriott is the Met's central specialist crime commander. and she issued a long statement on Saturday and this is what she had to say. Our thoughts will always be with Miss Jeffery's family and friends following her death. Virginia Jeffery, if you didn't know already, died in April after what her family described as a suicide.

12:19In 2015, the Metropolitan Police Service received allegations relating to non-recent trafficking for sexual exploitation involving Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. So right now she's giving a bit of a history of, because Virginia at one point did actually file an allegation against Andrew with the Metropolitan Police back in 2015, and that was the first time they considered whether to investigate Andrew. So she's explaining all the decisions that have been taken over the years to not investigate him. These allegations primarily concerned events outside the United Kingdom with one allegation of trafficking to central London in March 2001.

12:59Officers assessed all available evidence at the time interviewed the complainant, Miss Virginia Jeffrey, as well as contacting several other potential victims. This did not result in any allegation of criminal conduct against any UK-based nationals. I'm going to read that again. This did not result in any allegation of criminal conduct against any UK-based nationals. In fact, I'm going to pause there for a minute because I think that's really important to properly consider. So Andrew is obviously a UK-based national. So they've said they interviewed Virginia and a number of other witnesses, and they did not uncover any allegation of criminal offence by Andrew, effectively, a UK-based national.

13:44So why is that? Why have they said that? Well, one reason might be the fact that Virginia was 17 at the time. So why have they said that? One reason might be that Virginia was 17 at the time, which in Florida, I understand, would make her below the age of consent. Because in Florida, it's 18. But in Britain, the age of consent is 16. So she would have been under UK law, the jurisdiction where the first incident took place. She would actually have been over the legal age of consent. So what else might Andrew have been charged with? Well, he might have been included as part of a conspiracy to commit sex trafficking.

14:23So if Virginia was sex trafficked to London in order to have sex with Andrew, it is possible that the police could have prosecuted him as being part of that conspiracy. But they would obviously have had to build a case around establishing whether Andrew knew that she was a sex trafficking victim, whether he knew the nature of her relationship with Epstein and so on. And I know from covering other court cases that what his defense barrister would have said is the essence of conspiracy is consent and you cannot consent to something that you don't know is happening. and so the police would have had to have proven knowledge not just of Virginia's age which is incredibly creepy but technically over the legal age of consent but also actually the fact that Epstein had trafficked her to London for Andrew to have sex with not just that she was his travelling masseur who really liked him or whatever Like, Andrew, they would have to prove knowledge of the actual conspiracy to sex traffic.

15:32And they might have felt that nothing that was said to them demonstrated Andrew's knowledge of the sex trafficking operation. So they say, she says, the MPS, that's the Metropolitan Police Service, sought advice from the Crown Prosecution Service, which is the prosecuting authority in Britain. They prosecute cases. It's like the district attorney or the US attorney. and liaised with the United States authorities who were leading investigations into related matters involving US nationals. Following this legal advice, it was clear that any investigation into human trafficking would be largely focused on activities outside the UK and perpetrators based overseas.

16:11So this is the bit where they deal with why they didn't pursue sex trafficking as the charge. Officers therefore concluded in consultation with the CPS, the Crown Prosecution Service, that other international authorities were best placed to progress these allegations. Officers maintained close liaison with the United States and other relevant authorities throughout their investigation to ensure any UK matters could be identified and to consider any support requested. A decision was made in November 2016 not to proceed to a full criminal investigation. That decision was reviewed in August 2019.

16:45That's the month Jeffrey Epstein died in jail after hanging himself. And again in 2021 and 2022. In each instance, the position remained unchanged and Ms. Jeffrey and her legal representatives were informed. Following recent reports, and now we're getting on note, by the way, how long this statement is. So even just the length of this police statement shows that they do feel that they really have to explain and justify to the public why they're not pursuing this. So following recent reporting suggesting that Mr. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor asked his Met Police Close Protection Officer to carry out checks on Ms.

