I will read pretty much anything Andrew O’Hagan writes in the London Review of Books (which is a subset of “I’ll read pretty much anything in the London Review of Books” also a true statement) but I particularly enjoyed his demolition of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew of The Epstein Files, the Duke of Pizza Express, or the more prosaic Detainee A.

The piece—headlined “Stay Classy”—is a good look at the entire illbegotten nature of the monarchy, the intersection of stupidity and venality, and the entirely unshocking way in which powerful people are allowed to commit sexual offenses (and the slightly more shocking fact that they are often allowed to carry on committing them once they’ve been busted.)

And it starts off with a doozy of a first sentence.

“In the days​ of disco and Aramis 900, when the relationship between entitlement and sleaze could still seem novel, Prince Andrew came across like the more relatable sort of wanker.”

He was, O’Hagan points out, his mother’s favorite—and she essentially ran protection for him as he became enmired in scandal after scandal. “The worse he got, the more she wanted to camouflage him with medals, rosettes and ribbons,” he writes. “The irony is that he treated her as badly as he treated every other woman, flogging Sunninghill, the house she gave him as a wedding present, to the son-in-law of the president of Kazakhstan for £3 million over the asking price.”

Perhaps not as badly as every other woman, but the point stands.

I encourage you to read the whole thing.