More Trouble for Prince Andrew

0:01Prince Andrew could face a police investigation, King Charles is on a historic visit to the Vatican and Meghan breaks down in tears at a charity event. I'm Jack Royston, Newsweek's Chief Royal Correspondent, and this is Newsweek's Royal Report. Hello listeners and welcome to the show. Now Prince Andrew's world has substantially collapsed over the last week, which is saying something given how far he had already fallen. But things have genuinely changed. So it all started on Friday night, UK time, when a buzz kind of went around the UK media that a big statement was coming. These have become more common in recent years.

0:39And then in this particular one, Prince Andrew actually himself announced via a Buckingham Palace statement that he was going to give up voluntarily the use of his royal title. So not the titles themselves, but the use of them. Now, this was presumably intended to stem the tide of incredibly damaging stories and allegations surrounding Andrew. But already by Sunday, it was clear that that was not going to work. And the particular new information that emerged on Sunday, in the mail on Sunday, in fact, was an email which appears to suggest that Prince Andrew asked or instructed a royalty protection officer to dig up dirt on his accuser, Virginia Jeffrey.

1:24Now, this is said to have happened back in February 2011. So it's historic. He was a working royal at the time. and the information is disclosed in an email he sent to a deputy press secretary to Queen Elizabeth II. So in other words, the palace knew about it and he appears to have given Virginia Jeffries date of birth and social security number in this email. So that has now been addressed publicly by the Metropolitan Police who say they are actively looking at these new claims, which is basically police code for they're going to decide it's all very new but they're going to decide whether to launch a formal police investigation now you will not need me to tell you that if they do that and it related it resulted in andrew being charged that would be a cataclysmic disaster for the monarchy but it would also be a massive win for virginia's family obviously virginia jeffrey very sadly is no longer with us.

2:24She died in April after what her family described as a suicide. So this has fundamentally changed where things are, but there are huge questions remaining, including about whether any of this is actually going to help protect the monarchy's reputation. When I say any of this, I mean any of what the palace has tried to do to kind of distance itself further from Andrew. But just a few actual details first. So the email itself, like I said, it was sent to Ed Perkins, who was deputy press secretary to the Queen at the time back in 2011. This was one day before publication of Virginia Jeffries' first media interview to the Mail on Sunday.

3:08And there are some other important bits of timeline around there, which I'm going to get into in a minute, but first of all, what the email actually said. So he wrote, it would also seem she has a criminal record in the States, she being Virginia. I've given her DOB, i.e. date of birth and social security number for investigation with, and then the name of the officer is redacted, but he explains that that is the on-duty PPO, which stands for personal protection officer. so the Metropolitan Police responded to this like I said they confirmed that they're aware of it and they said they're actively looking into the claims and that means that they haven't yet decided whether to investigate they will do a kind of initial cursory review of the evidence available to them they might for example if they have I mean the first thing is they will want the email if they don't have it already and if they once they've got it they will take the name of that officer and try and no doubt speak to them and see what information they can find out.

4:07They may also be able to search their own systems in case Andrew made that request via email. But like I said, you know, the timing is massively important here and there are timeline issues. So I want to give some kind of basic details of that timeline. So Virginia's actual allegations against Andrew date back to 2001. But the Epstein scandal, how it related to Andrew in terms of it being publicly known about really kicks off probably from December 2011, but also December 2010 as our first key date. So in December 2010, Andrew flew to New York. He stayed overnight at Jeffrey Epstein's house. And he said later to the BBC in 2019 that he did that in order to break off his friendship with Epstein in person, right?

4:56So he said he specifically said he was being too honourable, that he felt if he was going to cut ties with Jeffrey Epstein, who by this time was a convicted paedophile, he was going to need to go and do it in person in New York. So in January of 2011, one month later, Andrew's ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, emailed Jeffrey Epstein with this groveling email in which she thanked him for lending her£15 ,000 to help her resolve crushing debts that she was experiencing at that time. So this particular email that Andrew sends was sent days after a picture of him walking through Central Park with Jeffrey Epstein was published in the tabloids for the first time.

