8 hours ago
4
I can’t believe the cops didn’t max out the theatrics yesterday when taking Peter Mandelson to the police station to help with their inquiries. They didn’t even do that thing where they put their hand on top of the suspect’s head to ease him down into the back seat of the car. Absolutely no sense of occasion.
And you know, they really may as well have had one. Misconduct in a public office is such an archaic old law and so incredibly difficult to prove that it may well be that you have already seen the high-watermark of law-adjacent consequences for both Mandy and Andy. The perp walk is the punishment. No offence to the highly esteemed Metropolitan police and the various other forces who’ve found the rare grooming-gang scandal they can be arsed with, but it’s hard to get past the deep-rooted suspicion that they are just looking busy. But look, we got one iconic royal photo out of it and a clip of Mandelson over which you could wonder absentmindedly, “Is this honestly the first time he’s been arrested? I must be having a deja vu because it hasn’t happened before, yet it feels so weirdly familiar. For whatever reason.” Anyway, allow me to reiterate that both of the men mentioned in this paragraph deny any wrongdoing.
So, in the UK, two guys have been arrested in connection with the Epstein scandal: a famously very clever one and a famously very thick one. What unites them? I have a theory about the many, many friends of Jeffrey. And that is that the more desiccated and vulnerable the milieu they hail from, the greater the chance that they may feel the not-very-full-force of the law. This may be why the only two arrests we have seen – bar Epstein himself and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell – are from the British monarchy and the upper echelon of establishment British politics. Are either of these institutions in rude and red-toothed health? Erm, answer unnecessary. But if you are one of Jeffrey’s big shots in big tech, or a high roller from high finance – well, as Holly Golightly once noted of the reassuring facade of Tiffany’s, nothing very bad could happen to you there.
In fact, looking at what appears to have occurred, I’m not sure very much bad can happen to you in the US as far as Epstein association is concerned. You hear a lot about the British establishment but the American establishment has covered itself in even less glory. Come on, America – you’ve got to arrest someone. Haven’t you? Even just one, for appearances’ sake? Maybe pick up one of the little people, the ones who cleaned up after whatever took place with the girls, and book them for being an accessory. Again, just for appearances’ sake.
The thing about even conservative estimates of what Jeffrey Epstein was up to for literally decades is that an awful lot of people would logically have to be involved. Even those right at the top of the Trump administration say so. The billionaire commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, recently assured the world that Jeffrey Epstein was “the greatest blackmailer ever”. Yet apparently this all-time epic blackmail enterprise needed only one guy (deceased) to run it. Nobody else, at all, had anything to do with it, not even knowledge of it. Even if we accept that preposterous premise, who does Howard reckon was being blackmailed by history’s greatest blackmailer? Presumably quite a few people, presumably most of them sufficiently high-profile that they had enough to lose to pay up? It would be good if this supposedly fearless US administration, or the FBI, or any of America’s hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers or 1.3 million active lawyers(!) could produce a single name and state them an active person of interest – and even better if they formally decided to bring them in for questioning for so much as five minutes. And yet, nothing and no one has been brought even near justice except for Jeffrey and Ghislaine. For what we have long been assured was a huge criminal enterprise, Epstein Inc seems to have been a real mom-and-pop business.
Not to the women and girls who were victims of it, of course. When the last batch of files was released earlier this month, almost 100 survivors noted their identities had been compromised in thousands of documents and photos, while they claimed that many of those who were their abusers remained protected. The Department of Justice later said that revealing victims’ names and addresses and bank details and whatnot was due to “technical or human error”. No doubt, no doubt. Why oh why does genuinely unbelievable ineptitude continue to dog this era-defining investigation?
So hard to say. Alas, with infinite reluctance, I also have another theory on the Epstein scandal. No one else is going to be convicted for the sex stuff. No one at all. All those women, girls – children? – unavenged. No one, bar the dead man and the incarcerated woman, is ever going to get convicted, nor almost certainly ever even get charged, either here or in the US. It may even be – indeed, is likely to be – that the biggest names from whom the public would really, really like to hear more are never even questioned. They will continue to be big shots, or under the radar, or people who simply don’t fear a knock at the door, because they understand perfectly well how the system works. And they always did.
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Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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