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Prince Andrew: On Trial (Ch5)
Rude, obnoxious, self-entitled. That’s the verdict of former protection officer Paul Page on Prince Andrew, ‘the most unpopular royal in the palace’.
At first, that appears a damning indictment of a man who has been accused of far worse than arrogance and bullying.
But like all of the ‘evidence’ in the mock-up court case heard during Prince Andrew: On Trial, it failed to stick.
Everything about this fake trial was ropey. For a start, Andrew did not appear. He wasn’t even represented by an actor.
And the trumped-up charge being tried was not a criminal one, nor anything like it.
The 12 jurors simply had to decide this question: ‘Is Prince Andrew a liability to the Royal Family, yes or no?’
He is without doubt charmless. Page, who guarded the royals for six years from 1998, claimed Andrew, ‘looked down upon all members of staff, not just police — maids, his own private secretaries and so forth.’
Rude, obnoxious, self-entitled. That’s the verdict of former protection officer Paul Page (pictured) on Prince Andrew, ‘the most unpopular royal in the palace’
Pictured: Prince Andrew, Duke of York attends the Thanksgiving Service for King Constantine of the Hellenes at St George’s Chapel on February 27, 2024 in Windsor, England
On one occasion, Page said, a young woman turned up at the palace gates claiming to have an assignation with the prince.
When police hesitated to let her in, she called Andrew on her mobile — and put him on speakerphone.
‘He said, ‘Listen to me, you fat lardy-a***d ****, if you don’t let my guest in, I’m going to come down there’,’ the former Scotland Yard officer recalled.
But Page, the jury learned, was a convicted fraudster who defrauded colleagues and friends out of their life savings in a £3million property scam, to pay for his gambling addiction.
As witnesses go, it’s difficult to conceive of one less reliable or believable.
A pair of actual barristers, William Clegg KC and Jeremy Dein KC, argued the case for Andrew’s prosecution and defence, hamming it up with objections and showboating.
But the majority of the legal work had evidently been done behind the scenes by
Channel 5’s lawyers, who ensured that not a whisper of anything libellous was aired.
The closest Clegg came was to remark, ‘There is evidence of him being a sex pest, and I put that politely.’
That evidence came from a masseuse, Emma Gruenbaum, who visited him at Royal Lodge in Windsor 20 years ago and described him as a ‘creep’.
Clegg outlined Andrew’s friendship with American financier and paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell.
‘To have one sex offender as a friend is a misfortune,’ he quipped. ‘To have two looks like carelessness.’
The rest of this two-hour show was guff and filler. We saw about three minutes of the jury’s deliberations.
What swayed them most was one obvious fact: the late Queen saw fit to strip Andrew of his duties, and the King hasn’t reinstated him, so his own family must regard him as a liability. Verdict: guilty.
Prince Andrew isn’t appealing. But we already knew that.
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