Andrew is out of his enormous freebie mansion in Windsor, and out of the Firm. As of yesterday, King Charles has stripped the former prince of his title and evicted him from Royal Lodge. He will now be known merely as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor and will reside temporarily at the Sandringham Estate, his board paid for privately by the King. In the longer term, though, who knows where he will end up living. Labour keeps promising to concrete over the English countryside with nondescript new-build box homes, and I’m sure one of those will do.

I have no personal ill will towards Andrew. I’ll even buy him a cutwork “LIVE LAUGH LOVE” set as a housewarming gift. I say this because while I have wondered for years at his ability to bob along on the surface of public life, while possessing no discernible charm or ability, I also found the media feeding-frenzy that just displaced him deeply uncomfortable.

One of the most striking features of our transition to digital media, from print and broadcast, has been the speed and forcefulness with which collective sentiment now travels mimetically, often seeming to consume public conversation wholesale. And the most noticeable effect of this digitally enabled emotional collectivism is the power it lends to the scapegoat mechanism. This is a pattern posited by the philosopher René Girard, as one of the deep dynamics of human societies. When tensions within a society rise beyond a tolerable level, Girard argued, rather than dissolve in chaos, that society will single someone as the “scapegoat” for punishment. Everyone then turns on the scapegoat, and this ritual act of sacrifice dispels the competing tensions and restores unity within the wider group.

I’ve no reason not to believe the late Virginia Giuffre, a survivor of Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation, who accused Mountbatten Windsor of raping her on several occasions. Grooming gang participants should not be allowed to get away with it, and that goes for members of Britain’s ailing Royal Family. But I also can’t shake the feeling that Andrew has been hung out to dry mostly because he is so irrelevant.

Back in the days when people socialised IRL, the live music scene would refer to backstage hangers-on as “liggers”, shorthand for “Least Important Guest”. That’s Andrew Mountbatten Windsor: an Epstein ligger. The extent of his and his ghastly ex-wife’s craven sycophancy was illustrated by Sarah Ferguson’s fawning apology email to Epstein in 2011, in which she called him a “supreme friend” and begged forgiveness for denouncing him in public, all while continuing to scrounge money off him to pay her debts.

But they were liggers. By contrast, the reason the Epstein story has continued to leak toxicity into our public life is that Epstein’s circle of hell was frequented by a Who’s Who of international movers and shakers. Names already revealed, albeit with unproven allegations, include Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Peter Mandelson (who even brought Epstein to 10 Downing Street), and Stephen Hawking. In her memoir, Giuffre said she was once raped and beaten by a former prime minister so well-known and powerful she still did not dare name him out of fear for her personal safety.

And while some (including Andrew himself) have accused Giuffre of playing fast and loose with the truth, perhaps she was right to worry. Epstein himself died in 2019, reportedly by suicide, and the “model scout” Jean-Luc Brunel, accused of grooming and trafficking girls for him, also died in his prison cell reportedly by suicide. Virginia Giuffre died earlier this year, likewise reportedly by suicide.

And perhaps they all were suicides. Meanwhile, there’s no question of defending Andrew’s character. He has been a ghastly, entitled, pointless embarrassment to British public life since It’s A Royal Knockout in 1987. A deanobox on some East Anglian floodplain is frankly too good for him. Shove him in an HMO with those nice boys who come here on small boats, for all I care.

But there’s an obvious discrepancy between his actual political influence and significance, and the force of punitive energy now directed at him. I can’t help wondering if some of it is a displacement activity: a sacrificial scapegoat to dispel public anger, while the rest of Epstein’s real “supreme friends” go on moving and shaking as usual.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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