In Britain, Prince Andrew has come to symbolise sybaritic upper class excess, but in the oil states of the Gulf he is most notorious for whitewashing one of the cruellest and most dictatorial regimes in the region.
The torrent of negative publicity engulfing Prince Andrew has focused primarily on his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and his relationship with Virginia Giuffre. But his role in befriending and giving respectability over more than 20 years to the monarchy in Bahrain – despite its horrific record of torturing and imprisoning pro-democracy dissidents – is almost as morally culpable, though in an entirely different way, than anything he did in Epstein’s palatial residences in New York, Miami and the Caribbean.
Toxicity and buffoonery
I first became fully aware of Prince Andrew’s blend of toxicity and buffoonery when writing about Bahrain in the wake of the pro-democracy protests which were savagely suppressed by the Bahrain government in 2011.
Even a person as self-absorbed as Prince Andrew must have had an inkling about these well-publicised and violent events in a place he visited regularly. In March 2011, the monarchy had crushed the Bahraini version of the Arab Spring with extraordinary brutality, torturing anybody associated with the protests. Some 47 doctors and nurses in the city-centre hospital in Manama, the Bahraini capital, who had treated injured demonstrators, were forced to stand without sleep for days on end to extract false confessions that they had sought to overthrow the government.
A Bahrain independent commission of inquiry, set up by the Bahraini government itself under foreign pressure, described at least 18 different torture techniques to which detainees were subjected including electric shocks, beating on the soles of the feet with rubber hoses, sleep deprivation and threats of rape.
Mass arrests and demolition
The huge demonstrations for democratic rights by the Shia Muslim majority were directed against the Sunni al-Khalifa monarchy, which has ruled Bahrain since the 18th century. In addition to mass arrests, some 30 Shia mosques, religious meeting places and holy sites – at least one of which was reputed to be 400 years old – were bulldozed on the pretext that they had no planning permission.
At the time, I interviewed 20-year-old woman poet, Ayat al Gormezi, who had been arrested for reading a protest poem at a demonstration at the Pearl Roundabout, a gathering point for demonstrators in Manama, which was later to be demolished by the regime. “We are the people who will kill humiliation and assassinate misery,” read two lines of her poem addressed to King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa. “Don’t you hear their cries? Don’t you hear their screams?”
Al Gormezi told me how, during her imprisonment, she was beaten across the face with electric cables, kept in a tiny, freezing cell and forced to clean lavatories with her bare hands. She was terrified by repeated threats from her interrogators that they would sexually assault or rape her, while all the time they were beating her on the head and body until she finally lost consciousness. Released after international agitation, she has long been politically inactive.
The brazenness of the repression in Bahrain meant that its rulers had few vocal defenders in the wider world, but I soon noticed that Prince Andrew was being quoted as celebrating Bahrain as a place of religious freedom and tolerance. Speaking during a visit to Bahrain in 2014, he said: “I believe that what’s happening in Bahrain is a source of hope for many people in the world and a source of pride for Bahrainis.”
Repression continued
In reality, the repression never stopped. “The leaders of the pro-democracy protests in 2011 are still in prison along with 300 other political prisoners and with 12 people under sentence of death,” Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei, the director of advocacy at the London-based Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy told me. This is despite the pardoning last year of 1,500 prisoners, some 600 of whom are political prisoners according to Alwadaei. Human Rights Watch gives somewhat higher figures for the numbers released.
A visitor to the island kingdom since at least 2002, both privately and as a UK trade representative, Prince Andrew has never shown any sign of embarrassment at being linked to a regime with such an infamous human rights record. In 2018, as Chancellor of Huddersfield University, a post from which he has since resigned, he opened a training course at the Royal Academy of Policing in Bahrain, a place where prisoners say they were tortured with electric shocks, beatings, sexual assaults and hanging by their arms.
Self-regarding arrogance
We know a great deal about Prince Andrew’s periodic visits to Bahrain because among those infuriated by his self-regarding arrogance was Simon Wilson, who was the British embassy deputy chief of mission there between 2001 and 2005. After retiring from the Foreign Office, Wilson wrote an excoriating account for the Daily Mail in 2010 about the appalling impression made on him by Prince Andrew, whom the British diplomatic community privately called HBH: His Buffoon Highness.
One ludicrous aspect of Prince Andrew’s visits to Bahrain lives in my memory. He insisted during a visit in 2002 that his valet should carry a six-foot ironing board into the five-star hotel where he was staying, so that his trousers should be ironed just right in order to give them a chic crease. The ironing board was a great source of trouble because its size made it difficult to get into an embassy car or through the revolving door of the hotel.
Wilson’s anger at Prince Andrew’s gross misbehaviour was unassuaged by the passage of time. In a separate interview with ITV in 2023, he recalled how “we had a whole raft of things that came out in advance of his visit, his dislikes in terms of eating and stuff. He would only drink water, it had to be at room temperature, no ice… He always brought a large entourage with him, a private secretary, an equerry, a valet, a lady clerk and a business adviser.” At an official dinner, instead of making a speech promoting trade (written for him by the embassy), he tapped the British ambassador on the head and told him to speak instead.
