We hear “nobody is above the Law” more in hope than expectation.   So it is heartening to hear that the Thames Valley Police arrested Mr. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor,  younger brother of King Charles, former inglorious Duke of York, and former Special Representative for Trade and International Investment, 2001-2011, on suspicion of misconduct in public office.  The mighty are rarely pulled down from their thrones as the Magnificat recommends.  Despite almost a rule of omerta, efforts to cover up some of the worst incidences of royal misbehaviour in the past  - misplaced patriotic instinct? - have rarely succeeded.  Today’s is a very British news bomb-shell. 

Wikipedia already knew of several surprising incidents of commercial wheeler-dealing by “Air-miles Andy”.  But Chris Bryant noted in the House of Commons in February 2011 how “it was very difficult to see in whose interests he was acting“. For some of the time, his own is the suspicion.  Prince Andrew was also something of a royal arms trader on our behalf,  and was close, Bryant believed, to Libya’s Gaddafi and allegedly to a notorious Libyan arms dealer.  

So could all this have been averted?   Could the Security Services via Tony Blair have warned the Queen that making Andrew a Special Representative, let loose globally, was a bad risk?  Perhaps they did and he did.  Then again, Peter Mandleson was put in the House of Lords so he could serve as Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills in October 2008 in Gordon Brown’s Government, just a few months before Epstein’s conviction for procuring a child for prostitution.   Was it considered improper then to intervene or, indeed, build up files on Ministers and members of the royal family involved with Epstein’s rich and powerful network?    We’ll never know. 

Between 2017-2025 the British Security Services stopped 43 late-stage terrorist attacks.  They deserve recognition for getting it right first time, and most times, a rare ability in today’s State.  Unsurprisingly, what else they were doing is not in the public domain.  But it would be interesting to know how they handled the rumbling Epstein scandals and the goings-on of the Duke of York.

In mitigation, despite the Good Friday agreement in 1998, our Security Services didn’t suddenly have time on their hands.   Osama Bin Laden had bobbed up in 1996 with some worrying suggestions about what jihadists needed to do to the “corrupt West”, and not just its ‘lackeys’ in the Middle East, and even before 9/11, went on to bomb American embassies in Africa with huge casualties.  But it was only in late October last year that, amidst the fall-out from the Epstein affair and the Palace’s distancing itself from the Duke of York, that The Telegraph reported that the Intelligence agencies had come out and declared Andrew a potential national security risk. 

The royals have suffered twice in living memory from the bad-brother syndrome.  In his 10 December 1936 letter of abdication Edward, the eldest son of King George V, let his “irrevocable determination to renounce the throne” be known.   Then using the title, Duke of Windsor, Edward with the twice divorced American, Wallis Simpson, for whom he had sacrificed kingship, travelled to France and married. 

After his brother Albert, Bertie,  became King George VI, Edward visited Germany in 1937 on the steamship Bremen at the invitation of the Nazi State Labour Front.  Preparations for war in Europe were well underway.  Buchenwald concentration camp has opened a few months earlier.  Some British tourists were still going to Germany but this was a semi-State visit and different.  The Duke of Windsor dutifully visited factories, inspected a SS unit, had tea with Goering, dinner with Goebbels, and  made a friendly, private visit to Hitler in Berghof, outside Berchtesgarden,  Bavaria - a thank you letter survives plus photographs. 

After Hitler’s invasion of France, the couple were given Nazi safe-passage south to Spain then,  in July 1940,  went on to stay with a rich banker in Lisbon.  The Marburg files reveal Operation Willi, discovered by US troops in 1945 in abandoned vehicles near Marburg Castle, near Hesse.  Correspondence between the German ambassador to Portugal and Berlin, shows a plot to co-opt, if necessary kidnap, Edward which ultimately failed.  Under Churchill’s pressure, Edward accepted a post as Governor of the Bahamas and sailed from Lisbon.

What to make of all this?   In 1936 a Joint Intelligence Committee was added to work with the tiny and somewhat ineffectual predecessor to MI5.  Baldwin, Churchill plus the Security Service, such as it was, handled the critical period 1937-1940 with  skill.  Edward fancied himself as mediator between Britain and Germany and was correspondingly vulnerable to his pro-Nazi wife, the German Foreign Minister, Joseph Ribbentrop, who was described as her ‘close friend’, and his own anger at his brother becoming king.  Like Andrew he became a national security risk.

