It’s been a week now and Prince Andrew’s interview with BBC journalist, Emily Maitlis, has been described far and wide as a train wreck. A public relations catastrophe.
This was no simple train crash. It was a train that smashed into an orphanage and careered into an animal shelter before coming to rest on top of a box of kittens.
Now the bullshit artist formerly known as Prince is retiring from whatever the hell it was he did.
How will we know that a man whose most impressive skill is wearing a hat, has left public life? We can’t be sure. It’s a bit like that old cartoon standard where the piano tuners have gone on strike. It is going to take a long time before we can tell the difference.
Perhaps he’ll be sent off to a distant castle and fitted with an iron mask in the traditional fashion.
Welcome to the art of public relations crisis management gone horribly, catastrophically wrong.
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If you’re ever looking for a job, crisis management would be an excellent choice because the best response in almost all circumstances is to do almost nothing. Issue a press statement here, leak a good news story to a friendly journalist there.
But there are crises and then there are fully blown end of the world as we know it crises. The Royals seem to have fallen into the trap of dealing with this one as they have with run of the mill crises in the past.
Mea culpas don’t cut it
Mea culpas over some act of drunken debauchery. Head bowed confessions of a love tryst. Grist for the mill for the tabloids.
There is no feat of public relations that can smooth over Andrew’s twenty-year association with Jeffrey Epstein. There is no deft communications legerdemain that can artfully dodge a princely friendship with a convicted paedophile that comes with it a goodly slice of evidence Andrew was one of the beneficiaries of Epstein’s criminal behaviour.
The only possible PR solution would be to do nothing in the hope the stench passes in time.
Andrew had hired Jason Stein, a man who had made his bones in the dark arts of UK politics. Stein’s approach was to do little more than nothing. His advice reportedly was for the Prince do two newspaper interviews. Command and control.
The story goes that he was gazumped by Andrew’s private secretary, Amanda Thirsk who opted for the Newsnight interview. Reports indicate the Queen was in full support. Stein resigned two weeks before the BBC Newsnight program went to air. The PR man could see the train coming off the tracks at that point so, he packed his bags and left.
The man who doesn’t sweat
Like many, I had seen the interview in highlight form only at first, featuring a series of excruciating self-incriminations and self-important babble.
The man who does not sweat, who knows he dined at a specific date and time at a pizza restaurant 14 years ago. It went on.
Surely, I thought, the entire interview can’t be as bad as the snippets posted on a range of media. I set about watching the whole, ugly 45 minutes and discovered it was actually worse.
Not a mention of Epstein’s many victims, not an expression of sorrow for them until yesterday when he was prodded into enforced empathy by written statement from the Palace.
Where to begin with this calamity? Well, let’s start at the beginning. The PR dictates for an interview of this type are generally to urge the meet take place on home or neutral territory. Andrew’s PR minders regarded an away match under the lights in a television studio as beyond the pale but an interview on neutral turf, in some public place was not considered.
Instead, the interview took place in Buckingham Palace.
Honour and a tin-eared toff
The Q&A got underway in the Palace’s south drawing room, a room that once hosted the hoi-polloi the day after Victoria’s coronation in 1838.
What better way to prove Andrew was a tin-eared toff than be filmed on home turf on a carpet worth more than most people’s homes?
About the only worse place to do an interview would be in a dingy, airless room with two FBI agents asking the questions which almost certainly will happen now.
The quote of the interview, and one that has been glossed over by the weight of so many other absurd self-justifications was his explanation for visiting Epstein in New York in 2010.
“It was a convenient place to stay … At the end of the day, with the benefit of all the hindsight one can have, it was definitely the wrong thing to do. But, at the time, I thought it was the honourable thing to do. And I admit fully my judgment was probably coloured by my tendency to be too honourable but that is just the way it is.”
Just to be certain, this is how Andrew explained away the time he spent as a guest of convicted paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein in New York while Epstein was still on parole for procuring a child as a prostitute, a state charge he had plea bargained down from an unknown number of federal felony child sex assault, procuring and sex slavery charges contained in a 53-page indictment prepared by the FBI that was not presented to a grand jury as a result of the dodgy plea deal.
Andrew went there to honourably end his friendship with Epstein and managed to stay four days and enjoy a dinner party with Epstein and other guests. Noblesse oblige apparently extends to child sex predators. Andrew believed that if he was guilty of anything it was that he is too honourable. You can just see the entire House of Windsor choking on their swan and gin and tonic suppers when he came up with that line.
It is said the Queen thinks the world smells of paint because wherever she goes in public has had a fresh coat of Dulux Hi-Gloss. Andrew seems only to have copped a whiff of immense privilege without responsibility.
The PR failed. Andrew has been cut loose to save the House of Windsor.
They will hope it all blows over but that seems unlikely while the tawdry life and sudden death of Jeffrey Epstein is actively investigated. Andrew will remain in an unwelcome spotlight.
Right now, the distant castle and an iron mask is looking like a good strategy.
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