Every picture tells a story, sang Rod Stewart. The fall-out from the Epstein files and how it exposes our political, corporate, and royal elite is plain to see on every front page and every news bulletin in Britain and elsewhere. Close-up or cropped, there he is, slumped back in the back seat. He is trying to slide down and hide, to escape the nightmare.
In a daze, haunted, dishevelled Andrew stares vacantly ahead. Just the other day, he was smiling and waving at local people in Windsor Park. Maybe he thought he had already reached the bottom, people would leave him alone.
Virginia Giuffre could no longer speak out since she had been driven to suicide.
He had been slung out of his Windsor grace and favour house by his brother, the King. Andrew has been stripped of his titles and income streams. He is condemned to a cottage on the Sandringham estate, like some dacha supervised by the Kremlin. The red eye in the photo was a technical mistake, but it just adds more to the image. It is a red eye, the evil eye of an alleged predator of underage girls who has lied.
We would love to show the picture, but the copyright on this one prevents us from posting it. The lucky photographer, Phil Noble, will make more money from this snap than anything else he has ever taken. Apparently, it was a shoot-and-hope shot as the car sped away. Eddy Frankel has a great piece in the Guardian linking the photo to pictures in history like Munch’s Scream..
Many commentators are using the photo as a symbol of the monarchy’s crisis. They are not far wrong.
Andrew may not have read or heard Charles’s chilling sentence – “let the law take its course” – before he was released. Their mother, good old Queen Liz, shelled out £10 million to stop the law taking its course. It is still unclear whether this was public or private money, which is par for the course with the Royals.
That £10 million bought off Virginia Giuffre, the teenage blonde girl in another notorious picture. It was the image that set his downward spiral in motion. That one was not by a pap but from the people who felt they were untouchable. The entitled elite with money and power who thought they were always protected. These reprobates made sure they selected women and girls who would find it more difficult to speak out. They selected poorer families or kids who were desperate for money and fame. Trafficking across borders was another way of containing any ‘difficulties’.
It must be particularly galling for Andrew to be cast out by his brother. The oldest, who could not hack the rigours of boarding school, talked to his plants. Despite having completed his naval service and wearing a chestful of medals, Charles never saw the kind of active service that Andrew did in the Falklands War. He captained a warship, whereas Charles took charge of a minesweeper. The younger brother must resent the fact that Charles got away with a pretty brutal betrayal and treatment of Diana.
Equal before the law?
Paradoxically, the wall-to-wall coverage of the current royal crisis both reveals and conceals the reality of the Royal Family.
Apart from papers like The National in Scotland, not one of the papers really questions the institution of the monarchy. No, they take the one bad apple line. Andrew is a bounder, but the rest are doing a wonderful job keeping the country united and happy, as well as bringing in the tourists. Keeping Trump happy is supposedly another great national contribution they make, which Starmer indulged in spectacularly at some summit, pulling out the official letter as if it were some sort of hallowed text.
Adapting the axiom that no publicity is bad publicity, we can see even horror stories like Andrew help spice up the ongoing soap story/spectacle that is a permanent feature of the construction of ideological hegemony in Britain. So the scenario is adapted to show how resilient the Royal Family is. How its newly discovered robustness towards Andrew shows just how strong the myth of us all being equal before the law is.
Your royal highness, tell that to the Elbit 24 who have been kept imprisoned so long without bail. Look at the Palestine Action activists who have been designated by a Labour Home Secretary as terrorists. Watch Black and Asian youth who are stopped and searched. Listen to working-class people who fill up the prisons since they lack money for good lawyers.
Ask yourself why dodgy business people like Lady Mone, who fiddled PPE procurement during Covid, have not seen the inside of a cell. Desperate women shoplifters, on the other hand, clog up the prisons. Remember how Epstein’s parties were fuelled by cocaine and other drugs. But those people are never put inside, unlike the thousands of drug addicts that populate our prisons.
Media follows the script
The media is already running the new script. It highlights Charles running about doing his official job of opening events and shaking hands. Surely Princess Anne will be brought to the front of the stage. Time maybe to put out some more publicity about Camilla’s campaign against violence against women. Perhaps she needs to look closer to home.
Kate and William were already kept well away from Andrew in the Stalinist-style official photo shoots. You cannot underestimate how important it is for the soap opera to keep these two nice and clean. Eventually, if Charles’ health were to decline, they could play the card of an early transition.
So, although there is a lot of concealment, cracks are appearing in the uncritical support for the Royal Family, endlessly echoed in the mainstream media. Recent surveys show a decline in support for the monarchy among younger age groups.
Apart from playing the William and Kate card, there is talk of a slimmed-down working family or even giving some of the huge resources controlled by the Royals back to the subjects. I saw they were floating the idea of another Royal Park made up of the huge Buckingham Palace garden. The very generous financial arrangements between the government and the Crown could also be revisited.
Labourism supports the monarchy
One of the features of British Labourism is its slavish, sentimental attachment to the monarchy. Unlike social democracy in Europe, the republican tradition is very weak indeed. This is ironic, given that the English were among the first peoples to execute a monarch and establish a (temporary) non-monarchical regime.
Labour’s monarchist love affair is closely linked to its steadfast support for the nation, the union (against Scotch, Welsh independence or Irish unity) which is still alive and well. Finally, it is logically tied together with a largely pro-colonial, pro-imperialist ideology and practice.
Yes, it did support post-war independence movements, but helped repress the Kenyan insurgency, backed the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, cheered on Thatcher in the Falklands, and backs the Israeli settler colonial state today.
Socialists have correctly not attempted to push a Republican position onto broad movements like the Corbyn project for instance – the 2017 manifesto do not call for a Republic. Given the existing majority for the Monarchy insisting on the broad movement to adopt such a position would not progress the struggle.
However, we can raise demands that constitutionally and economically weaken the Royal Family’s hold. Constitutional change should remove the powers the monarch retains while retaining some ceremonial vestiges. The civil list could be severely cut, too.
Within the broad movement, its left wing should support others who argue for a Republic. Such steady campaigning does make people question more generally how we are governed, by whom, and in whose interests.
Crises like the present one offer us an opportunity to raise the principles of a republic. A decline in pro-monarchist ideology can only weaken the deference that holds back confidence in the working class’s ability to govern itself.
It is interesting, isn’t it, that the governments and others have started to move a little more seriously once the revelations about the sharing of government documents by Mandelson and Andrew with Epstein emerged. Trafficking and abusing women comes lower down in the hierarchy of priorities, whatever the verbal handwringing of our rulers.
Rod Stewart was more prophetic than he realised when he talked about Every Picture telling a story. Andrew, jettisoned and alone, must be feeling this right now:
Wait a minute
I firmly believed that I
Didn’t need anyone but me
I sincerely thought I was so complete
Look how wrong you can be
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