Both Edward and Andrew seem to have had no sense of what might be meant by unacceptable company and association for a representative of the State.  Both had to leave their desirable residences in Windsor Great Park.  Both, lost their royal title and, perhaps unfairly, gained a reputation for treachery.  Both were provided with a cover-up costing money and time – to little avail – to retain the royal family’s image: a £12 million settlement for Virginia Giuffre while Edward, cheap at the price, received an annual allowance of £1.4 million, in today’s equivalent, and a Governor’s hat in a warm climate (he also realised some £250 million by selling two royal residences to King George VI).

The details of what exactly needed covering up is difficult to pin down.  The Marburg papers have him talking privately to a Spanish diplomat in 1940 contemplating the coming Blitz pushing Britain into peace negotiations.  But German counter-intelligence was playing games, and possibly putting their spin on his words reported back to Berlin.

Fast forward and, other than Epstein, nobody seems to know who knew what.  There are reports of pin-hole cameras for filming visitors’ activities found in rooms on Epstein’s  island.  Kompromat is to recruiting intelligence assets as an Arsenal match is to a ticket holder.  Were Epstein’s obsessively comprehensive archives for self-protection or for remunerative transactions with intelligence agencies, and if so, which ones?  We may never know.

Given the magnitude of the Epstein scandal, the other big question is could victims, and others, have been spared the consequences of the moral failings of its rich and powerful elite by swift and decisive action by the Security services?  What did the FBI/CIA have on Epstein and did they share it with the UK? And is the clandestine surveillance of those in authority  a proper and necessary  role for our Intelligence agencies?   Political policing of Left-wing activists became routine in the Cold War.   NGOs have not been spared their attention and, sometimes, infiltration in the past.   In democracies, effective parliamentary systems for the maintenance of standards in public life with appropriate monitoring, and less gullible political leaders, should obviate such surveillance. But do they?  

We now have one of the best Intelligence services in the world.  Lets hope our parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee are finding ways forward with them on such critical issues. 
 ​

“Every world crisis is, as the word denotes, a judgement and a decision out of which something new must come.  It is therefore an opportunity to hear the Word of God and for the Spirit to manifest its creative power to humanity. This is the hope that the prophets always maintain in their vision of judgement against the nations, and which the Church constantly repeats in the liturgy”. 
 
Pope Leo on today’s crisis?  No, Christopher Dawson, writing in 1941.  He was a Catholic historian and Vice-President of Cardinal Hinsley’s Sword of the Spirit which dropped pamphlets over Nazi Germany calling Catholics to resist and, in the 1960s, produced the Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR), later known as Progressio.  Led by Mildred Nevile, CIIR developed a distinctive approach to solidarity with, what was then known as, the ‘Third World’.

With his hope that ‘something new must come’, Dawson might be speaking directly to our current global crisis.  But what might it be?  And where might the Church be hoping the Spirit would be manifesting its creative power today?  The suffering and prophetic voices of women in and beyond the Church, and in the solidarity with them, suggests itself. 

Mothers are last in the family to eat in Gaza and in countless areas of conflict around the world.  Rape in wars continues unabated.  The sexual trafficking of women, treated as a passing story in our own cities, has now been brought into global prominence by a criminal elite, Epstein and his powerful, rich friends.  Then there is the suffering of women oppressed by – what is imagined as - 7th century Muslim religious duties, imposed as the law of the land, cruelly implemented, even by the denial of education making gender equality in Afghanistan a distant hoping against hope.  A movement of solidarity with the plight of vulnerable women has been increasingly coming to the fore. 

It was Pope John Paul II in his 1987 encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (On Social Concerns) who gave a straightforward definition of solidarity as a virtue: “a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good”.  It stuck because it bypassed binary arguments about the individual versus the communitarian, liberalism versus post-liberalism.  In that sense, and in that sense only, the Christian understanding of solidarity isn’t a political principle.  It is by definition a personal commitment to a type of relationship, to friendship and just social structures.  John Paul II also described what solidarity wasn’t: “not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many others”.   Solidarity was set in opposition to “structures of sin”, alongside individual moral failings, (he was celebrating the 20th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s  Populorum Progressio which condemned unfair trade practices imposed on developing countries by powerful states).  If “economic structures of sin” sounds a little academic, think of the cruelty and violence embodied in the laws and social  structures of former Apartheid South Africa and in Israel – and the resistance to them, past and present.

I remember taking Rev. Frank Chikane, soon to be General-Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, 1987-1994,  but on the run, a target for the apartheid regime, to see the Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal Basil Hume.  There was an immediate rapport between Robert Runcie and Frank.  Runcie had been a tank commander in the Second World War and knew what it was like having someone intent on killing you.  Cardinal Hume was kind and welcoming but the ‘vibes’ were more formal.  On another occasion, I asked Cardinal Hume to make an appeal for the ANC brother of a young South African women who had come to London to try to save him.  He was about to be executed in Pretoria.  The Cardinal was sympathetic but clearly wasn’t going to do so.  And there was not much chance it would have had any result.  I later heard he had driven to Heathrow the next morning to comfort her before she returned to Johannesburg.   People are different.   They show solidarity in different ways.

