Our thanks to Mike Buchanan for this on Times Radio a weeks ago, Peter Hitchens on Prince Andrew: The King has failed to observe the presumption of innocence, (video,15:45). He writes:

“The treatment of Prince Andrew by King Charles III and the mainstream media has been utterly scandalous.

There is no evidence to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Prince Andrew – third in line to the throne in 2001, after Prince Charles and Prince William – ever met Virginia Giuffre. Even if what she later claimed was true – that they had sex in London when she was 17 – he would have committed no crime under UK law, and even if he recalled the matter, his denial would have been perfectly understandable. One of the reasons men pay highly for sex with prostitutes is that they go away afterwards.

It is claimed that the infamous photograph was taken on a disposable camera and had an imprint from the photo processing lab that read: “000 #15 13Mar01 Walgreens One Hour Photo”. This allegedly indicated the photo was developed on March 13, 2001, near Virginia Giuffre’s Florida home after she returned from London.

A number of possible explanations occur to me. One is that the photograph is genuine, and that Prince Andrew naively agreed to pose with the 17-year-old prostitute, presumably accepting her assurance that she wouldn’t share it with anyone. But even if that was what happened, and they had sex, he would have committed no crime under UK law.

The other possibility is that the Walgreens imprint was faked in order to back up Giuffre’s story of having met the Prince. Given the potential value of the image – Prince Andrews’s eventual payout to Giuffre was in the order of millions of pounds – the cost of faking the imprint would surely have been utterly trivial by comparison.

Prince Andrew should have been presumed innocent from the outset. If the poor man takes his own life, his blood will be on King Charles’s hands.”

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