As noted in the previous post, Prince Andrew and Team York did a piss poor job preparing for their interview with BBC Newsnight and Emily Maitlis. It was a unanimous and unmitigated disaster. There is absolutely no one, except for Lady Colin Campbell, who can find one shred of positivity from the conversation and, what’s worse, Andrew’s performance on Newsnight made everything worse. He was mocked on social media. He was trending, along with the hashtag #nonceuponatime. Which is why even the Sun and the Daily Mail and Piers Morgan (!!!) had to go full court press with their coverage of the interview. It was the thing the British public couldn’t stop talking about: Prince Andrew, the f-cking joke of the royal family…and how un-sweaty he is. Imagine what the Queen must have been thinking when this came out of his mouth:
Ladies and gentlemen, possibly the greatest 57 seconds of television ever recorded.#Newsnight #PrinceAndrew#NonceUponATime pic.twitter.com/vuuYpyXt9I
— Dr Beep Bloop Broop (@DrJamesMasonry) November 16, 2019
I wish so badly we could see the expression on Emily Maitlis’s face when Prince Andrew decided to answer her question about Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s allegations with an Inactive Sweat Glands Defence. The Queen’s second son is telling us that he couldn’t possibly have raped a 17 year old girl because he has a rare Inactive Sweat Gland condition. If you put that in a script, the network would send a note back that it defied belief! This is crazy!
But of course you know why he thought that would play, right? What Andrew was trying to do here, in the stupidest way possible, was remind us that he served in the Navy, that he’s a war hero. He thought that would be the takeaway – like, remember when I was brave and suited up and fought for our country? How could someone who’s been a soldier possibly be involved in sex trafficking?
Needless to say, it backfired. We are not talking about his courage. We are talking about his perspiration –or lack thereof. We are researching the Inactive Sweat Gland condition. We are thinking about his fat fingers and his defective sweat glands. Instead of thinking of Andrew as someone who was a hero on the battlefield, we are thinking about how he doesn’t need deodorant.
But if it was only his Inactive Sweat Gland situation, it might be salvageable. The problem is that the sweat glands aren’t the only problem. There’s also the matter of Andrew being all like, oh, no, I’m not a party guy.
“I don't know why I've collected that [party prince] title because I don't… I never have really partied. I was single for quite a long time in the early 80s but then after I got married I was very happy and I've never really felt the need to go and party and certainly going to Jeffrey's was not about partying, absolutely not.”
You know what happens when a fool goes on TV and claims to not be a party guy and to not sweat? Twitter comes through with the receipts:
#PrinceAndrew says:
— Nomia Iqbal 🐝 (@NomiaIqbal) November 16, 2019
- he doesn’t party
- he doesn’t sweat
- he is careful about when he takes public pictures
- he doesn’t remember meeting or having a photo with #VirginiaRoberts #maitlis #Newsnight pic.twitter.com/pVEBNSVJdD
More pics of #PrinceAndrew not partying and exercising discretion with pictures pic.twitter.com/7nVsCsuQV0
— Nomia Iqbal 🐝 (@NomiaIqbal) November 16, 2019
This, of course, is about the photo of Prince Andrew with Virginia Roberts Giuffre. She alleges that she was introduced to Prince Andrew by his friend, the dead rapist pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and his alleged madam Ghislaine Maxwell. According to Virginia, she was sex-trafficked to Prince Andrew three times. And of course we’ve all seen the photo of Andrew with his arm around her. Andrew tells Emily Maitlis that he doesn’t remember meeting Virginia. He stops short of calling her a liar but claims her account couldn’t be accurate because he doesn’t sweat, doesn’t know where the bar at Tramp nightclub is, and also because he never went upstairs at Ghislaine Maxwell’s….
Despite the existence of a photo of him with Virginia taken upstairs at Ghislaine Maxwell’s.
But… even though he doesn’t remember THAT, he does remember going to Pizza Express in Woking with his children since it’s rather out of the ordinary for a person of his status to go to Pizza Express in Woking. Which speaks to what’s ordinary and what’s not ordinary in his life. Not ordinary would be having a meal at a fast food establishment. Ordinary would be, you know, hanging out with millionaires as underage girls milled out. You remember that which is extraordinary; you forget the quotidian. And THAT what’s so telling about Prince Andrew and the people he spent time with: this is an environment where one can casually drop the n-word in a business discussion and not really think it’s all that weird when a very rich man is surrounded by very young girls. Explained Andrew:
“The other aspect of this is that… is that I live in an institution at Buckingham Palace which has members of staff walking around all the time and I don't wish to appear grand but there were a lot of people who were walking around Jeffrey Epstein's house. As far as I was aware, they were staff, they were people that were working for him, doing things, I… as it were, I interacted with them if you will to say good morning, good afternoon but I didn't, if you see what I mean, interact with them in a way that was, you know what are you doing here, why are you here, what's going on?”
