𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

The arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor shows that nobody is above the law – not even the brother of the King. But it followed demands for justice from a surprising source. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has played a key role in ensuring police turn their sights on Andrew.

Mr Brown remained relatively quiet after leaving Downing Street in 2010, although he was a diligent constituency MP until 2015 and published his memoirs in 2017. He’s even reportedly turned down offers of honours such as a seat in the House of Lords. But he was stirred to action by the release of millions of new files relating to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, by the US Department of Justice. They confirmed Mr Brown’s worst fears – that his former colleague Peter Mandelson had actively undermined him, when they were supposed to be working together to protect the British people from the global banking crisis.

Mr Brown, as Prime Minister, invited Lord Mandelson to join his government as Business Secretary in 2008. The pair had been enemies in the past, but Mr Brown was willing to bury the hatchet.

The Epstein files made clear, however, that during this period Mandelson was in contact with the US financier and passed on confidential information about the UK Government’s activities.

But there was more. Mr Brown, a devoted father of three, including daughter Jennifer who died at a young age, made it his business to discover just how deeply the Epstein scandal had infected the UK establishment, He pored over the documents, displaying the same obsessive attention to detail that political colleagues remembered from his days as Prime Minister and, before that, Chancellor.

And he made his findings public on February 11, in a clear attempt to encourage police to act.

Mr Brown highlighted reports that Epstein trafficked girls from Latvia, Lithuania and Russia via Stansted Airport – and revealed that he understood that UK police had failed to speak to some of the women affected. He called on British police to “urgently to re-examine their decision-making in their investigation”.

Writing in the New Statesman magazine, Mr Brown said: “I have been told privately that the investigations related to the former Prince Andrew did not properly check vital evidence of flights. I have asked the police to look at this as part of the new inquiry. The Stansted revelations alone require them to interview Andrew. Separately, a line of emails concerns the logistics of registering trafficked girls for English-as-a-foreign-language courses, as a route to obtaining US visas. We need to know if and to what extent this was also happening in the UK.”

He added: “What connects this month’s revelations to the sex trafficking crimes of Jeffrey Epstein is our decades-long collective failure to root out the worldwide networks of powerful men with wealth and influence who have raped, exploited and violated girls and women; treated them as less than human – and done so with almost complete impunity.”

Just over a week later, Andrew was arrested.

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Mr Brown has now sent an extensive document to the police with more details of his findings.

Mr Brown said: “I have submitted a five-page memorandum to the Metropolitan, Surrey, Sussex, Thames Valley and other relevant UK police constabularies.

“This memorandum provides new and additional information to that which I submitted last week to the Met, Essex and Thames Valley police forces where I expressed my concern that we secure justice for trafficked girls and women.”

Even Mr Brown’s closest friends in politics sometimes had doubts about this obsessive nature. It was both a blessing and a curse. But nobody doubted his towering intellect.

Neither did they doubt the strong moral purpose that propelled Mr Brown into politics. Whether this Labour giant always made the right decisions is another matter, but he was driven by a desire to do good.

Another thing everyone at Westminster knew about Gordon Brown is that he made a formidable enemy. It’s something that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is learning to his cost.