273. From a humble address to a royal arrest

Well, we’re living in curious times.

For the first time in four centuries, a member of the British royal family has been arrested in connection with a criminal investigation. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the previous Prince Andrew, was already a marginalised member of the family, as result of his association with the American sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, but now that association has led to his potentially facing the prospect of jail itself.

But that’s not where the episode starts. It opens by talking about another of those strange rituals of the British constitutional system, a procedure left over from the distant past, more or less adapted to modern needs. This is the ‘humble address’, once a way for parliamentarians, supposedly (though often not genuinely) loyal subjects of the crown, to address the monarch. In this case, it was a means to force a modern British government – the current one – to make available information about the appointment of Peter Mandelson, the other Brit in trouble over Epstein, as ambassador in Washington DC.

Those two cases, Mandelson’s and Mountbatten-Windsor’s are progressing well towards a destination that doesn’t look particularly healthy for either of them.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, voices are already being raised to ask, ‘if the British can investigate prominent people involved in an essentially American scandal, why can’t a few of the people equally tainted with it over here face the same treatment?’

Let’s see who might be listening…

Illustration: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor being driven away from the police station where he was taken for questioning after his arrest. Photo from The Guardian.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License