5:38And the specific story there was saying Epstein's a convicted paedophile and Andrew shouldn't have anything to do with him as a result. So that was the basis of the story that had been published. And then it was on the eve of, the day before, the publication of Virginia Jeffries' really harrowing details of her life story. I talked about it in great detail on the show last week, so I'm not going to go too deeply into it right now. But just, you know, she talked about, you know, having been homeless as a child and sleeping with men for food and taking Xanax to numb the pain. And it was the publication of the first photo, or that famous photo of Andrew with his arm around Virginia Jeffries' waist.

6:17So that was about to happen. and Andrew did this on the eve of that major, major story. So in other words, it does seem on the face of it, like what he is saying is that he's asked this police protection officer to dig up dirt on Virginia Jeffrey, potentially having a criminal record, which actually her family have said is not true. They've said she didn't have a criminal record. I don't recall anything like that coming up in the civil lawsuit that Virginia filed against Prince Andrew. And he did, like his lawyers fought dirty and they did put some quite like nasty things into the evidence in that lawsuit.

6:47I don't remember there being anything at all about having a criminal record. So obviously, after Andrew has sent this particular email and revealed that he'd asked this of a police protection officer, the day after the article comes out with all of its incredibly harrowing details, and then as I discussed last week, Andrew then sends a follow up email to Jeffrey Epstein saying, I'm just thinking about what impact this is having on you. And, you know, we're in this together and we'll just need to rise above it and we'll play again soon. So that timeline of events, which, by the way, is completely and controvertibly factually true, as far as we can tell, you know, with Virginia's allegations, there is the element of, you know, of doubt that can only really be resolved by a jury, you know, until those allegations are put before a jury, we will never be able to say definitively whether Virginia Jeffery's allegations are true and Andrew is a liar or whether Andrew is telling the truth and Virginia is a liar.

7:44It's down to a jury to decide. But however, this chain of events, Andrew's kind of trying to respond and react to this scandal, that is definitively factually provable. You know, those emails exist in black and white. And that's really crucially important in terms of how the monarchy responds to this. I want you to hold on to that thought, right? But we've got the timeline broadly in place. I mean, there's one other point, which is Fergie sent another, she kind of gave a big statement to the Evening Standard a month later in March saying, you know, she abhors pedophilia and child abuse and would have nothing more to do with Epstein.

8:22And then the following month in April, she sent Epstein another groveling email saying, oh, I'm so sorry. You know, I just kind of, you must, please forgive me. You must understand I was just trying to save my career as a children's writer. So this is, you know, this timeline really is the complete annihilation of Fergie's reputation as well as Andrew's. But the specific wording of the Met statement is, we are aware of media reporting and are actively looking into the claims made. So what could happen as a result of this? What would the crime be? Well, I'm relieved that a former police, head of royalty protection at the Metropolitan Police, has come out to make it explicit, because that gives me a little bit of weight behind what I was going to say anyway.

9:05But But Di Davis, former head of royalty protection at the Metropolitan Police, has clarified that the particular crime would be something called misconduct in a public office. And that's really interesting because actually there was a huge effort by the Metropolitan Police to prosecute a load of journalists really recently, well, fairly recently in the last kind of 10, 15 years of that exact crime for giving money to public officials for stories. So what that does is it creates like a really recent body of case law, including, you know, there were appeals to the high court. So there are rulings by some really very senior judges.

9:40So all of the actual kind of case law should now be spelled out in really clear detail if the police were going to try and bring this case. And basically, to cut a long story short, an offence is committed if a public official willfully misconducts themselves without reasonable excuse in a manner that would represent a serious breach of the trust placed in that public official by the public. so obviously I think you know the public are really pretty outraged about this all and I think if the facts are proven there is a real chance a real prospect of potential success should the Met try to bring or should the Crown Prosecution Service really try to bring a case against Andrew so that is quite interesting actually though and this is the other interesting bit about the history in terms of the prosecution of journalists under this area of law is that back when they were looking at tabloid reporters, the Crown Prosecution Service advanced this quite complex legal position that it's not only the public official who commits the crime.

10:43If they are in any way doing it in partnership with another person, then that person commits the crime too. And that opens up the possibility that, you know, if we don't know, there's nothing to suggest this police protection officer conducted these searches on Andrew's behalf. And hopefully, you know, the officer had just told Andrew to jog on and get lost. But if they did, then they could potentially be looked at as being part of a conspiracy to commit misconduct in a public office. Now, they are not able to defend themselves. They've not been named. They might well say that didn't happen, and fair enough.

