About twenty years ago, when I was barely more than a callow young slip of a grumpy alcoholic burn out, I remember reading predictions about how climate change might play out across the world.

The UK, it was speculated, would ultimately become more like South East Asia - humid and wet, with a rainy season.

At the time of writing, after a period where the endless rains have become worthy of national headlines, we finally seem to be coming out of our newly acquired rainy season. At least a couple of times this week, I’ve seen the sun, and there are blossoms and snowdrops and the first faint indicators of spring, even as the country as a whole is apparently adopting the weather patterns of the Golden Triangle.

None of this is what’s on my mind.

Aside from the slightly brighter weather and the hints of warmth, there’s something else in the air today: A collective “ha!” from basically everyone in the country.

Andrew Mountbatten Windsor has been arrested.

This comes immediately after the news that the former president of South Korea has been sentenced to life in prison for his attempt at an insurrection. Fuck spring - what’s cheering me up today is the feeling that sometimes, the rich and powerful still have to suffer some consequences.

Of course, if you’re not rich and you don’t want to suffer consequences, there are options. I don’t necessarily consider this newsletter to be “tips for criminals” - although that might be a good one to start writing on the side - but there are a few ways that Andrew seems to have been unwise while he was committing all of the crimes he’s very obviously guilty of.*

The first rule that all criminals should understand: Whatever else you might be doing, don’t fuck with the money.

It’s important to note that Andrew has been arrested not for sex crimes, but for “improper conduct in public office.” Obviously, sex with under-aged girls who have been trafficked to you by the world’s most prominent pedophile is considered “improper conduct” in almost any setting imaginable, but the recent headlines about Andrew have ignored that stuff and focused on the fact that he might have also been guilty of leaking economic secrets to his friends while he was a trade envoy. This might mean people in the UK lost some money.

To keep myself legally above-board, Andrew of course claims to be innocent of any sex crimes with young girls, so let’s instead take something like snooker. If you had a friend, Jeffrey “Snooker” Epstein, and you’d been on a trip to Snooker Island, the private island where Jeff liked to play snooker, and you’d flown there on his snooker-themed airplane, and you came back and claimed not to have played any snooker, despite being pictured next to a table and holding a cue, then I wouldn’t believe you. But anyway, nothing has been proven about Andrew and all the snooker he allegedly played. And by “snooker” I mean rape, and by “played” I mean “committed on underage girls.”

The fact that we’re all pretty certain that Andrew is guilty of these crimes doesn’t matter to the ruling elites. What matters is, they’re also pretty sure that he did something that might have cost them money. This is because you can do what you like to women and poor people - and especially poor women - but as soon as someone loses a couple of million, there’s going to be a reckoning.

The whole arrest of Andrew feels to me like a vendetta. Someone, somewhere, decided that he had to be made to suffer. Not for whatever he did to young women, but for some otherwise-forgotten stock market incident that someone powerful is still pissed off about. This is absolutely speculative on my part, of course, and even if I’m right there’s no way to prove it, but Andrew could have been arrested years ago for the sex trafficking charges, and he wasn’t. The recent stories about his leaking of secrets seem to have been the clincher.

It’s somewhat analogous to Al Capone being imprisoned for tax evasion. Sooner or later, money men will find a way to hurt you if you’ve given them a reason.

Another basic tip for criminals is not to commit a crime while you’re committing crimes - the classic example is that if you’ve got a large quantity of drugs in your car, drive within the speed limit so there’s not an excuse to pull you over. The money stuff is related to this - if you’re going to take part in enormous criminal conspiracies (like, say, a sex trafficking ring), make sure your financial affairs are in order.

Happily, the collective chuckle of the nation isn’t the only sound on the breeze, today. There’s also the sound of everyone else in the Epstein files sucking in a breath through clenched teeth. This is because police have seized Andrew’s computers and records.

This is bad news for Andrew, and worse news for everyone else. As the U.S. government dawdles and obfuscates over releasing what they know about Jeffrey Epstein (only about half of the Epstein Files have been released, and with some heavy redactions to protect people who have so far remained president - sorry, “nameless”…), Andrew might be in posession of reams of incriminating evidence that the Americans can’t touch.

Obviously, the next piece of advice for criminals is extremely basic: Don’t leave evidence lying around. This should go without saying, but we have to remember who we’re dealing with, here.

We can argue back and forth about whether Andrew is stupid enough to have kept documentation of crimes on his computer. He probably is that stupid - this is a man who claimed he couldn’t be a rapist because he was at Pizza Express, and that he was biologically incapable of sweating. But even if he’s not catastrophically stupid, he’s catastrophically pampered.

It wasn’t all that long ago that members of the Royal Family had a servant to literally wipe their arses for them. There were numerous euphemistic terms, starting with “Groom of the Stool”, which is where we get “stool” as a synonym for “shit”, before becoming things like “First Gentleman of the Bedchamber.” What’s important to note is that the role wasn’t fully done away with (…flushed, if you will. Dare I say, wiped out?) until the ascension of Edward VII in 1901.

Do we really think that Andrew, a man whose family didn’t historically have to wipe their own arses, would have thought to wipe his own hard drive? It’s doubtful he’d even know how. If he didn’t think to ask someone to do it for him, then my bet is that it didn’t get done.

Would he have asked anyone? I’m not convinced. Andrew strikes me as the exact sort of stupid, lazy and rich that means he thinks he can’t be caught. Put yourself in that mindset - Asking one of your servants to delete all the information on your hard drive makes you sound guilty, and opens you up to the risk that said servant will steal the incriminating information you’ve just alluded to, so it’s best not to bring it up. But also, you don’t really know how to delete all of this information, so you just leave it. It’ll be fine - nobody is ever going to question you. You’re royalty.

I’d be willing to bet that there is a lot of stuff on Andrew’s devices that is going to incriminate not just him, but a wide network of his contacts. I don’t know what happens to royal devices when they’re no longer needed - if the royals had any sense they’d have them incinerated - but I’d bet Andrew doesn’t know, either. There’s every chance all of his old hard drives are just in a storage cupboard, loaded with pictures and emails and details of all kinds of illegality.

Obviously, it would be fantastic if this led to a domino effect that brought down other powerful, crooked sex offenders, but on a day of optimism and subtle hints of spring, that’s still too much to hope for. The best that can be said is that it’s going to be a shame when Andrew kills himself, which I’m going to guess will happen somewhere around Easter, in a secluded location with no CCTV…

*(“Allegedly.”)