On Friday I wrote on this thread: "On the one hand, no-one, I imagine, would dissent from the view that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor needs to be treated like anyone else being investigated for criminal behaviour. On the other hand, that is an impossibility, in view of his status (or, rather, ex-status)."
In yesterday's Times, the paper’s lead opinion columnist on Saturdays, Fraser Nelson, expatiated on the same theme in a more informed and lucid way than I could.
Under the heading, “Spectacular arrests don’t always serve justice", the sub-heading “Our judicial tradition is one of operational independence, evidential thresholds and restraint — we should hold on to it”, and the out-quote “A dawn raid is not a neutral administrative step but a public event”, Nelson’s article included this:
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It is now ten years since Leon Brittan, a Thatcher government minister, died while under investigation for paedophilia. The police, then, had been urged into action by Tom Watson, Brown’s protégé, who used parliament to amplify allegations from a fantasist who was later imprisoned for making it all up.
Lord Bramall, former head of the armed forces who had waded ashore on D-Day, was in his nineties, caring for his terminally ill wife, when officers in forensic suits arrived to search his home on the same baseless grounds.
This was panic under political pressure. It has a close cousin: spectacle in the name of equality. I’m no fan of Nicola Sturgeon but was not sure why police sealed off her house like a murder scene when her husband faced investigation for fraud.
The understandable need by police to show that the powerful are not above the law always risks being twisted so those in the public eye are hit far harder, almost as a performance. Perhaps the most notorious example of this was the raid on Cliff Richard’s house on paedophilia charges, televised by a BBC helicopter. He was rich, powerful — and entirely innocent.
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Nelson’s examples are people who were innocent (apart from Sturgeon’s husband), while the e-mails AMV exchanged with Epstein on financial matters strongly suggest that AMW is not.
However there is more than a suspicion that the police may have been “grandstanding” when they came for AMW. Behaviour from which they are far from immune. Others on this thread have also questioned the justification for the police raid in which he was arrested.
More widely, there remains something unsettling about the treatment of AMW in much of the National Press and the broadcast media – an unpleasant relish in kicking a man when he is down.
Justice needs to be served, and seen to be served. It is not healthy, however, when vindictiveness, malice and spite become part of the process.