11:20But it's not just Andrew who could be in the firing line. There's also anyone at the palace who might have been involved. So I would really hope that the palace themselves took this seriously and searched their own email systems to try to find their own internal records of any discussion that might have taken place internally at the monarchy about this issue. And, you know, again, obviously I've mentioned Ed Perkins, Queen's deputy private secretary. He may well have told Andrew that what he was talking about doing was insane and that he should stop and that it was completely morally wrong. I sincerely hope that's the case.

11:56He's not, I'm sure, in a position to speak freely about this because he'll have signed an NDA. So he won't be able to come out and defend himself. But there are serious questions to be asked here. And that might come out if the police do launch a formal investigation in terms of any role that Andrew might have tried to get the palace to play in smearing Virginia Jeffery. So it's, you know, it's one that if it takes off and it has legs, it could bring real serious reputational harm down on the monarchy. And in a way that could have really long lasting consequences for years and years to come and actually potentially threaten the future survival of the monarchy.

12:35and the reason for that is the fact that the polling shows young people in Britain are going off the monarchy going off going off the royals but more than that as I think I've discussed on this podcast before the actual age range within which you see those trends is getting older not you know it's not this problem isn't going away it's spreading up the age range which is partly going to be a case of the people who hated the monarchy back in 2021 will now be four years older. So some of them might have been 18 to 24 in those days and will now be in the 25 to 34 year age bracket. But actually, I looked into the detail of something called the British Social Attitude Survey a few weeks ago and found that actually, you know, new parent, like the parental age brackets.

13:27So, kind of 35 to 44 is now showing signs of becoming increasingly antagonistic to monarchy. And that is obviously a massive concern for the royals because that could create a time bomb for future generations to deal with. Because if those people then bring their children up to be more hostile to the monarchy, then that might not actually show in the polling for another kind of 18 to 20 years. But the royals could wake up one day and find that suddenly everybody hates them and not necessarily particularly know why, but the reason might well wind up being that Prince Andrew made scores and scores and scores of people hate the monarchy, you know, 20 years earlier.

14:04And by that point, it will be too late for them to do anything about it. So I think the royals need to take this really, really seriously. So what have they tried to do? Well, they've tried to persuade, or they've succeeded, in fact, in persuading Andrew to give up his title. So that includes voluntarily giving up his Duke of York title, it includes giving up the use of it, it includes voluntarily giving up his role in the Order of the Garter, which is a chivalric order, an order of knights, which he does like that kind of pomp and it blows up his ego to be involved in these things. So it's not nothing, but there's a number of reasons why I think it won't work.

14:44I mean, apart from anything else, he's still a prince. So, you know, not being able to call himself the Duke of York is, I guess, a blow to him. But, you know, he barely leaves the house anyway. So it's not completely clear in what context he was previously using the Duke of York title that he won't now be able to use it. And if he just broke the rules and used it anyway, would we even find out, given that we're not really aware of him doing these things now? But this is the statement. And bear in mind, this is a statement from Andrew, but also released through Buckingham Palace press office. In discussion with the king and my immediate and wider family, we have concluded the continued accusations about me distract from the work of his majesty and the royal family.

15:26So, you know, straight off the back there, you know, couching this through the lens that your terrible, terrible conduct is distracting from the good work of the royal family is really not the way to address this issue because the British public do not see this that way. They don't think that this is awful because it's just such a distraction from the monarchy. There have been times when Andrew's been a distraction. For example, when he turned up at a memorial to his father, Prince Philip, and stole all the headlines, but that's not what's been happening in the British papers in the past few weeks.

16:01That email that he sent to Jeffrey Epstein saying, we're in this together and we'll just have to rise above it the day after his accuser told, you know, her interview saying that she'd had to have sex with homeless people for money, for food rather, and has taken Xanax to numb the pain, and then had become a Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking victim, you know, flown to London at the age of 17. All of the, you know, to come off the back of reading all of that 3 ,500 words of incredibly harrowing testimony. And the next day, you know, email the predator, the abuser, the convicted paedophile at that point, Jeffrey Epstein, and say, I'm worried about how this is affecting you.

