Prince Andrew should have listened to his mother. More to the point, the Queen should have made him listen

By Chris Trotter*

Koo Stark was the giveaway. Prince Andrew first encountered Kathleen Norris (Koo) Stark at his twenty-first birthday party in February 1981. The personable young actress from New York, four years older than Andrew, clearly captivated the prince. They continued to see each other for the next two years.

Royal personage meets vivacious actress. Romance is kindled. Where’s the story? If this sort of royal dalliance had been deemed acceptable for the man who later became King Edward VII, then surely it was equally acceptable for Andrew.

We’ll never know.

That the name of “Koo Stark” came to be inscribed on the toilet door of history is due almost entirely to the fact that five years prior to meeting Andrew she had starred in “Emily” – a soft-core porno flick.

The moment the British tabloids got hold of the story, the prince/actress liaison was doomed. Instantly, Koo became notorious. Andrew earned the sobriquet “the playboy prince”. Not in the least bit amused, his long-suffering mum, Queen Elizabeth II, made it clear that more was expected of her favourite son.

More might have been expected, but it was never exacted. It should have been, if only because in the story of Andrew and Koo we find all the ingredients of the scandal that would later destroy the prince’s reputation, strip him of his titles, and stain what remained of his life.

Beautiful women and powerful men; the dark allure of the illicit; a life lived at speeds far in excess of the British Royal Family’s; and, most of all, the experience of walking away from scandalous explosions unscathed. This was a brewery for trouble of the most serious sort. The silly boy should have listened to his mother. More to the point, his mother should have made him listen.

More than one person has remarked that in the photographs taken of Jeffrey Epstein in the years before his fall one is presented with the nearest approximation of the Devil’s countenance ever likely to be encountered this side of Hell. The flicker of sardonic amusement in Epstein’s eyes; the dangerous sensuality of his mouth; it’s a perfectly calibrated cocktail of temptation and terror.

Those who came close enough to feel the dark magnetism of Epstein’s meticulously curated personality should have fled screaming into the daylight. Should have, but didn’t, until the damage was done.

But Epstein was not the Devil: he was just another vicious human-being attempting to carry-off a Luciferian lifestyle. Can’t be done. Not by a mere mortal at any rate. For all the satanic hallucinations that he was the one of the very few strong enough to do evil without consequences, he ended up dead, by his own hand, in a Riker’s prison cell.

But if, in life, Epstein was a sleazy exploiter of young women and girls; an abuser who met his end in a manner entirely proportionate to the perfidy of his conduct; then, in death, he has become something much more closely resembling the being he believed himself to be.

The fates of those who came too close to Epstein do indeed bear the imprint of the dark urgings that drove him. His glamorous procurer, Ghislane Maxwell, has been disgraced, indicted, convicted, and incarcerated. His good “friend” Prince Andrew, Duke of York, now a mere “Mister,” languishes in Norfolk – an internal exile by his royal brother’s command. And Andrew’s nemesis, the abused and abandoned Virginia Giuffre, whose life Epstein so casually disfigured, is also dead by her own hand.

And then there is that other New Yorker, the one whose Luciferian pretensions are now the un-wished-for preoccupation of the whole world. The man who quite literally whispered in Epstein’s ear and later sent him a birthday greeting in the shape of a woman’s torso. The man who, when Satan conducted him to a high place and showed him all the kingdoms of the Earth, put in a bid for the entire portfolio.

Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to release the “Epstein Files”. His MAGA followers, convinced that the most lurid of their conspiratorial fantasies regarding America’s elites would be confirmed in the file’s hitherto inaccessible pages, were delighted. When Trump then shrugged-off the whole matter as unworthy of further effort, they were, unsurprisingly, furious. Was he hiding something?

From beyond the grave, Epstein managed to do what no one else has so far accomplished: he’s caused the MAGA legions to doubt their combed-over Caesar. Proof, perhaps, that when it comes to the art of the deal, Mephistopheles is always going to leave Trump coughing up his lungs in a cloud of sulphurous smoke.

Is that what finally caught up with Andrew? Breathing in too much sulphur? Just as inhaling too much tobacco smoke leads to lung cancer, does breathing in Lucifer’s sulphurous exhalations bring on cancer of the soul? But what else had Andrew, as the UK’s “Special Trade Representative”, been breathing-in all those years he was making the rounds of powers and principalities keen to avail themselves of the United Kingdom’s arms exports?

Epstein’s ghost has saved its best trick for last. Not content with undermining the President of the United States, it has robbed the King of England of his most ancient and vital functions: to uphold the laws enacted in his name, and to protect the rights and privileges of his subjects.

In Magna Carta, Charles III’s distant ancestor, King John, solemnly promised that no free person would be deprived of their life, liberty, or property, except by law. In the centuries that elapsed since the signing of Magna Carta, it has also become a core principle of British justice that all those accused of a crime are to be considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

Andrew, a prince of the blood, and eighth in line to the British throne, had no less a right than the humblest British street-sweeper to the benefit of the presumption of innocence. Andrew has always declared himself innocent of all the charges levelled against him by Virginia Giuffre. He remains unindicted, and, thanks to the “journalism” of the global news media, could not now receive a fair trial even if he was.

Surely, it was the duty of Andrew’s brother, the King, in the name of protecting the humblest street-sweeper’s right to the presumption of innocence, and in the cause of upholding the inviolability of private property, to face down the global mob clamouring for Andrew’s humiliation and punishment. If that also meant refusing to strip his brother of the property rights conferred upon him by their mother, then so be it.

In declining to uphold these ancient rights and privileges, King Charles III has undermined the moral coherence of the UK’s constitutional monarchy. Given that moral coherence is the only political force still available to the Crown, that will likely prove to be a very costly decision.

In his play “Julius Caesar”, Shakespeare has Mark Antony say of his friend: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” In the case of Jeffery Epstein, a man who did no good, Shakespeare’s words are more than vindicated. The living consequences of Epstein’s evil continue to unfold.

Certainly, Andrew’s failure to heed his mother’s advice, post Koo Stark, has borne the bitterest of fruit. In defiance of the old proverb, when the man now known as Mr Andrew Mountbatten Windsor decided to sup with the Devil, he arrived holding much too short a spoon.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.