The Duran Podcast - Former UK Prince arrest... Will it take pressure off Starmer?

Episode Date: February 22, 2026

Former UK Prince arrest... Will it take pressure off Starmer?

All right, Alexander, let's talk about Andrew and his arrest, Andrew of Mountain Bomb Castle of Windsor. And he was arrested on his 66th birthday. I know. They do love their numbers, don't they? They do love their symbolism. Anyway, he was arrested, and I believe he has been let go, but he is still under investigation. The king is supporting the police in the investigation. And I guess my first question to you is, will this relieve some of the pressure from Stammer and the whole Mendelsohn scandal?

Will this take some of the pressure off? Will the citizens of the UK be fine with Prince Andrew? Or will they ask for more? Well, that is an excellent question, actually, because there's so many... many unanswered questions about the Andrew arrest. And I am beginning to wonder whether this isn't, in fact, an attempt to refocus attention away from Mandelson and to put Andrew in the spotlight. Because the more I thought about this, the more difficult I find it to understand.

Now, I'm afraid I'm going to have to talk a little bit about police procedure. and crimes and this kind of crime and the way that investigations are conducted in the UK. So, you know, forgive me. But it's a bit technical, but let me explain. Now, for an investigation of an offence of this kind, misconduct of public office, it would be very unusual, extremely unusual indeed, in my opinion, for the police to start an investigation with an arrest and a detention and a search. This is absolutely exploding a nuclear bomb right at the beginning of an investigation.

Of course, in terms of other crime, robbery, investigation of a robbery or a murder, it would be different. But this kind of, if you like, white collar, semi-civil, semi-criminal offence, what you would expect the police to do first is invite the suspect for interview. And the suspect comes voluntarily to the police station. And if there's a decision to arrest, the arrest is usually made there. And usually the suspect is then released on police bail. Actually going out, arresting someone in this very public way for this kind of offense, holding him in a cell for 24 hours and then carrying out a search of his residence,

that is extremely radical. It's the sort of thing that is inevitably going to attract massive publicity. And it's not what the police usually do for an investigation of this sort of offense. And I've been involved in investigations of these kind of offenses. And I cannot ever remember a thing like this ever taking place before. You only do that in one of two specific. reasons. One is if you think that the suspect is going to flee abroad, which it might happen, but realistically was that going to happen with Andrew? And the second is if you think that the

suspect is about to commit another crime, such as, for example, destroying evidence. And the question is then what evidence does Andrew still have, which he would want to destroy? Maybe there is such evidence. Maybe he has still got records of his dealings with Epstein, which he hasn't yet destroyed, and the police were tipped off that Andrew might be about to destroy that evidence, and maybe they moved in, and they took the step that they did. But it still begs lots of questions, and it does still seem to me an extreme, an extreme stance. to have taken in an investigation of this kind. And it treats Andrew very differently from the way that Mandelson is being treated. Mandelson is being investigated for the same offense.

The evidence against him is very strong, I would say. But we have the emails, we have records of payments. We have all of these kind of things in relation to Mandelson, which have not yet been publicly produced in relation to Andrew. And yet Mandelson so far has not been arrested. He has not, I believe even been interviewed. And he's certainly not been held in detention. And there's been no search of, he's, by the way, I believe, various homes. So why this difference in the treatment of the two men? Now, I want to just say something else, which is up to know, The case against Mandelson looks much stronger than the case against Andrew. Mandelson was a member of the government.

He was a cabinet minister. He was a ambassador. He obviously did hold public office. It's not clear what public office exactly Andrew is supposed to have held. He's a member of the royal family. Is that a public office? Possibly. He was a UK trade representative for a time, but this was not a formal position.

There's apparently no document in existence formally appointing him to that role. And though the British state paid him expenses, they never paid him a salary. And then, of course, there's a whole issue of intention, perhaps Mandel's a Andrew could say, well, you know, all these documents he was giving Epstein fitted in clearly to his work as a trade representative. They were intended to promote trade for Britain. You can't say that about Mandelson because Mandelson clearly beached trust at the time when he was a cabinet minister.

So absent the possibility that the British authorities had a tip of that Andrew was perhaps preparing to tip, to destroy some incriminating documents or evidence of that kind, it does seem to me as if suddenly this big focus on Andrew on his birthday could be intended to take away focus from Mandelson in order to have us all talking about Andrew rather than. than Mandelson. And of course, when we talk about Mandelson, we really mean Kier Starrma. Just saying. Now, I say that Andrew is still a member of the royal family. I cannot believe that the police would have acted without first having discussions, both with the prime minister and with the I mean, that's how things like this happen in the UK. I wonder whether, given the realities of Britain today, whether perhaps someone suggested to them quietly that they do this with Andrew. And if it was done from somebody who, let's say, had Stama's best interests at heart,

I can't say it would surprise me. I was going to say the same exact thing. I was going to ask you that very same question. Would a scenario be possible where Stommer and the king met? They decided to have a meeting and they decided, look, I need to get some of the pressure off of me. That's what Stommer would tell the king. And you, King, also need to deal with this trouble that's called Andrew. Yeah.

I mean, it appears Andrew is a problem for the royal family. right? I mean... Oh, absolutely. So the best solution going forward is for you to support as King to support the police investigation into Andrew. And Andrew's going to have to have to be arrested and investigated. Maybe there are assurances given that he will not be sent to prison.

Or if he is found guilty, it'll be some sort of a light sentence. I don't know what they do in the UK country club type of prison or I don't know. You know better than I do as far as. sentences and stuff like that if they do find him guilty. Maybe some sort of an agreement like that was worked out in the best interest of the UK and of the crown, right? Well, the first thing to say is, I don't know that. There's a guess, by the way, on my head. It's a guess.