16:44Don't worry about me. And we're in this together and we'll play again soon. That is definitively morally wrong to the overwhelming majority of Britain. You will not find more than a tiny handful of people who do not consider that definitively morally wrong. And you can say that without engaging in the more difficult question of whether Virginia's allegations are true, right? Because that is genuinely hard. That is down to a jury to decide. Unfortunately, no jury will get the chance because Andrew will not be prosecuted for Virginia's allegations, even if he is prosecuted over this email about the police protection officer.

17:24But, you know, the monarchy now is in a position where really they need to do something much stronger. And what that is, is no, never before has anybody, whether it was Queen Elizabeth II, King Charles, Prince William, none of them have ever actually spelled out clearly in detail in an on the record statement, what they think of Andrew and his conduct. so we've had Andrew getting forced to say stuff so far you know even after the BBC interview he did in 2019 he was forced to issue a statement you know in which he'd stepped back from public life and said that you know he famously in the interview didn't express any sympathy for the victims and so the statement they made him do and you know a few days later he did express sympathy for the victims so you know we've had the palace making Andrew take responsibility in various different ways, but we've never had the Queen, King Charles, Prince William, anybody else actually tell us what they think about all of this.

18:30We see source quotes in newspapers saying, William wants to be much tougher on Andrew, but even that is still couched in the kind of lens of royal PR and how to handle a difficult problem. What we haven't had is a positive expression of the values of the monarchy and our values as a society. Because, you know, we have in this, in Britain, you know, we have a zero tolerance approach to child exploitation, which is sown through all of society, including, you know, the concept of safeguarding children, which, you know, is through the kind of policies in schools, you know, in government, in council departments, in children's centres, you know, all over everywhere.

19:15We have policies about sex trafficking, you know, even private companies have policies on how to make sure they don't unwittingly wind up in some way supporting the actions of traffickers or, you know, or whatever. So this is sown throughout British society and it should be perfectly reasonable for the British public to expect that King Charles would be able to give some kind of a positive statement of what the monarchy's values are. And the really kind of galling thing about it is that Queen Camilla does actually do quite a lot of work with rape and sexual abuse survivors. And yet that is so much less famous than the Epstein scandal.

19:56And the monarchy is so much more associated with perpetrators than it is with victims, despite the charity work that Queen Camilla has done. So this really, really needs, I think, King Charles to come out and show leadership from the front to tell us what we all know to be true already anyway. which is, you know, he will not engage with the question of whether Andrew is guilty of a criminal offence, and he will not engage with the question of whether Virginia Geoffrey is telling the truth or not. But there is, in my view, nothing to stop him coming out and just giving a positive statement saying, Prince Andrew's conduct has been definitively morally wrong, right?

20:36There is ample evidence to support that contention and to say that Andrew's conduct falls well below the values of the monarchy and that the punitive action taken against him, enforcing him, basically negotiating the situation with him where he gives up his titles is not about stopping him from being a distraction. It is about the fact that he has done something definitively morally wrong and that this is not who we are as a country and what the monarchy stands for is not smearing sex trafficking survivors, child abuse survivors, in order to protect Andrew's own reputation. You know, that is not who we are as a society.

21:19We do not believe in that. And Charles should be able to show leadership in that department. In fact, Gloria Allred, the attorney who represents some of the Epstein victims, went on TV in Britain and said that she thought Andrew's statement was offensive. So in terms of, you know, containing the PR fallout and the damage done to the monarchy's reputation. I mean, you know, it's not going to do that. It isn't going to do that. And there will be more allegations. Like I said, you know, Andrew made that statement Friday. And by Sunday, new material had come out. Tuesday this week, Virginia's posthumously written book is going to be published.

21:55And already we're seeing little bits and pieces get published in the British media, for example. There's a really harrowing line about how actually she experienced, I think, an abortion days after one of the occasions on which she says she was trafficked to um jeffrey epstein's private island to take part in an orgy with prince andrew now obviously he denies this um but she uh she describes how she became ill during a plane ride now um she said she writes i had a tiny incursion near my belly button which was consistent with a laparoscopic i.e. keyhole surgery for an ectopic pregnancy, but Epstein told me I'd had a miscarriage, which is something altogether different.

22:40The one thing I remember clearly is that at one point, a doctor told me I might never be able to have children. So obviously that is incredibly harrowing. Now there's no basis on which to kind of suggest that Andrew must have been the person who got Virginia pregnant. And she says elsewhere in the book, Epstein never wore a condom, neither did the men that he and Maxwell trafficked me to. So it's not necessarily about saying that, you know, Andrew got her pregnant, but the harrowing nature of her experiences and what she went through is going to be incredibly upsetting to anybody who reads that book.

