the brilliantly leaping gazelle

I feel sorry for the former Prince Andrew or Andrew Mountbatten Windsor (AMW) as he is now. How could one not? He has done nothing wrong, certainly nothing he has ever been charged with and crucially, nothing prosectors in a criminal trial have convinced a jury he deserves to be convicted of.

Yes he may well be many things, some of which may well be behaviours or ways of conducting himself which we might find objectionable. But then if we doIf we do, we should  also ask ourselves how, if we’d have had his ridiculously privileged upbringing which from his birth had him treated with constant indulgence by his equally privileged family or by the fawning sycophants they employed, might we have behaved any different? 

That isn’t to excuse what he’s done. But here’s the thing. Only one person knows for certain if he did any of the things everyone assumes he did, and that’s him. Everything else is a mixture of guilt by association, allegations, conjecture and speculation. Which is essentially gossip, rumour and hearsay. Anyone can allege anything about anyone. Doesn’t make it true.

But that’s to forget that the public had been successfully groomed by the press for decades into imagining that AMW was an insatiable philanderer who enjoyed a ‘colourful’ and ‘chequered’ love life. ‘Randy Andy’ they called him. He was news, and it didn’t hurt that the women he supposedly trysting with didn’t look like they urgently needed the services of a plastic surgeon either. If the press were ever to be challenged over their breathtakingly hypocritical double standards, the question is; who would ever challenge them? Who would demand to know how it was possible to go from being  enthusiastic chroniclers of AMWs sexploits in the 1980’s and 90’s but then to became more critical of same as Britain emerged into a new Century?

Possibly they’d claim the public mood had changed, that what was once seen as titilating was now tawdry, that social mores were changing and all they were doing was simply reflecting this attitudinal shift. Which conveniently, and disingenuously, overlooks the fact that well before the advent of the faux outrage’s, judgmental pile-ons and quixotically censorious hysterias of social media, it was the press that shaped determined who or what was unacceptable. Far from merely reflecting social mores back at us, the press had decided what these new mores were, were projecting, reinforcing and reframing an ever changing set of morals upon us.

In all of the endless words the press has devoted to crucifying AMW, one thing has struck me as curiously absent. Why, when they speculate on where he’ll live once he leaves wherever it is he is now, they never follow through by asking how it is that his brother just happens to have a few gaffs lying about empty.

They never question why we have a monarchy. Or question why it is that in a society that is so seemingly obsessed with proclaiming its virtue by rubbishing its past, endlessly detects evidences of -ism’s, – phobia’s and -ions, and tears down statues, removes ‘triggering’ artworks from galleries, and has institutions denouncing their founders when it does, why does the single most powerful symbol of privilege still exist?

Because if it didn’t, whilst wealth and privilege would still be with us, newspapers would have to do actual reporting, AMH would be just another citizen and Virginia Giuffre might still be alive.