Pope Francis, too different for conservative tastes, added his distinctive coda to John Paul II’s words in 2013 speaking off-the-cuff in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Bonaria, patron saint of sailors, in Cagliari, Sardinia.  Francis called for compassion for “real people who are suffering and starving” - rather than abstract statistics on poverty.  He lived up to his words.

Why choose Cagliari on a coastal hill in a town on an island in the Mediterranean?   The clue is in ‘Bonaria’, Good air/winds that had blown sailors in the 16th century, with their veneration of Our Lady with them to Santa María del Buen Ayre, Buenos Aires, Good Air, Francis’ former Argentinian Archdiocese for 15 years. The Cagliari meeting was at his request with local prisoners and the unemployed.  His solidarity with them came at a personal level: from recalling stories of family poverty in Italy and how his unemployed father had suffered during the Great Depression in Argentina.  Unemployment, denying a vital space for human creativity, was a “wound to human dignity”.   Francis came back often to the centrality of solidarity in a life of faith responding to injustice.

Injustice has moved not only NGOs but has also evoked, directly and indirectly, Government concern and concerted action.    Both Conservative and Labour governments have promoted protections for women in war, culminating in rape being made a distinct, recognized war crime.  The Metropolitan Police set up a new Violence Reduction Unit in 2022.  Domestic violence against women is a key part of it.  Women played the leading role in making both the above happen.

Governments obviously have the power, money and resources to achieve more than any number of NGOs, though very often in democracies it is pressure from  NGOs, such as the Catholic Institute for International Relations using  effective advocacy alongside public opinion, that lies behind or promotes new government initiatives.  Building up public opinion against the headwinds of a Right-Wing press is no easy task.   In addition, any response to today’s prophetic voices has to weigh up what is doable in different contexts, in the short term and what may require a life-time.  It is one thing to seek justice in a land led by a narcissistic sociopath showing symptoms of cognitive decline, another to deal with a Communist Party led by a ruthless dictator, and another for those living in democratic States with fragmenting political Parties.  Each situation will demand analysis and dictate a different expression of solidarity.  Seeing round corners is not just a political skill.

The UK has the chair of the UN Security Council for this month of February.  OXFAM and other NGOs will be pressing for progress in gender equality and in countering violence against women. In all societies, secular or religious, in back-streets and in global institutions, the creative power of the Spirit is at work, bringing the prophetic voices of women to bear.   Christians are called to be its head, heart and hands.
 

The Labour Party has entered a political Bermuda Triangle.  The relationship between Peter Mandleson now disgraced former UK Ambassador to Washington, and convicted US financier and criminal, the late Jeffrey Epstein, may have more damaging outcomes for the UK’s ruling Party than the Profumo affair did for the Conservatives in 1961-1963.  The then Secretary of State for War was exposed as having a sexual relationship with a 19-year old model who was also sleeping with a Soviet naval attaché.  The scandal acted as catalyst for the resignation of Harold Macmillan’s and the defeat of his successor, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, in the 1964 General Election.   But the exposure of Epstein’s activities has had wider consequences, not least for dozens of abused women coping with blighted lives, one who tragically took her own life. 

The political damage goes deep.  It plays into the - transatlantic – belief in corrupt elites acting with impunity and holding ordinary people in contempt.   As many MPs (aware that they were already held in disregard or worse by the public) have commented, it further discredits politicians.  It entrenches the – erroneous – belief: ‘they’re all the same’.  We will hear much about ‘regaining trust’.  But the behaviour of elites is an integral and understandable cause of widespread anger, it is not going away, and is not just based on envy. Nor is it unfounded .

The term ‘elite’ itself is ill-defined, amorphous.  It approaches the pejorative echoes of ‘communist’ during the Cold War, a generic name for the enemy, bad and threatening people.   It offers, as a result, scant insights into how to deal for the common good with actual elites.  

Here, then, is a functional definition which may be helpful: elites exercise authority and power over citizens, occupy top positions in institutions where they can increase their access to resources and wealth through national and international networks.  I say elites, plural, because the positions taken up in society by today’s elite are more varied than those in the 19th and early 20th centuries; 30% are now women, and a small number are non-White from the old empire.  A consistent feature, though, is the predominance of the wealthy.

