EDITORIAL: Andrew’s arrest shows no one is above the law

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After years of lurid speculation about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and his alleged ties to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, British police finally swooped in and arrested the former prince this week.

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In an ironic twist, the charges against him do not centre on allegations about his dubious relationships with young women.

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Just as gangster Al Capone was arrested for tax evasion, the disgraced former royal is alleged to have leaked confidential banking information to Epstein. From 2001 to 2011, Mountbatten-Windsor worked as a globe-trotting trade envoy for the British government. (Epstein died in his prison cell in 2019.)

Over the past decade, a deplorable narrative has unfolded around Mountbatten-Windsor, of inappropriate behaviour with young women, all of which he vehemently denied. He appears to be the worst combination of not very nice and not very smart. In a disastrous, hubris-fuelled 2019 BBC interview, he famously claimed to have been at a pizza restaurant near his home and not cavorting with his accuser, Virginia Giuffre. Giuffre committed suicide in Australia last year. Since then, her autobiography, Nobody’s Girl, has become a global bestseller.

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King Charles has attempted to distance himself from his brother since he took over the Crown. He stripped him of his princely title and threw Mountbatten-Windsor out of the mansion he had shared with his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, for the past 20 years.

The shocking fallout from the arrest will be felt in Canada, where Charles is head of state. We should be careful to keep the two separate. Charles showed his dedication to this country last year. During his cancer treatment and U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats to annex this country, Charles flew here to deliver the Throne Speech.

At least in the U.K., powerful people are being called into account. The former British ambassador to Washington, Lord Mandelson, was forced to resign because of his connections to Epstein. We haven’t seen the same accountability in the U.S.

There are questions about what to do with public infrastructure named for the former Prince Andrew, Duke of York.

Rename it. No one needs to be reminded of his disgrace. A few replacement names come to mind: Our first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald; Egerton Ryerson, the architect of public education; and noted abolitionist, Henry Dundas. That should fix it nicely.

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