17:22Geoffrey in 2011, the NPS carried out a further assessment. This assessment has not revealed any additional evidence of criminal acts or misconduct. The Met remains committed to thoroughly assessing any new information that could assist in this matter. To date, we have not received any additional evidence that would support reopening the investigation. Blah, blah, blah. Basically, it then wraps it up with some generic guff. so that's crazy to me and it is to me bonkers that they say that this assessment has not revealed any evidence of criminal acts or misconduct so this is to me it's taking me back to this recurring realisation that royal family members need a code of conduct like it needs to be on paper in writing that royal family members have to conduct themselves to a certain moral standard.

18:16And if they fail to, then, you know, at the very least, like, can we just agree that something bad has happened? It's like, there is nothing in this statement that establishes the principle that a royal family member should not just treat their metropolitan police officer like a tool for them to do whatever they want with. Like, the police officers are supposed to serve us. Like, they protect the royal family because that serves us. Like, that serves Britain as a country, as a society. They don't do it because, you know, we just like the royals and so we want to give them nice stuff. It's not just us giving like, you know, a company car because we want them to be happy.

18:57It's not one of those things that you might get if you work for Google or something, you get all these perks. Like it's not a perk of the job. We give royal family members close protection officers because we don't want royal family members to be assassinated or attacked because it serves the public interest in Britain to keep them safe. But they must not abuse that privilege. They mustn't. And there is absolutely nothing that's been said by the palace and nothing that's been said by the police that cements that principle that there have to be boundaries imposed on royal family members, that there are things that they are allowed to do.

19:37Absolutely. but there are also things that they're not allowed to do. Like it is not acceptable for them to do certain things. One of which is getting a serving police officer to dig up dirt on a woman who's accused you of a criminal offence in order that you can try and smear and tarnish her reputation in the public domain. And I suspect what's happened here is that the police have found no evidence that the police officer followed through on Andrew's request and carried out any searches. Perhaps, you know, my information is that the palace press officer who was actually sent this email about Andrew doesn't remember receiving it.

20:14You know, there are loads of emails flying around at the time and they simply do not remember getting this one. Who on earth knows? But my other question is, like, do the palace still have all of these records? Do the palace have Andrew's emails from 2011? Have the palace supplied those emails to the police investigation? Have the police asked them to? It feels to me like the police have basically gone back through their own records and the evidence that they are in possession of and built their decision making around that, rather than go to the palace and say, what evidence do you have? You are supposed to be at the top of society.

20:58King Charles is head of state. You presumably therefore want your government's laws to be enforced. And, you know, the police, the Crown Prosecution Service, which pursues prosecutions in your name to fulfil its function properly. So can you give us the evidence that we might use to determine whether we need to investigate? And there's been absolutely no indication that Buckingham Palace has supplied any information to the police about this. And it was really striking, actually, that just in the past week, in fact, over the weekend, a story emerged in the mail on Sunday, that actually it's taking forever to get Andrew out of his mansion, Royal Lodge, because when he was stripped of his royal titles, he was also told he had to leave his 30-room house in Windsor, Royal Lodge.

21:48And part of the reason it's taking so long to get him out is because the rooms are apparently packed with all of his stuff, because he's a hoarder. And specifically mentioned in that story are that there are rooms full of documents, documents including some of which are significant enough that they need to be archived they need to be added to the royal archives because they are historically significant documents together with photographs so in other words this is all stuff that could be evidence and nobody searched his house nobody searched through all of these reams and reams of documents and pictures to see if there's anything incriminating he's just been left to his own devices and i do find it very difficult to believe that the police would be so, I suppose the word is kind of laissez-faire and hands off if this was an ordinary person, particularly this one where there is something in writing, in an email, incontrovertible that you could put in front of a jury and say, you know, all they would have to do, say a royal family member is expected to meet the highest standards of public conduct because they are role models to the nation, right?

