When watching Prince Andrew’s car crash interview with the brilliant Emily Maitlis, I quickly came to a simple conclusion: I didn’t believe a lot of what he was saying. When shown a photograph of himself with a beautiful 17 year old girl, the Prince said he had no recollection of meeting her, which is not the same as saying he never met her. But when he was asked whether he’d had sex with her on 10th March 2001 his memory suddenly improved. “I was with the children and I’d taken Beatrice to a Pizza Express in Woking for a party at I suppose four or five in the afternoon.” Unbelievable. Literally.
Without getting into very personal territory, my memories of meeting members of the opposite sex and subsequent relationships (or not) remain crystal clear. When Andrew met – or didn’t meet, if you believe his story – Virginia Roberts, he was 41. The picture of them together has been in the public arena for donkey’s years. Whether he had “relations with that woman”, as Bill Clinton might have put it, is in some very minor ways small beer. 17 is far too young for a man in early middle age to engage in a relationship with, but let us be very honest: she was strikingly attractive.
I took my children for countless meals when they were younger. I can remember many of the places we went to but I would struggle to pin down an exact date or even decade. Perhaps the Woking branch of Pizza Express produces uniquely excellent pizza, unlike the other branches which produce generic mediocrity that tastes more like cardboard than authentic pizza.
Of all the things the interview raised, it was the Pizza Express episode that troubled me most because Andrew seemed more repulsed that he had been there and not by the idea of middle aged men having sex with trafficked young girls. He came across is shifty, evasive and thick.
The royal family now hangs by a much finer thread that you might think. Our elderly and frail monarch is rarely wheeled out in public these days, apart from when she is lied to by Boris Johnson to make a Queen’s Speech that will never be acted upon. When she goes, the succession passes to Prince Charles, who few like and respect. And who seriously believes that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will stick around in the UK, as the tabloid media stirs up hatred and dislike towards them? (I’m talking about you, Piers Morgan, but not just you.)
Prince Andrew will keep his job, which seems to involve playing golf and going on jollies around the world. His brand, such as it is, has been tainted irreparably but none of this matters. No one likes him and he doesn’t care. Nice work if you can get it.
