“Denier”, to Queen Elizabeth, referred to the thickness of her stockings: to her son the King, it refers to a climate-heretic. Thus the generational shift in the modern world, in which her second (and favourite) son is internationally regarded as a loathsome cur beneath any consideration, even while her granddaughter-in-law Catherine is now the most popular person in the realm.
Now, as it happens, I have variously met the Queen – courteous, chatty and interested – Charles (ditto) and Princess Anne (ditto, but even more so) and last but very much least, Andrew – less courteous than curt, though perhaps that’s not quite the word that comes to mind. He was horrible. Supercilious, rude and – as they say in Washington – a cocktail-party parrot-watcher.
I once also met Ghislaine Maxwell. She didn’t so much impatiently scan my pet parrot for those more interesting souls behind it as harpoon me with a laser-glance before stalking off to chat with those fascinating creatures behind me: a Saatchi or two, Terry Wogan, Simon Schama, Nigella Lawson, and so on. None of these can now be accused of complicity (any more than can I) in whatever Maxwell’s chum Jeffrey Epstein was getting up to, though guilt-by-association is all the rage these days. And yes, Epstein clearly was a bad egg, and not just because he had trouble spelling his first name. More relevantly, he was also very powerful, and worse still, a powerful, double-alpha male, the very peak of the human hierarchy, for whom, when admixed with bad-eggery, almost everything comes easily, though of course, undeservedly.
The double-alpha-male psychopath (as Epstein was) is a truly dreadful beast, because not merely is he above society’s rules, he genuinely doesn’t know what they are. Not the faintest idea. Ordinary psychopaths – quite a common species – soon intuit that other human beings live by rules that they don’t understand, but in the process of childhood/teenage socialisation, they learn to incorporate those rules within their daily conduct, resulting in general behavioural compliance. However, double alpha-male, psychopathic-bad eggs never become socialised, because their dominance causes people around them to conform with their amoral conduct. So these double-alpha, psychopathic male bad eggs become both exemplars and leaders, and others duly follow. The SS was a fountain of Hitlerian psychopathy, in which every single rank save the very lowest was emulatively entitled “Führer“.
Ghislaine Maxwell was a high alpha female, with a libido to match, though lacking that vital and malignant testosterone, which is what enables evil men to lead their societies towards the moral abyss into which our species so regularly plummets. So, in Epstein’s company, she became a pawn, a plaything and a willing accomplice. Like her father, she genuinely understood no scruple, a concept as meaningless as kindness is to a warrior-ant or a Bach motet to boiling lava.
“Poor Andrew” is not a term you’ll see too often about his mother’s second son. However, it applies even in the context of the tragedy of Andrew’s “lover”, Virginia Giuffre, who committed suicide eighteen months ago. Such an end, terrible and horrifying though it always is, does not validate every single accusation made by the victim. That’s about as far as it is possible to go without either seeming heartless or of hyper-hypothesising. So, simply go back to their famous picture, with no suicide remotely on the horizon. Most men, even sensitive, intelligent ones, of Andrew’s age would have been attracted to Virginia, and since she looked so mature, would not have asked too many questions about her age. I certainly wouldn’t. And whatever might be said about Andrew, no-one would accuse him of either intelligence or sensitivity.
No. He was a priapic boor. Lots of men are, but few are born to the House of Windsor, and for twenty-two years, also be second-in-line to the throne of the United Kingdom and of headship of the Commonwealth of 56 nations. And might not a priapic boor frequently fantasise about an unfortunate turn of events at Balmoral – picnic, lightning – leading to the throne and a perpetuity of pelvic possibilities? The ordinary meaning of “shallow” is deep space compared to the immeasurable thinness of poor Andrew’s unnourished, etiolated soul. So how else would he consider Epstein other than a magician conjuring eager young women from the ether?
Now consider Epstein. Forget what you have learnt about him. Imagine him as he once seemed to Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Peter Mandelson, and many other high alpha males: Unbelievably wealthy, charismatic and stupendously and selflessly generous. Where did he get that vast Golconda of money from? Well, my dear, in polite society, it doesn’t do to ask. Moreover, when enormous wealth is accompanied in equal measure by charm and kindness, even intelligent sceptics are beguiled into acquiescent compliance. If all are then lubricated by vats of Dom Perignon amid an incandescent sea of sparkling wit, aided by the studiedly – nay, flagrantly – unplatonic companionship of beautiful young women, why rock the boat? Isn’t everyone having a good time? Who wants to be an Oliver Cromwell on an ocean-going yacht, even if the pre-dinner cocktails are chilled with ice-cubes hand-carved by Amazonian pygmies out of an Andean glacier ten thousand years old, to be followed by deep-fried ocelot tongue and grilled panda-paws?
Indeed, not asking goes to the root of the matter. Nobody asks Bill Clinton what he was doing on Epstein’s sordid isle, to whom, and in whatever multiples thereof. Why not? Because, unlike poor Andrew, Bill (I did not have sex with that woman) Clinton is a double-alpha liberal male, a species that few journalists would ever try to harm. Which is why no-one, in public anyway, ever queries just how generously Clinton shared his corpus cavernosa with young she-aides or how many innocent Afghans were slain by drone-strikes casually authorised either by him or by the Patron Saint of Permanent Piety, Barack Obama, the most zealous killer in the history of the White House.
But poor Andrew is not alpha. Not beta, zeta, eta, theta, or even omega. To him applies the final couplet of Macbeth’s soliloquy on the utter meaningless of life. Andrew signifies nothing, making him the perfect lynch-mob victim. So kill him. O yes, let’s. Slaying unpopular royalty: what fun! Brave too.
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
Every metric in British life reeks of necrosis