A Grilling? If Prince Andrew was a piece of meat then Emily Maitlis’s interview would give us food poisoning

It’s not a carefully controlled, softball interview with the BBC but an interview under arrest which is required

It says something about our ‘justice system’ that Julian Assange is under lock and key in Belmarsh prison for services to journalism and revealing the truth about US war crimes whilst Andrew Windsor is giving an interview in the plush surroundings of Buckingham Palace.

This was an exercise in damage limitation though it is clear that such is Andrew Windsor’s shiftiness that he has raised more questions than answers.

He said he ‘let the side down’ meaning the Royal Family. Andrew Windsor didn’t mention letting down the hundreds of young girls that his friend Jeffrey Epstein was trafficking.

Apparently ‘randy’ Andy didn’t notice anything was amiss during his many visits to Epstein’s Florida mansion and during his stay at Epstein’s New York pad. He didn’t deny staying on Epstein’s island either.  If you believe his version of what happened you would believe anything.

In December 2010 Andrew went to stay at Epstein’s New York home in order to tell him he couldn’t see him again!  Not only that but he went for a leisurely walk in Central Park with him. It is bullshit. If in fact the only purpose of the visit was to cut off relations then a royal aide would have phoned Epstein. Clearly Andrew felt indebted to the monster.

Andrew with the boss of a Kazakh oil company

Not only that but he stayed for 4 days because it was ‘convenient’. This is from someone who has a range of hotels to stay in, for whom money is no barrier and who can stay at the British Ambassador’s residence. The obvious conclusion is that he stayed for reasons related to the child sex allegations for which Epstein was convicted and facing further proceedings. Allegations of sleeping with what were girls trafficked as sex slaves is rape.

Andrew casts doubt on the famous photograph with a 17 year old Virginia Roberts, suggesting that it is photo-shopped, that his fingers didn’t fit but he doesn’t categorically state that it is a forgery. Why? Because the negative might yet turn up. He is careful not to say anything which might prove a lie in the future.

Nothing Virginia Roberts has said, about having slept with him 3 times or knowing him has proven to be false. Andrew admits to a friendship with Ghislaine Maxwell who procured the girls for Epstein.  That in itself is damning enough.

By his own admission he gave a party during his 2010 stay at Epstein’s house for his host. He also invited Epstein to a ‘shooting party’ as opposed to a birthday party at Sandringham. Clearly it was a close relationship.

The wonder is that the bunch of parasites otherwise known as the Royal Family is able to do all of this courtesy of the tax payer. If ever there were a group of people who should stand on their own two feet it is the Royals.

Andrew is a particularly despicable specimen having previously acted as a conduit for arms deals with regimes that have atrocious human rights records such as Kazakhstan. He has hosted the King of Bahrain who had doctors who tended to the wounds of demonstrators tortured.

Sleeping with under-age girls who are sex slaves is on a par with this. It says something about Andrew Windsor that he kept up his friendship with a convicted sex trafficker because of a ‘sense of honour’ whose behaviour was merely ‘unbecoming’.

Even to this day he doesn’t regret his friendship ‘because of the people I met.’ Presumably he is referring to his arms dealer friends.  It would have been more honest if he said that he didn’t regret it because of the girls that he raped.

Piers Morgan describes Maitlis’s interview as ‘forensic’. I have another word, sycophantic. Maitlis failed to press Andrew Windsor at different times during the interview for example not on whether he could remember the photograph and being with Roberts but whether he denied it outright. She didn’t ask him whether it was a forgery.

She barely pursued the propriety of staying with a man guilty of using and exploiting dozens if not hundreds of girls.  She said of course nothing about his involvement with the arms trade and whether the amorality of dealing with the world’s dictators might rub off in his personal life.

In the circumstances she was deferential and restrained but that is how the BBC has long treated the Royals. Yet despite all of this, such was Andrew Windsor’s shiftiness and the implausibility of his explanations (‘I could kick myself’) whilst remembering small details of a Pizza Hut outing 18 years ago that will have done him and the Royals the very damage that he intended to avoid.

Tony Greenstein