But can I just say something? I know that Starma and the king did meet last week, have met because they do every week. It is part of the constitutional system in Britain that the prime minister meets with the king at least once a week to report to the king on the things that are taking place in terms of the government. And these meetings are private. Sometimes it's just the king and the prime minister. No written records are kept. Very occasionally, the king's private secretary is also present. So they did undoubtedly meet this week. I mean, there's no question about that. Now, what they discussed between them, I don't know, and we probably will never know, because it is very secret.

There are actual laws about this which protect the privacy of conversations between the king and the prime minister, who is remembered the king's first minister. Do things like what we've just been talking about happen? Of course they do. Of course they do. Of course, if it did happen like that, in this case, it would be improper to put it mildly. But does it happen? Have things like that happened in the past? Yes. Well, I mean, you know, you're talking about preserving, at least on Stammer's side of things.

He needs to preserve his administration. Yeah. Someone has to take the fall. Yes. Right? They have to throw someone under the bus. They already got rid of McSweeney. Yes.

So, you know, the next logical person would be Andrew. And as far as the royal family goes, my understanding of things is that Andrew is very problematic for the world's, for the reputation, for the functioning of the royal family. To put it mildly, let's just talk about Stama. He didn't just get rid of McSweeney. He got rid of his director of communications. In other words, he's press spokesman. And he sacked the chief cabinet secretary.

Now, he is Britain's most senior civil servant. He is the contact person between the prime minister and the permanent bureaucracy. So he was sacked too. So Stama, who has a notorious reputation for sacking everybody in order to protect his job, has been busy carrying out a purge of the people who have been closest to him and who might be most implicated in any decisions that you have might have made in advance of the whatever further revelations about Mandelson might be coming. And I think there are going to be revelations about Mandelson because as we discussed previously, there's a committee of MPs that is going to be looking at the papers which supposedly explain

how it came about that Mandelson was appointed by Stama, ambassador to the United States. And we've already said in different programs that I believe, that there are things which are, to put it, mildly embarrassing to Starner in those papers. So it makes complete sense, if that is true, and this is all speculation, but we can engage in speculation, there's no arm in it. It is, it makes complete sense in that case for Starner to want the focus to be somewhere else on Andrew and what he was doing. And so you stage this incredible event, this arrest, this public arrest, you keep Andrew in the cells, you search his home, you make it seem as there's something really, really bad is happening,

because that's absolutely the impression, by the way, of this is about as bad as it gets where Andrew is concerned. And that way people are talking about Andrew, and they're focused on Andrew's connections with Epstein, and they're talking less about Mandelson. Now, if that is the calculation, by the way, I think it is wrong. I think what is going to happen is that far from it taking focus away from Mandelson, it's going to make people in the country even more angry because they will be saying, well, the proof of how bad this is is the way in which Andrew has been brought down. There's no difference between Andrew and Mandelson.

They are absolutely terrible people involved with perhaps the most terrible man of all, who was Epstein. And the fact that Stama was close to Mandelson really must mean that he is a terrible man as well. So I think far from this latest Andrew operation, taking the focus away from Mandelson, all it's actually doing is underlining and emphasizing the extreme seriousness of the whole Epstein affair. So this doesn't buy Stam or any time? I don't think so. I don't think so. The other thing to say is that next week we have an important by-election in Britain in Manchester. The word that's coming out is that the Labour vote there has completely collapsed.

This is a constituency in Manchester where Labour has always won and where at the last election they got more than 50% of the vote. It's a toss-up at the moment whether it'll be the Greens or reform who are going to win. But Labour is in more. meltdown. There's also been another scandal relating to Stama, which hasn't gained the traction, obviously, that the Epstein one has done, but which has made many people in the media very angry, which is that it turned out that McSweeney and Coe were basically doing spying on British journalists and spreading smears about them.

I'm not going to get into the details of it. I don't think the country at large is very interested, but the media itself is. So they're angry about some of these revelations. And so there is that going on. And you remember we did a program about two, three weeks ago, in which we discussed how Stama was trying to postpone the local elections in May. He was calling off local elections wherever he could, obviously in order to minimize the Labour Party's losses. The government has had to capitulate on that one.

All of the elections that they tried to postpone are now going to take place on the day when they're supposed to happen. And we've been told that they have been forced to do that because the government's law officers have said that the postponement of the elections was illegal. something which we could have told them, and if I probably did tell them. But anyway, they've now had to get high-level legal advice about that. Remember, Stama is a lawyer himself. In fact, he's a king's counsel. This obviously is making a very, very bad impression altogether. It's looking increasingly as if everything, you know, the wheels are indeed coming off.

The only thing that keeps Stama in office is that there is no obvious person to take over from him. Or to be more precise, there is, there's his former deputy leader, Angela Rainer. If she wasn't being investigated, thick as of the tax issues, she would be there to take over. She would almost certainly have fallen now. But anyway, I mean, sooner or later, this is all going to come unstuck. Whatever Stama does, and I do, I really, do ask myself whether this whole Andrew operation was intended for the reasons that we've just been talking about to take the focus away from Mandelson in order to help Starma. If that's

the plan, then frankly, it's a desperate step by a drowning man. As they say, he's not waving, he's drowning. Yeah, well, he doesn't have many other options, I guess. So he played the Andrew card. Maybe. All right. We'll leave it there. The durand.locals.com. We are on X and Rumble and telegram. We are also on substack. There's a link to our substack in the description box down below and go to the Duran shop, pick up some merch, free shipping for everything ordered $70. They can order $70. You get free shipping. The link to Duran Shop is also in the description box down below. Take care.