Misconduct in Public Office: The Arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor

After years of scandal and insulation, the legal system appears to have found a door it can push open.

When rank meets process - Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was, going by the small explosion that’s come from my mobile phone this morning, arrested. For the avoidance of any doubt, I am very, very pleased by this sudden turn of events - the semi-ex-Royal with a scandal list so long it would make Oscar Wilde do a bit of a double take is truly well overdue some consequences, so this is great to see happening.

However, before we start popping the champagne and bringing out the good glasses, we have to quickly confirm what he was arrested for.

Because it’s not for sexual trafficking, sexual assault or anything that remotely matches the moral temperature of the public outrage that has followed him around for years now.

No - the arrest appears to be based on misconduct in public office, which, if you’re not a lawyer, sounds like it could be something you get told off for because you’ve badly run your local parish council and gave Dave the pub landlord permission to erect a very dodgy statue of a questionable beaver outside your local.

And yet, this remains a good thing - because ultimately, this is one of the ways that we actually do get to see power held to account.

As I’ve gotten older, a part of me has come to the realisation that justice, while not only being slow, also seems to take other routes to get where it’s going. I have lived my whole life with what seems like a persistent fantasy that justice, when it finally shows up for powerful men, will do so with fireworks. That it will mirror the accusations and allegations that made the headline and that it will feel proportionate to the disgust.

This goes back a good decade and a half or so, when I was still a mere cub in South Africa, and comes from a certain Mr Jacob Zuma. At the time, Jacob Zuma, the then president of South Africa, was under intense scrutiny after years of what can only be called weapons-grade fuckery in office, including, but not limited to, the alleged sexual assault of Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo in 2005.

He was acquitted for that case, politically he survived and institutionally, he positively thrived. The allegations kept coming - Nkandlagate followed, in which he spent R246m on a lovely little compound for himself in Kwazulu Natal, that he had an improper relationship with the Gupta family leading to accusations of state capture and that he was ultimately pretty much as corrupt as any politician could really be.

All the allegations were well supported and enormous, the public anger became volcanic and the sense of impunity was utterly suffocating.

Eventually the thing that brought him to his knees was not, as many people, including myself, imagined, the moral crescendo that was expected, and I would say, wanted. It was process - it was the contempt of court, corruption proceedings and the grinding machinery of institutional accountability that finally caught with him sideways rather than head on, and he was sentenced in 2021 to a prison term.

Not, of course for any of his original misdeeds or scandals, but for refusing to comply with a constitutional court order. Justice had been delivered, it just wasn’t the justice that people expected, nor I would say deserved.

The point of this brief walk down memory lane is that so many times when powerful men fall, they very rarely do so at the point of maximum outrage - they fall where the evidence is tightest, the law is clearest and where prosecutors believe that they can win without the whole case imploding on first contact with reality.

Which brings me neatly back to Mountbatten-Windsor.

For years his name has been synonymous with Jeffrey Epstein. His interview with Emily Maitliss on Newsnight remains one of the most spectacular implosions of a whole person’s reputation that I have ever seen, and since then the public expectation has always been that any fall would be centred on the ugliest allegations.

Which is a fair enough expectation - it is after all where the moral gravity sits. The thing with our legal system, and it is a good one, is that it does not prosecute based on moral gravity. It prosecutes on offences that can be reliably evidenced, tested and survived in court.

While to many’s ears, misconduct in public office sounds small because it lacks the cinematic flair and it does nothing to satisfy the emotional ledger, it is concrete, it is defined and it is something that the Crown Prosecution Service can use - potentially as a crowbar to really crack open potentially even more.

This particular prosecution, as dissatisfying and uncomfortable as it may feel, is just so often how these things work - accountability for powerful men, I’ve sadly learned, is incremental, procedural and bureaucratic.

It starts with the thing that can be proved beyond reasonable doubt, not the thing that makes the loudest headline. If you can meaningfully establish abuse in office, you can legally cement that breach of trust - and once you establish, legally, that breach of trust, you create a foothold, which once established, makes other doors that much easier to push down.

The arrest of Mountbatten-Windsor today doesn’t guarantee the grand reckoning that we all would love to see though - an arrest is not a conviction, and even evidence in public domain is not guilt until proven by the law. But. It does spectacularly puncture the long-held assumption that rank, proximity to the Crown and the sheer, concrete-like density of scandal is enough to keep someone permanently insulated.

Today, the system in the UK decided it can act. That is a spectacularly good start.

Yes, it’s not fireworks, it’s paperwork and the least incendiary route available, but sometimes, as South Africans learned watching Jacob Zuma slowly be taken down, that is precisely how the fall begins.

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