No matter how much you try to digest the implications of the alleged Chinese spy scandal, some details are just comically indigestible. Take the fact that Prince Andrew has somehow contrived to find staff even stupider than him. Here is one senior aide called Dominic Hampshire, writing in March 2020 to the Chinese businessman with whom the Duke of York has found himself unfortunately entangled: “Outside of [Andrew’s] closest internal confidants, you sit at the very top of a tree that many, many people would like to be on.” Sorry, is this March 2020? A full four months after the four-dimensional pile-up that was Andrew’s Newsnight interview? Which was followed immediately by the duke’s own mother sacking him? Dominic, there were ventilators that people would rather have been on than that tree.
Or take the fact that the rural Buckinghamshire pub where David Cameron took the Chinese president Xi Jinping for a pint in 2015 was bought by a Chinese firm called SinoFortune, which seems to have promised billions of UK investment that never materialised.
Anyway, if you’re just joining us after a news fast, I’m afraid that Prince Andrew may have Let The Wrong One In again. The Duke of York seems to have hired an alleged Chinese spy, Yang Tengbo, as his chief representative in China, and invited him a few times to Buckingham Palace, St James’s Palace and his house. Yang denies he is a spy and insists he is just a businessman, while Andrew has been described – apparently by the Chinese embassy – as someone who “will grab on to anything”. Yes, I think I’ve seen the photos.
And yet, if the duke’s mate does turn out to be a spy, it feels a little too easy – and a lot too convenient – to blame this latest calamitous episode for Andrew solely on him. After all, the thing about spies is they are supposed to be quite hard to detect. If it can be a struggle for the security services to identify who is a spy, to a suitable threshold of proof, then it’s unlikely to be a doddle for the dimmest member of a family internationally recognised for its dimness. Obviously, the international sex trafficker should have been a somewhat easier one for Andrew to spot. I guess the biggest clue with that one – the guy whose New York house he went to stay at in 2010 – was that Jeffrey Epstein had quite literally just finished serving a grotesquely plea-bargained jail sentence for soliciting girls as young as 14 for sex. If only there’d been signs, etc.
But speaking of signs, if only there’d been some before this week that could have indicated to the royal family that Andrew was permanently unsuited to activities involving either judgment or money. He should really have been forcibly retired from both these arenas in the mid-90s. After all, strange things involving foreign money and influence have been happening to him for decades. His previous trade envoy job, though seemingly concocted to get him flown around international golf courses on the public dime without arousing too much criticism, in fact ended up taking him willingly into the orbit of some of the world’s least appealing dictators and political operators. To pluck only a couple of examples from a litany of them, he met Azerbaijan despot Ilham Aliyev on at least a dozen occasions, and at least twice on visits described as “entirely private”. Middle East embassy staff were reportedly asked to make time for his efforts to sell his Sunninghill Park house to Gulf dignitaries. In the end, it was mysteriously bought for £3m more than its asking price by the then Kazakhstan president’s son-in-law, and allowed simply to fall into ruin.
All of this and so much more has long been known to the royal family, who – with the obvious sole exception of Andrew himself – are more responsible for his permanent liability status than anyone. Yet again the king and his so-called “firm” find themselves at a fork in the road. Either they let Andrew carry on trying to “seek his fortune” in the real world, or they pay for him to a level sufficient to close him down. Those are the only two choices left. The family very deliberately shut off the third avenue – allowing Virginia Giuffre’s claims against Andrew to be tried and tested in open court. Instead, they felt the wiser option was to retreat into their money and settle behind closed doors for many millions of dollars.
In the absence of allowing some form of justice to at least play out and exonerate Andrew or not, the fork they should now take is using more of that money to pay entirely for their black sheep. This mad situation where a proven liability is forever grubbing around grim regimes and their operatives is ultimately of their making. Why should the people of this country be exposed to unknown security risks simply because King Charles thinks it looks bad to keep Andrew in palatial grace-and-favour splendour and not have his courtiers leak an “Andrew set to be turfed out of Royal Lodge” story thrice yearly? It DOES look bad – but it was the family’s choice. Let them own it. The cost to the state of investigating this latest foul-up by Andrew probably runs into many millions – the Crown might consider itself lucky, again, not to have those billed to it too.
As for the wider implications of this affair, it was way back in 2011 that a Foreign Office adviser opined that Prince Andrew’s global manoeuvring was making the UK “look stupid”. And yet, surely we can do that for ourselves? Documents disclosed in this current investigation find Chinese state operatives warning that Prince Andrew was “desperate” – but I’m afraid the UK continually acts desperate too.
A huge part of Britain’s post-imperial decline has been the breathlessly enthusiastic capitulation to foreign money – from Russia, from China, from the Middle East and beyond. London has sold off its landmarks to the money, built luxury properties to stand empty while helping the money offshore itself, and worked ingeniously to launder the money. A vast and well-remunerated service class exists to ease all this along, from lawyers to accountants to reputation managers to the people who advise the money on how to get its children into the right schools, with the writer and corruption expert Oliver Bullough memorably describing our new status as “butler to the world”. Quite so. Even a prince of the royal family is a butler now.
But he certainly isn’t the only one. Countless among Britain’s professional classes and elite institutions are in similar thrall and show no signs of retreat. I’m not quite clear on the precise distance between the SinoFortune Arms and the last chance saloon – but it’s certainly starting to feel like they’re on the same pub crawl.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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