Roblog

Andrew O’Hagan in the LRB reviews Andrew Lownie’s new book Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York alongside Virginia Giuffre’s autobiography, and in doing so eviscerates Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and the cheap, tawdry corruption with which he has coasted through his adult life:

“With some people, money and sex are the only truths. It’s the ultimate delinquency to believe that gratification itself is power. Bringing down the royal family may be the least terrible consequence of everything Andrew has done. When a lazy aristocrat from a dying dynasty uses a helicopter to travel seventeen miles, the edifice shakes. But when that same man rapes a 17-year-old and calls her a liar, it is the end of days. The gift of Andy and Fergie, which comes at too high a price, has been to bring the antiseptic of daylight to the culture of royal privilege.”

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A timely piece from Patrick Radden Keefe on London’s facilitation of dodgy Russian wealth:

“The stark implication of ‘Putin’s People’ is not just that the President of Russia may be a silent partner in one of England’s most storied sports franchises but also that England itself has been a silent and handsomely compensated partner in Putin’s kleptocratic designs – that, in the past two decades, Russian oligarchs have infiltrated England’s political, economic, and legal systems. ‘We must go after the oligarchs,’ Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared after the invasion of Ukraine, doing his best to sound Churchillian. But, as the international community labors to isolate Putin and his cronies, the question is whether England has been too compromised by Russian money to do so.”

Keefe leans heavily on Oliver Bullough in the piece; his books Moneyland and the recently published Butler to the World are both brilliantly depressing. #