On many of his visits until he lost the job in 2011, the prince was in Bahrain as an official UK Special Representative for Trade and Investment, though Wilson says his performance was negligent or counter-productive. His zeal for the al-Khalifa royal family remained extreme despite its harsh repression during and after the Arab Spring, though this was generally in keeping with the West’s support for despotic Arab regimes in the Gulf.
Prince Andrew’s enthusiasm for the Gulf monarchies has only deepened as his reputation has sunk to pariah status in the UK. He is reported as frequently telling friends that he might move permanently to Bahrain or the United Arab Emirates, where he may expect to be warmly received by at least some members of Gulf royal families. But the welcome would not be universal.
“It would be despicable to be hosted by a dictatorship,” says AlWadaei. “If it was up to people in Bahrain, they would not want him.”
Further Thoughts
In 2002, Theresa May famously shocked the Tory party conference by telling delegates, “you know what some people call us: the nasty party.” She said that “our base is too narrow and so, occasionally, are our sympathies.”
How different it is today when the largest political parties all compete to “out-nasty” each other. Immigration is the worst example of this. First out of the blocks being Reform, saying that it will deport 600,000 migrants over five years.
Then the Tories quickly overtook them by pledging to deport 750,000 migrants over the same period, this mass expulsion to be conducted by a UK agency with “sweeping new powers”, and £1 billion in funding, to be modelled on the “successful approach” of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Doubling down on this Trumpian path, the Tories have this week gone even further by promising to deport millions of legal migrants whom they claim should never have been allowed into the country in the first place.
Joining this toxic race to the bottom to see who can be the most xenophobic, Labour has added its own soupcon of venom to the poisonous brew cooked up by Reform and the Tories. This is to suggest that migrants are parasitic on the British society and state, structurally essential though they are to the NHS, care system, universities and agriculture, to name but four. Yet the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has the gall to imply that exhausted doctors and nurses have to earn the right to settlement in Britain by passing exams in English and undertaking voluntary work.
The spread of “nastiness” blights rational discussion of immigration, antisemitism, Gaza, freedom of expression, crime, grooming gangs, gender identity and other issues. Working as a journalist, I have been struck over the last 15 years how those with contrary opinions are more and more treated as pariahs to be denounced, ignored, ostracised, and, where possible, sacked from their jobs. The outraged rhetoric and divisive assumptions of the culture wars have infected and debase everything they touch.
A classic example of the crippling impact of presumptions born in the culture wars is the furious row which has broken out over the inquiry into grooming gangs. Most striking is the venom of denunciations by four of the grooming gang survivors and the alacrity with which they accuse those who correct or contradict them of being a liar who must be immediately sacked.
Beneath the Radar
Appalling though it is to watch the disintegration of American democracy, it is difficult not to feel some sense of satisfaction at the indictment of John Bolton – the national security adviser to President Donald Trump in 2018-19 turned critic – on 18 counts of mishandling classified information. This is the same Bolton who called for Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden to be executed under the Espionage Act, and Hillary Clinton to be jailed during the 2016 presidential campaign in which Bolton supported Trump.
Bolton is accused of using personal email and a messaging app to send more than 1,000 pages of a “diary”, including top secret information about his day-to-day actions, to two family members with no security clearances. The indictment is evidently an act of vengeance by Trump, recalling the case against him, since dismissed, for illegally storing classified documents at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach.
Why should Bolton have sent such an avalanche of information to members of his own family? A likely explanation is that, like many American politicians, he was planning a well-paid book deal as soon as he left office, and the diary and documents were intended for the book, since published under the title The Room Where It Happened: White House Diary.
Cockburn’s Picks
Every big scandal in the UK produces a wave of hypocritical anguish in which commentators in the mainline media express shock and horror at some piece of wrongdoing. They go on to ask why the Government or police did not act sooner.
Yet, again and again, the scandal – such as the Harrods boss Mohamed al-Fayed’s alleged sexual assaults on employees and the Post Office jailing of innocent sub-postmasters – had long been publicised in Private Eye or elsewhere, but the stories had been ignored by the mainstream media, who, when the scandal finally broke, pretended that nobody knew about it before.
One of the grosser examples of this pretended ignorance is the scandal surrounding the appointment of Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to Washington, though his close friendship with paedophile Jeffrey Epstein was well known.
When Mandelson was forced to resign after his fawning and embarrassing letters to Epstein were published, commentators asked censoriously why the Government had appointed him in the first place. More or less in chorus, they said that the Government had questions to answer, but reality they should have been explaining why, when interviewing Mandelson on television and radio at the time of his appointment, they had not questioned him themselves about his close relationship to Epstein.
A damning selection of clips from these punch-pulling interviews are in Richard Sanders’ film Exposed: Starmer, Epstein, Mandelson and the Real Prime Minister for Double Down News.
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