The Spectator was once the journal of choice for old-fashioned, law-abiding shire Tories – so why is it getting behind the elites who palled around with the child-trafficking convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein? Every day seems to bring another piece of content apparently designed to muddy the story.
The day after the King’s brother was arrested last week, Brendan O’Neill, the magazine’s contrarian-in-chief, penned a piece headlined: “The hunting of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor”, in which he bemoaned the the “digital hounding” of the former royal, “the ugly gloating over a man’s downfall” and “the peddling of false accusations”. It concluded: “The shame, right now, belongs less to Andrew than to those who have made a bloodsport from his troubles.”
“The hunting of Andrew has gone too far,” declared O’Neill solemnly. “Admit it – you can feel it. His arrest this week on suspicion of misconduct in public office unleashed yet another round of prideful animus for the former prince. Social media was a riot of malicious glee.
“Then came that photograph of him in the back of his car following his release from custody. He looks startled, haunted, frightened. The mob lapped it up. They wrung pleasure from his pain.” Poor Andy!
O’Neill is not alone among Old Queen Street staffers aghast at the notion that palling around with Epstein might have some kind of consequence. On Monday night, following the arrest of Peter Mandelson, the magazine’s publisher Freddie Sayers took to, inevitably, 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”. He added darkly: “Dystopian, illiberal, should spook us all.”
As the media law expert David Banks pointed out immediately, the Law Commission has some sympathy with Sayers’s concerns, and has recommended that misconduct in public office be replaced with a statutory offence – but added: “Given the fact the offence dates back to 1783, the idea it’s just been ‘hit upon’ is way off the mark.”
And describing Sayers as “absolutely bonkers”, the lawyer Dan Neidle wrote: “You know another ‘hazily defined common law offence’? Murder. And the usual criticism of ‘misconduct in public office’ is that it is too *hard* to prosecute corruption.”
But the Spectator wasn’t done there! Up popped columnist Matthew Parris on the magazine’s The Edition podcast to declare – on the basis of, it would appear, nothing more than a vague feeling – that Mandelson hadn’t done anything wrong.
“I expect it’s always gone on,” yawned Parris at the notion of a business secretary handing secret government information to financiers. “It’s just that we have the internet now, we have social media, we have WhatsApp, and you can look at everything that anybody has communicated to anybody else.
“It’s probably not unusual that in the leather-armed chairs in London clubs on Pall Mall senior members of the government talked to senior people in business and industry and occasionally gave them a little bit of a heads-up on this, that and the other. There may be a legal case arising from what Peter Mandelson told Epstein, so I tread with care, but I’m not sure that any of this approaches the level of criminality. Just gossip, really.”
Quite – no more than the latest he-said, she-said from the Beckhams! Thank goodness we have a high-minded current affairs journal like the Spectator to tell us what’s important and what’s not.
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