Public suspicion of elites is not misplaced.  Epstein was convicted of procuring a child for prostitution in 2008 and for sexual trafficking of minors in 2019.  In the 1990s, Epstein was receiving prodigious fees for  financial services from wealthy clients, amassing some £600 million,  dodging tax on his two American Virgin Islands companies, and attracting an international elite including Mandelson.   But the US public’s justifiable suspicion had a bizarre side.   During Trump’s 2016 election campaign, extreme Right-Wing social media gave considerable mileage to variants of a story that Hilary Clinton led an international paedophile sex-trafficking conspiracy, run by a “satanic cabal of elites”, in one version operating beneath the Ping Pong Pizza parlour in Washington D.C. 

Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman pose and research several pertinent questions about elites in their Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite Belnap, Harvard 2023.  They use inclusion in Who’s Who for membership of the UK elite and a variety of other sources for data in an pioneering historical study with a detailed appendix on methodology for sociologists.   Their most significant use of statistical data explores what they call ‘elite recruitment’, how you join the club, and ‘elite reproduction’, explaining how elites sustain continuity in a changing world.  They document a complex story.

The Clarendon group of public  (i.e. private) schools, Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Malborough, Merchant Taylors, Rugby, Shrewsbury, St. Paul’s and Winchester is a key part of it.  In the second league comes the 350-plus Independent schools of the  Head’s Conference  or HMC, also to some degree, bar a few scholarships, ‘sieving’ out  children of less well-off families.  The contacts and friendships made at school are reinforced in Oxbridge dining clubs and on the sports fields.  The ‘Old Boy’s club’ can help in job hunting and the ascent through different hierarchies: government, law, business.   This was the main 20th century pathway before the Second World War when Britain’s military needed competent officers, not just ones with a sense of entitlement, ill-judged self-confidence and upper class accents.  The 1944 Education Act created competition from State-funded school pupils, aged 11-15 from 1947, then up to 16 in 1972, promoting a challenging meritocracy.   The 11-plus exam for Grammar Schools, and the development of separate Secondary Modern schools for those who failed it, created heartbreak for children.  And the route to the core of the elite remained stubbornly the same.  By the 2020s, Born to Rule finds 47% of the elite went to Independent schools compared with 10% of population,  and compared to less than 1% of the population nearly 9% attended  Clarendon schools with 35% going on to Oxbridge – including Mandelson the ‘meritocrat’ from Hendon Grammar School.

Privileged education remains the propellant boosting youth into an elite orbit.  But the rocket fuel also remains family money, large amounts of it.   Britain’s richest top 1% held 70% of national wealth in 1900 but, for a variety of reasons, loss of Empire, pressure from trades unions, not least, this dropped to 20% in 1980 hovering around that figure for several decades.  Recruitment into the elite has stayed steady around 20% of the wealthiest 1% in the country.

Born to Rule’s interviews provide  insights into elite thinking.  As might be expected, the wealthiest and most powerful expressed what would be considered Right-wing views about equality, tax and inheritance.  But with more varied occupations, creative artists, academics, media stars, more women, concerned with social justice,  a range of political positions were included bringing key aspects of social democrat and ‘progressive Left’ policy, a priority for poverty reduction, alongside racial and gender equality. 

The most striking change since the 1940s is in how today’s elite wish to be seen: ordinary, rewarded and rising due to their hard work.  Nothing to do with inheriting wealth or earning a fortune in the City.  A few of the wealthy elite speak in the book of their family wealth, innate skills, arrogantly confident in their judgement, ready to take big risks.   And these beliefs can be their downfall.

A chapter recommends what to do about elites but the recipe contains essentially the ingredients of what would be considered a socialist approach, taxing financial services’ transactions, high value property wealth and inheritance, VAT for public schools, 50% worker representation on corporate boards, a satisfying meal for the Left but indigestible for much of the British public. 

There is no nod towards the growth of international elites indicated in the volumes of Epstein correspondence.  And no mention of the international power of the US IT tech giants’, nor the related policies of the thuggish US elite – originally brought for transplantation to Europe by a Trump White House strategist, Steve Bannon.

Elites depend on a lack of accountability in political systems to sustain their impunity.  Investigative journalists, an almost extinct species, despite the elite proprietors controlling the media, need time and money to do their job.  Gordon Brown, former PM and  voice of the Manse, has proposed several times a range of doable measures Government can immediately implement to root out elite corruption.  As the Profumo and Epstein affairs illustrate, elites may not be defeated but they can be curbed.
 
