Pizza shop the only winner from Prince Andrew’s PR disaster
It seems Prince Andrew in his car crash interview forgot about the distraught 14-year-old girl reportedly fleeing in her underwear from Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion – a clear display of what a life of unimaginable privilege and little purpose can do to an individual, writes Frances Whiting.
Opinion
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THE only winner, as far as I can tell, from the public relations disaster that was Prince Andrew’s recent interview with the BBC’s Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis about his friendship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, was Pizza Express in Woking.
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Prince Andrew — although he reportedly told his mother, the Queen, that he thought his now infamous chat with Maitlis gone rather well (“You know, mummy, I really think we can all put this ghastly business behind us”) — certainly didn’t emerge victorious, and nor did the underage girls Epstein and his morally bankrupt procurers trafficked for their sexual gratification.
Let us not forget that this whole, sorry Epstein saga began with a distraught 14-year-old girl reportedly fleeing in her underwear from Epstein’s New York mansion in 2005, triggering an 11-month investigation into the financier and his friends handing around underage girls like hors d’oeuvres at the mansion and at his private, Virgin Islands getaway, charmingly known to locals as “paedophile Island”.
But Prince Andrew forgot about that 14-year-old girl — and apparently all other girls who found themselves in their underwear, or without — in Epstein’s presence; these young woman barely rating a mention in the Prince’s highly publicised television “mea culpa” that wasn’t.
There was no remorse shown for Epstein’s victims, no concern, no sympathy and no words of compassion.
It was as if, in his hapless rush to clear his own name, the Prince forgot who the real victims in this sordid saga are.
He did, however, remember visiting a Pizza Express branch in the Surrey town of Woking on the night that one of Epstein’s accusers Virginia Roberts (now Roberts Giuffre) said she was trafficked to the Prince as a then 17-year-old.
Not so, said Prince Andrew during the BBC chat, because he remembered that on the night in question — March 10, 2002 to be precise — he was at a Pizza Express in Woking with his daughter Princess Beatrice.
In fact, he said he remembered it “weirdly distinctly” because “going to Pizza Express in Working (or any other branch, one might imagine) is an unusual thing for me to do”.
Then, the Prince waffled his way into further refuting Roberts Giuffre’s claims by bizarrely offering up his now infamous “no sweat” defence. Roberts Giuffre had claimed the Prince had sweated profusely during their (reputedly three) sexual encounters.
Not so, said the Prince, because an adrenaline shot given to him during his service in the Falklands War had rendered him incapable of perspiring.
“I have a peculiar medical condition which is I don’t sweat” he said — spawning several thousand photos on the internet of a younger Prince Andrew perspiring profusely while pawing young women at parties.
As far as alibis go, it was right up there with remembering you had a ham and pineapple pizza in Woking 17 years ago, and as baffling as his explanation as to why he took four days to break up with Epstein during a stay with the disgraced predator at his Manhattan mansion, post Epstein’s conviction.
Epstein, he said, was notoriously difficult to get hold of – “he was in and out all over the place” (oh dear) and so Prince Andrew purportedly lay in wait at the mansion, ready to pounce on Epstein, presumably in between massages by underage girls.
Yes, it is safe to say Prince Andrew did himself no favours during the BBC interview, succeeding only in digging himself a deeper hole, and earning himself, behind closed Palace doors, at the very least, a sharp reprimand from his mother.
The Queen has — post interview — stripped her second, and reportedly favourite son from royal duties, removing him from the public eye to somewhere he can presumably do no more damage to the “firm” — and in the process, further shredding his already tattered reputation.
It has been a particularly spectacular fall from grace for the Prince who was once the apple of his mother’s eye, and the great, white hope of the aristocracy.
I am old enough to remember when Prince Andrew — now 59 — really was Prince Charming.
He was, for a time, Britain’s most eligible bachelor, considered to be a far more palatable package than his older brother, the less rakish, and more pompous Prince Charles.
He was also the hero of a nation, courtesy of his time serving as an active-duty helicopter pilot during the Falklands War — royalty’s own top gun, posing famously with a rose between his teeth on his return to British soil, post-service.
But now we see, all these decades later — what a life of unimaginable privilege and little, real purpose can do to a man, or a woman.
There were, as I said, no winners in Prince Andrew’s BBC interview — except a fast food franchise getting the sort of publicity businesses can only dream of.
Instead we saw a man woefully unable to read the room, a man so removed from the realities of contemporary society, not to mention an entire movement — #metoo — and so very used to other people cleaning up after him, that it is little wonder his own attempt to do so resulted only in a much bigger mess.
Such is the life and tale of a fairytale Prince, only this one is particularly Grimm.
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