Alison Mau: Prince Andrew's disaster interview has no aroha for Epstein victims

Friday, 22 November 2019

OPINION: There's an excruciating moment after every television interview, whether puff-piece or grilling, when the lights dim and the operator steps away from the camera - and there's nothing left to say.

Liberated from one of life's more ridiculous scenarios (a 'one-on-one chat' which might have as many as five unseen people working just beyond the spill of the lights), someone has to find something to break the awkward silence between the disentangling of mics and the 'thanks-and-see-you-later'.

Most of the time, whether you are interviewer or interviewee, all you can come up with is the asinine 'Uh, so, I think that went very well.' Which is apparently what Prince Andrew said after the most spectacular balls-up of a televised interview since, well, there isn't really a comparison.

And apparently, it was no platitude - he meant it, to the extent that he told his long-suffering mother in church the following Sunday that the interview he'd filmed with BBC Newsnight had been 'a great success'.

* Prince Andrew's priority now must be to protect the Queen

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* Did the Prince Andrew interview do serious damage to the royal brand?**

AKA, the greatest PR disaster of modern history.

It's a big claim to make, but a glance at UK media shows a debacle cantering fast downhill with every headline.

There have been, oh who knows, perhaps a million words written in the five days since the interview that 'told-all' about the prince's friendship with accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein but without watching the blasted thing yourself, it's hard to get a grip on just how clueless the prince is under journalist Emily Maitlis' questioning.

The claims the duke makes are bizarre. He asks us to believe the regular inhabitants of the Epstein Manhattan mansion, Palm Beach house, private jet and Carribean island (all of which he frequented despite saying Epstein wasn't a close friend) seemed to him just like the staff of Buckingham Palace - therefore he swanned right past them paying them no mind at all.

Prince Andrew with Victoria Roberts Giuffre. The image caused scandalous headlines for the royal family when it first surfaced in 2015, along with an array of serious allegations of sexual misconduct.

He does not explain how a multitude of girls as young as 14 giving daily massages in cut-off jeans can truly be compared to a fleet of tweed-clad Englishwomen bustling about dealing with the daily needs of the Queen.

And before you scold me for being pernickety about clothing, remember the prince plainly takes attire very seriously indeed. It is one of the main reasons, he says, he couldn't possibly have had his picture taken holding 17-year-old Virginia Roberts around the waist on the night she says she was trafficked to him for sex at a townhouse in London's posh-as billionaire's enclave, Belgravia.

'When I'm in London I wear a suit and tie,' he claims.

The friendship with Jeffrey Epstein dogged Prince Andrew for years.

The bullshit floodgates really opened then - 'I've never really partied, I don't sweat thanks to a big fright I had in the Falklands War, I don't know where the bar is at (London nightclub) Tramp.' And then, the mother of all meme-worthy excuses, the one that really did almost break the internet; 'on the night in question, your Honour, I was dining at a Pizza Express in Woking.'

Unfortunately any photographic evidence of the prince downing a Fiorentina at said fast food outlet on March 10, 2001, is lost to the mists of pre-Instagram time - but unfortunately for the Prince, there are plenty of snaps of him sweatily grabbing at various hotties on the dancefloor at parties in the 90s, and more emerging by the day.

Nobody believes him, which is bad for the prince, and for the royal family at large. As one very clever US columnist, Rebecca Mead, wrote this week, it's a story that invokes 'mounting surges of enraged republicanism'.

But a week into this latest Andy-scandal, it's a bit sad that all the media attention has focussed on what it means for the royals. It's sad that, no matter how much we might like Liz, we seem more concerned about the 93 year-old monarch than the women at the centre of the Epstein claims.

Prince Andrew belatedly scrambled to care in a statement released Thursday which was plainly written by whatever palace PR staff survived the post-interview putsch. He did not think to care at all when in front of the BBC cameras. He did not mention the women at all other than to declare them faceless servants. At one point he shows the true extent of his disingenuity when Maitlis mentions the women speaking out about Epstein.

'Oh and rightly so,' the prince gabbles, forgetting that he's just spent the past 10 minutes calling Roberts a liar.

Many of those who are scolding the prince for his lack of aroha for the victims haven't shown much themselves - and I include the BBC in that. UK media report Virginia Roberts gave her own interview to the BBC three weeks ago, but it has not seen the light of day; presumably to allow Newsnight to get Prince Andrew in the bag and on the air first.

As the week rolled by and the world fussed and fretted about the damage the Duke of York was doing to the monarchy, the women victimised by Epstein and his retinue of enablers, were sidelined again. By weeks' end though, there was one grain of cheer for them - it seems Prince Andrew will give himself up to an official US investigation.

Perhaps he'll have to tell the truth this time - and perhaps that will lead to some kind of result for the girls who had the misfortune to cross paths with Jeffrey Epstein.