The Spectator’s baffling attempts to play down the Jeffrey Epstein scandal continue apace, with more high-profile figures piling in to muddy the story which has already led to the arrests of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Peter Mandelson.
Rats in a Sack has reported this week how Brendan O’Neill, the magazine’s contrarian-in-chief, bemoaned “the ugly gloating over a man’s downfall” and “the peddling of false accusations” while columnist Matthew Parris yawned that allegations of a business secretary handing secret government information to financiers were “just gossip, really”.
The magazine’s publisher, Freddie Sayers, has been particularly keen to brush it all under the carpet, first taking to X to moan that “the British state seems to have hit upon the hazily defined common law offence of ‘misconduct in public office’ to string up anyone who has been deemed a bad person by media outrage but who hasn’t clearly broken any laws”.
Then he wrote a piece for his other title, the right wing website Unherd, to declare that “Epstein mania isn’t justice,” saying: “Of course, questions of due process and the proper functioning of institutions don’t sell newspapers. But they are more important than ever when the mob decides to pitchfork its victims.”
And now the Spectator has commissioned a piece by Ian Maxwell, brother of Epstein’s jailed accomplice Ghislaine, to complain how “My sister Ghislaine became a prop in the theatre of global online outrage”.
“The temptation to see this as a simple morality play – privilege at last brought to book – is understandable. It is also corrosive,” he writes.
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The Unherd man backing Andy and Mandy
“Epstein-related stories offer a perfect cocktail for the digital economy: sex, money and conspiracy, replete with presidents, royals, politicians, ambassadors, financiers, academics and billionaires. It is unsurprising that some of the most-shared posts have been those least tethered to any court record.”
He also complained about the way their father Robert, who embezzled hundreds of millions of pounds from his own companies’ pension funds before falling off a yacht, was covered in the media.
“Reputation once shredded is hard to repair,” he writes. “My father was never tried, let alone convicted. Yet the inspectors’ report, published after the criminal trial, was damning about his conduct: he was ‘blameworthy’ in ways that did not map neatly onto criminal charges. In the public mind, he is now remembered chiefly as a crook, not as the decorated soldier, outstanding publisher and entrepreneur he once was.” Funny, that!
Meanwhile, might there be a reason Sayers in particular is so keen to downplay the royal scandal – given that he has a rather unique link to the Windsors?
Sayers played Prince William in an obscure – although still available in full on YouTube – 1998 TV movie called Diana: A Tribute to the People’s Princess before discovering his true calling as a journalist.
Reviews on IMDb variously describe it as “quite simply an insult to the memory of Princess Diana”, “one of the worst examples of contemporary bio-films” and that “trudging through Angolan minefields is preferable to viewing this rubbish”.
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