Noo no matter how hard you try to digest the implications of the alleged Chinese spy scandal, some details are just comically indigestible. Assume that Prince Andrew somehow contrived to find a staff even more stupid than that. This one senior assistant is called Dominic Hampshire; He was writing in March 2019 to the Chinese merchant, with whom the Duke of York found himself greatly involved: “Extra of [Andrew’s] to the closest internal informants, there are many, many similar seats at the top of the tree. the people would rather be in that tree.
Or take the fact that the country pub in Buckingham where David Cameron hosted Chinese premier Xi Jinping was bought for a six-star in 2015 by a Chinese firm called SinoFortune, which apparently owns it. promised billions of UK investment which never materialized.
Anyway, if you just join us after the fast news, I’m afraid Prince Andrew can’t Don’t make the mistake again. The Duke of York seems to have hired a Chinese spy, Yang Tengbo, the viceroy in China, and invited him several times to Buckingham Palace, St. James’s Palace, and his own home. Yang denies that he is a spy and insists that he is just a businessman, as Andrew is described. apparently through the Chinese embassy – as someone who “takes to something”. Yes, I think I saw the pictures.
And yet, if the captain’s roommate turns out to be a spy, it feels a little too easy and too convenient – to blame this last disastrous accident of Andreas solely on him. After all, spies are supposed to detect things quite easily. If there can be a struggle for the security services to know who is a spy at the threshold of the appropriate test, then it is unlikely that there will be a backlash for a more obscure member of the international family recognized for its obscurity. Obviously, being an international sex worker should have been a bit easier for Andrea to get to. I guess the biggest feeling with that one – the guy whose New York house he went to stay at in 2010 – was that Jeffrey Epstein had quite literally just finished serving a grotesquely plea-pangained jail sentence for soliciting girls as young as 14 for sex. I wish there had been signs, etc.
And speaking of signs, if only there had been some before this week, which might have signaled to the king’s family that Andrew was perpetually unfit for business, whether of judgment or of money. In fact, he must have violently withdrawn from both of these arenas in the mid-90s. After all, foreign money and favors have been done to him for decades. His previous job as an art ambassador, although it seems to have been concocted for him to fly around the international course in the public career, so as not to provoke too much criticism, nevertheless ended him in the orbit of some of the world’s smallest people to appeal to dictators and political operatives. To pick just two examples from their litany, the ruler of Azerbaijan met Ilham Aliyev on at least a dozen occasions, and at least twice during his visits he was described as “completely deprived”. The Ambassador of the Eastern Middle East asked him to give time to sell his Sunninghill Park home to Gulf dignitaries. In the end, he was the son-in-law of the then president of Kazakhstan, demanding more than £3m for a mysterious price, and simply allowed it to fall into ruin.
All these things, and more of them, have long been known to the royal family, who—except in the eyes of Andrew himself—are more serious about his permanent peasant status than anyone else. However, the king and his so-called “firms” are on the road. Either they allow Andrew to try to seek his fortune in the world, or they dishonor him enough to be fair to him. Those are the only two choices left. The family has deliberately blocked a third avenue – allowing Virginia Giuffre’s claims against Andrew to be tried and tested in open court. but they felt more prudent that they should withdraw their money closed ledges by many thousands of dollars.
In the absence of any justice by playing less and apologizing to Andrea or not allowing it, the fork he is taking now uses more of that money to pay off the whole black sheep. This is a crazy situation where the proven liability of grim governments is always around and their cause of action is finally being realized. Why should the people of this country be exposed to unknown security risks simply because King Charles thinks it is bad to keep Andrew in the palace favor and splendor, and not to have his courtiers put “Andrew off the turf of the Royal Lodge.” story three times a year? He faces evil, but the choice of the family. Let them have it to themselves. The cost of this latest state of investigation, disgraced by Andrew, probably runs into many millions – the crown could consider itself lucky again, not to have them killed too.
The broader impact of this business is that, back in 2011, he was considered to be an external consultant and head of global Andrews. making the UK “look stupid”. And yet we can do it to ourselves? Documents uncovered in this current investigation find Chinese state operatives warning that Prince Andrew is “desperate” – but I fear the UK continues to act desperate too.
A huge part of Britain, longing for post-imperial decline, was eager to surrender foreign money – from Russia, from Chinafrom the Middle East and beyond. He sold his lands in London for money, built luxury estates to stand empty while he helped himself to the money, and worked ingeniously to launder money. There is a huge and well-remunerated working class that does all this through unemployment, from lawyers to accountants to report managers to people who advise money to get their children into the right schools, as writer and corruption expert Oliver Bullough memorably describes. our new status as “waiters to the world”. Yes exactly. Even the head of the royal house is now a butler.
But certainly not alone. There are innumerable British professional classes and elite organizations in the likes of God and they show no signs of retreat. It’s not quite clear about the exact distance between SinoFortune’s arms and the last chance saloon – but it certainly starts to feel like crawling into the same pub.
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Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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