22:58It's not a difficult sell. Of course they are. Being a royal family member is a public office. They receive public funding for carrying out their duties. And part of being a working royal is you receive a close protection team. And it is not a privilege to do with whatever you want. It is there to protect you and nothing more. And that Andrew made this request and that it's very important that we uphold certain moral values and standards in this society. And Andrew breached them. And it's here in black and white. It's incontrovertible. I find it very difficult to believe that they would consider there to be no reasonable prospect of the jury going guilty.

23:42Because it doesn't have to be that they feel totally certain the jury are definitively definitely going to go guilty. there just has to be a reasonable prospect of conviction and that's to press charges. That's not even for the investigation. So I think it's incredibly frustrating and the inevitable conclusion is the police will just literally never prosecute a royal family member and just think about what that actually means. Like if you're another royal family member whether now or in the future maybe even in 10, 20, 30 years time looking back on this, the inevitable conclusion is you can kind of do whatever you want because no one's ever going to prosecute you, even when it's in black and white.

24:27And that is terrible for the future of society because if you don't put walls up around people, then they will do terrible things. Accountability is the mechanism through which you stop bad things from happening. That is the preventative element of the law, is that if people know they'll be prosecuted, a whole load of them will never commit criminal offence. Some will do it anyway, no matter what's illegal and no matter what the potential punishment is. But a whole load of people will simply never commit the crime in the first place if they know they're going to be prosecuted. But equally, if they know they'll get away with it, then people will be like, oh, well, you know, no one cares anyway.

25:08And that's kind of the feeling with Andrew now is the police don't care. Right. And it's very difficult to resist that. And we had this with King Charles, you know, back a couple of years ago, there was this thing called the cash for honors scandal, which was basically that a man called Michael Fawcett, who was the chief executive of his, one of Charles's charities, the Royal Foundation, sent an email to a Saudi billionaire and basically offering him help securing a knighthood and citizenship in return. for donations to Charles' charity. So they were charitable donations. It wasn't about personally profiting from it, but it was about trying to secure investment in the charity in return for help with an application for citizenship and pursuit of a knighthood.

25:55And those things are not supposed to be buyable. You're not supposed to be able to buy British citizenship. You're not supposed to be able to buy a knighthood. So again, it was another one that seemed really clear cut. And the police actually there, they spent two years investigating it. But even while that investigation was happening, it was very clear that there was also a regulatory investigation by a charity regulator up in Scotland, which is where the charity is based. And they were kind of leaving the office of the Scottish charity's regulator to conduct the investigation and just like checking in with them and seeing what they'd uncovered and how they were getting on with things.

26:31And then they kind of made their decision based in part on the investigative work that was done by the regulator, which is another thing that's completely insane to me, that they wouldn't just grab a hold of it and deal with it themselves. But they clearly don't want to. They don't want to take on the royals. And part of the reason might be fear of failure. What happens if you... It's the classic race. You come for the king, you better not miss. What happens to the specific individual police officers who come for the king or his brother and miss? and the prosecution fails, do they destroy themselves and their careers?

27:06But it's just terrible. And for me, the way that the prosecutions against journalists for misconduct in the public office functioned is they were based substantially around the codes of conduct of the public officials. So let's say it was a prison guard. They would go through the code of conduct for prison officers and say, well, look, he's been told by management, effectively, it's in his contract that he's not allowed to do this thing and he's not allowed to do that thing. So that means that he's broken the law because it's in writing that this is what's expected of him and he's failed to meet that expectation.

27:39Interestingly, the Court of Appeal actually didn't take that view. They took the view that the offence of misconduct in a public office is not about the employment structure or the management structure or what your boss thinks. It's about the public's trust. However, clearly, a prosecution like this would be easier to pursue in future if there was an actual code of conduct for royal family members that established the principle that, as we say to footballers, you know, soccer players in Britain, they will be judged by their conduct both on and off the pitch. And we need to make that really clear in writing for royals.