Max Hastings: Why an Epstein show trial for Andrew is a bad idea

Key topics:Prince Andrew may face US testimony over Epstein tiesStarmer under pressure over Mandelson & Epstein falloutEpstein saga distracts from Ukraine, Gaza, global crises.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Max Hastings.There is a better than even money chance that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, Duke of York, Knight of the Garter, will soon be obliged to fly to Washington and testify before a congressional committee about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. So serious is the reputational damage that he has done to Britain’s royal family that King Charles is likely to insist that his younger brother complies with a subpoena.I made myself unpopular by saying on a radio program last week that I found it hard to believe a royal show trial will do anybody any good. Windsor, as we shall abbreviate him, seems incapable of telling the truth. Moreover, we have found out enough about his sexual freeloading on Epstein to make our minds up. He is disgraced. Going beyond that is a question for the police. There may well be criminal matters that need pursuing, related to his alleged sharing of confidential information or possible sex trafficking. But an appearance on Capitol Hill will merely be show business.The British people, far more than many Americans, have become obsessed with the Epstein satanic circus. We are especially exercised by the roles of some prominent UK citizens, about whom President Donald Trump’s official redactors appear to have allowed us to learn far more than they have of the alleged misconduct of prominent Americans, except maybe Bill Clinton..Read more:.Prince Andrew’s grim Epstein scandal strengthens the ‘No Kings’ argument: Rosa Prince.It seems likely that, even if the exit of Prime Minister Keir Starmer is delayed, he will sooner or later become a casualty of Epstein, not because he was an associate of the pedophile financier, but because he appointed a US ambassador who was, and who then lied about it.Even today, few Americans have heard of Peter Mandelson. When he arrived in Washington last year, a friend who met him at a Georgetown party asked me about him. I responded that I dealt with Mandelson for years, as a newspaper editor, and established through personal experience that he might be incapable of lying straight in bed. I wrote that Starmer had apparently appointed him on the basis that the right man to represent Britain in a snakepit was a snake.It all went horribly wrong. That is hardly a surprise with Mandelson — for years many of us have known him for what he is. But the prime minister has ended up as collateral damage. Connoisseurs of scandal, who include many newspaper editors, are licking their lips at the prospect of months’ more revelations.Personally, I hope we can call a closure on the Epstein horror show sooner rather than later. This is not to spare Trump’s blushes, if he was capable of such things. Nor is it to ignore the victims of Epstein and friends. Proper legal process must be followed. My concern is more to do with the constant drip-feed of details that offer more media spectacle and cause for grandstanding outrage, and little to support criminal charges. And I worry because we live in extraordinarily serious and dangerous times, and this is taking too much of our attention.It is dismaying that each day’s front page and broadcast top story dominated by Epstein is one less where rightful attention is paid to Ukraine, Gaza, famine-stricken Sudan, climate change, US government anti-vaccination madness and much else. Epstein is a gift to Vladimir Putin, China’s President Xi and the leaders of Iran and Israel, who are able to carry on doing bad things without full international scrutiny.Beyond Epstein, Trump continues to generate a meaningless yet eye-catching crisis a day, whether about a possible blocking of the new US-Canada bridge, or increased tariffs. And all the time the urgent problems of the US and the world — the cost-of-living crisis, America’s withdrawal from international organizations, shameful presidential pardons and even a prospective US strike on Iran — escape proper debate.I was criticized on that radio program last week for suggesting that Windsor’s appearance before a congressional committee would get none of us anywhere, even Epstein’s victims. Many of the audience took this to mean that I wanted him to escape public humiliation for his gross abuses. Not so. He is already humiliated, as he richly deserves. Unless there is a clear aim to establish criminality, to continue pruriently poring over disclosures of more women, more free trips, more money for his ex-wife, is for whose benefit?The story of Windsor and Epstein is unusual among squalid royal stories because it has been documented and photographed. But regal families have for centuries exploited the fact that rich people foolish enough to value association with crowns offer princes absurdly generous prizes, financial or sexual, in return for their company. Spain’s royals have been repeatedly shamed by exposure of their participation in dirty deals, and the Scandinavians have their share of embarrassments.Kings and princes seem never to have as much money or, in some cases, as much sex as they think themselves entitled to. And even in an age when few crowned heads outside the Gulf states actually rule anything, sugar daddies are willing to indulge them. No further exposure of Windsor’s activities will diminish the eagerness of some future royals to embrace sleaze as a career, if they are granted the opportunity, because this is what ignorantly entitled people do. What we middle-class types label as decadence, they call fun..Read more:.Epstein: Starmer must end Labour’s “boys’ club” culture — Rosa Prince.As for Mandelson, who went on TV a month ago to assert that he never participated in Epstein’s sexual misdeeds because he is gay, his epitaph will be that he helped to create one Labour prime minister — Tony Blair — and destroyed another. .© 2026 Bloomberg L.P.

Max Hastings: Why an Epstein show trial for Andrew is a bad idea

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