Like, OF COURSE it wouldn’t have been weird to him, he’s so used to walking around places where people are in servitude, only in this case, the “servitude” in question is actually less “staff” and more “sex slave”, and if he couldn’t tell the difference, what the f-ck is his “normal”? What is Prince Andrew’s scale of what’s right and wrong in comparison to what is legitimately right and wrong?
Because near the end of the interview, when Emily Maitlis asks him, again, whether he has regrets or guilt, instead of expressing sympathy for the victims, Andrew garbles out the following:
“As far as Mr Epstein was concerned, it was the wrong decision to go and see him in 2010. As far as my association with him was concerned, it had some seriously beneficial outcomes in areas that have nothing and have nothing to do with what I would describe as what we're talking about today.
On balance, could I have avoided ever meeting him? Probably not and that's because of my friendship with Ghislaine, it was… it was… it was inevitable that we would have come across each other. Do I regret the fact that he has quite obviously conducted himself in a manner unbecoming? Yes.”
UNBECOMING!!!?
Emily Maitlis calls him on this immediately and his answer is to rationalise that he was trying to be “polite”. For f-ck’s sake, man, if there is any time to NOT be polite and to be outraged, even for a royal, it’s when you’re denouncing a f-cking PEDOPHILE!
And still, even after Emily tries to give him a clue, he still doesn’t pick up on it because he carries on justifying his friendship – with a dead rapist pedophile!
“Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm being polite, I mean in the sense that he was a sex offender. But no, was I right in having him as a friend? At the time, bearing in mind this was some years before he was accused of being a sex offender. I didn't know there was anything wrong then, the problem was the fact that once he had been convicted…”
And that’s what Emily keeps coming back to, quite rightly – whyyyyyyy were you still friends with him? Prince Andrew can’t say, or won’t say. None of the answers line up…and when you consider that Jeffrey Epstein loaned Sarah Ferguson money – which does not come up in the interview – it begins to make sense why he has to talk himself into knots explaining what he cannot explain: that Jeffrey Epstein was a financial asset to him. An asset in many ways, actually. This, earlier, is how Andrew characterised their association:
“But it would be a considerable stretch to say that he was a very, very close friend. But he had the most extraordinary ability to bring extraordinary people together and that's the bit that I remember as going to the dinner parties where you would meet academics, politicians, people from the United Nations, I mean it was a cosmopolitan group of what I would describe as US eminents.”
“Eminents.” Thirsty ass motherf-cker. Thirsty ass STARF-CKER. That’s pretty much what he’s saying here. Here’s the second son of the Queen of England exposing himself to be a social climber, the most common practice of commoners. Specifically what Meghan Markle has been accused of – and he’s doing it with the royal blood in his veins.
When are we talking about the hypocrisy of tearing down Meghan for supposedly scheming her way into the family when there’s a member of the family who appeared to overlook the crimes of a rapist pedophile so that he could hang out with “eminents”?!
And finally, over and over Prince Andrew insists that he and Jeffrey Epstein weren’t close – and yet, despite the fact that they weren’t close, he felt he had to break up with the dude in person because it was the “honourable” thing to do?! That’s how he tried to explain why he went to see Epstein in 2010, so that he could end their friendship. And ended up staying with him for four days while Epstein hosted a dinner in his honour, which Andrew couldn’t explain either.
If you’re not that close, why the need to break up in person? If you’re breaking up, WHY ARE YOU SLEEPING OVER?! There’s our A Few Good Men courtroom moment. None of this adds up – which is why he fell apart on cross examination.
It was a matter of “convenience”, said Andrew. I’m sorry, but you’re a member of the British royal family. It’s convenient for you at most places. At most luxury hotels. Is “convenience” here a euphemism for “cheap”? Because if it is, well, it’s coming back to money once again.
And maybe, for these kinds of people, that’s the most humiliating part of it all. That he has to go around begging people to let him stay over.
For the full transcript of Prince Andrew’s interview on Newsnight, click here.