23:16You know, here's another passage about her experiences with Epstein generally. In my years with them, i.e. Epstein and Maxwell, they lent me out to scores of wealthy, powerful people. I was habitually used and humiliated and in some instances choked, beaten and bloodied. I believed that I might die a sex slave. And that obviously goes hand in hand with things she said in the past in court filings, for example, that she feared death or serious harm to herself if she didn't do what Epstein and Maxwell told her to do. And that was part of the reason why she says she was forced to have sex with Andrew after being trafficked to London aged 17.

23:59So do go out and buy the book, judge for yourselves, decide what you think of it and whether you think her account is believable, whether it's plausible. And keep in mind everything that Andrew said about it, including both his denials and also his inconsistencies. For example, you know, he said to Emily Maitlis in 2019 that he cut off all contacts with Epstein in December 2010 and never had any contact with him again. And we now know that he emailed him just a couple of months later to say, you know, we're in this together. So keep both things in mind if you do read the book. And, you know, I would say go out and buy it.

24:39But I don't, you know, even beyond the book itself, I don't think this is going to be the end of it. And I know that there are journalists. I've heard two different accounts of journalists still working on aspects of this story that have not been published yet, including really serious and damaging claims that absolutely 100 % would make the splash in any newspaper in Britain. So I'm absolutely not expecting this to go away, which does beg the question, what does that mean for the monarchy long term? And I think now, like I said before, that this could be a tipping point for the monarchy where this has been going on such a long time, you know, best part of 20 or 15 years, that a whole generation of British people will have grown up associating the monarchy with predatory sexual abuse.

25:26And I think it could be a really long time, if at all, before they can actually dispel that association. Right, on that note, I'm going to take a quick break. But before I do, a reminder to rate and review the Royal Report on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your favourite shows. And if you are watching on YouTube, please do subscribe. And when I'm back, King Charles has a date with history.

25:56Hello and welcome back to the show. The King and Queen will undertake a historic visits to the Holy See, to the Vatican, to see the new Pope. Now, this may not sound particularly extraordinary initially, because after all, they went to see the last Pope shortly before he passed away, which I think was a hugely moving and significant moment for the King and Queen Camilla. But what's going to be really different this time is that a real effort has been made to kind of really move past any kind of historic divisions that might have been between these two denominations of Christianity and forge a kind of new path together.

26:32And there are some really symbolic moments that are going to cement that messaging. So the biggest one, I think, is that King Charles and Pope Leo are going to pray together. And this will be the first time that a British monarch has done this in centuries and hundreds of years. So that's going to be huge. And then there are some certain other details that are clearly in there to try to reinforce the point that this is about an ongoing partnership. It's not just a kind of one-off occasion between them. One of which is that the Vatican has actually created a chair, a special chair for Charles that he'll sit on, that will remain in the Sistine Chapel, I believe, in the Vatican, past this event.

27:16And it will be there for William when William becomes king, and it will remain in the Vatican as a kind of a symbolic, you know, permanent invite, I suppose, a permanent welcome to the British monarchy. Now, if you think for even just a moment about the conflict in Northern Ireland, and how deep those kind of Protestant and Catholic divisions had been for so many years, I mean, obviously, you know, there's peace in Northern Ireland today. But for so many years, the divisions ran so deep. I think it's, I personally think it's, it's great that Charles is doing this and it's a real sign that no matter how divided the world can sometimes seem, it is possible to just wake up one morning and decide to move past that division and to heal and to do things differently so I think that's fantastic and there are other details there, they are making the king I think it's Holy Confrater so he now has that title and it's a real testament to, I think, Charles's perspective on religion, which dates back at least to the 1990s, if not further, that he wants to kind of represent and defend all faiths.

28:32So the British monarch is the supreme governor of the Church of England, which means the ceremonial head of the Church of England. But it's also in the, you know, the king is also, the monarch is also the defender of the faith, which historically has meant Protestant Christianity. and Queen Elizabeth II, his mother, was very true to that interpretation that she was the ceremonial head of the Church of England and she had a whole load of rules that were bound up with that. For example, she only went to church weddings, but she was somebody who approached the job in a way that was much more fixed and much more about protocols and rules.