 
 

At a rough estimate, the Church runs 3,100 hospitals and 15,000 clinics in the Least Developed Countries (LDCs).  From Pope John XXII’s Mater et Magistra in 1961 to Pope Leo’s Fratelli Tutti in 2020, the Church has consistently called the rich nations to action: supporting the poorest, engaging their citizens in development, reducing indebtedness, extending the outreach and effectiveness of the Catholic agencies under the CARITAS INTERNATIONALIS umbrella (founded in 1951), and seeking integral human development for all.

If you were called to sum up in just three words what Catholic Social Teaching was about, you’d do no better than ‘Solidarity’, ‘Justice’ and ‘Compassion’.  And if you were to find four words most used to oppose NGO international development agencies and Official Development Assistance (ODA) it would be “Charity Begins at Home”.  The natural commitment to family, friends and community has been set up against helping the poorest overseas, either-or instead of and-and.  Who wants to join J.D. Vance in his justification for cutting aid?  Sadly increasing numbers.

Last year, Elon Musk froze some $58 billion in US ODA allocated for 2025: in other words for poverty alleviation, emergency humanitarian interventions, conflict prevention, peacebuilding,  global public goods such as health care and vaccination, or climate action.  Out of a total payroll of 10,000, 1,200 USAID staff were fired and 4,200 put on ‘administrative leave’.  Meanwhile substantial buildings occupied by USAID were handed over to Customs and Border Patrol.

The US Government’s only compliment to virtue was certain temporary waivers to cuts.  Parts of infrastructure were left standing amongst the wreckage of Federal foreign aid.  The priorities were telling.   Most of the temporary exemptions related to the spending of the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs and the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.   After 13 February 2025, the latter received exemption for $5.3 billion expenditure of which $4.1 billion went to Israel and Egypt, plus more moderate sums to Taiwan and the Philippines’ military.  The announced USAID exemptions for - non-food - aid to Gaza, were $78 million and $156 million for the Red Cross’s work.

PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS, launched by President G.W. Bush in 2003, is estimated to have saved 26 million lives around the world.   It was operating in 2025 on 8% of its 2024 budget of $6.5 billion with consequences that hardly need spelling out.  The waiver covered - in theory -  all aspects of provision: antiretrovirals, testing, treatment and supply-chains. But the disruption caused by a 90 day freeze, let alone long term consequences, cost lives.  Money to pay local NGO staff suddenly disappeared globally with an immediate halt to their work amongst some of the world’s poorest people.

Global aid flows, currently between $170-180 billion, rose between 2019-2023 then dropped by 9% in 2024 and are currently falling at somewhere between 9-17%.  The UN Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) calculate 239 million people currently require humanitarian aid.  Between 2016-2019, UNOCHA reached some 130 million people but now has to adopt a prioritization programme for the very poorest, serving only 87 million, though hoping to return to 130 million in the future.  OXFAM’s statistics have a more powerful impact ; due to the US aid cuts “a child under five could die every forty seconds by 2030”. 

The justification for US aid cuts is allegedly to reduce national debt.  Trump’s acolytes complained about what they called ‘woke’ projects funded by USAID.  Would funding a feminist theatre company who, amongst their performances role play preventative health care, be ‘woke’ and suspect?  Women, of course, play an important educational role in health.   Even giving ‘woke’ the widest interpretation, projects that might be eligible for this description amount to an infinitesimal percentage of overall expenditure on aid.  And when a tiny fraction of a State institution’s activities are ill-judged, most people living in the real world would say such institutions were doing well. 

Aid is used to strengthen health systems.  HIV, Ebola (funding for prevention frozen then re-instated), Marburg, West Nile and new lethal viruses do not respect borders.  Can’t aid-detractors recognise even self-interest?

There is the recurrent  claim that development aid doesn’t work because it hasn’t jump-started the economies of poor countries.  If that is the criterion, one reply is that it rarely has been given a chance to work.   War, bad governance, and endemic corruption blight economic development.  If you need to bribe your way through several roadblocks to get to and into a port, export growth will be stunted.  Dealing with a wide range of problems, development aid, which  encompasses many different and vital interventions, makes a major contribution to human well-being.

It does contribute to economies.  Timely peace-building can avert war and subsequent collapse of the economy.  If half the workforce is infected with malaria -  thousands of their children dying from it - this harms productivity.   As the CEO of an international aid NGO working in three continents, I’ve stood admiring trained senior women in West African villages, some of them illiterate, chatting to mothers as the sun went down, cleverly passing on health messages that reduce infections.  Bonny babies in bathtubs, midwives learning literacy and becoming better midwives,  were a living testimony to the effectiveness of supporting health systems, providing finance and upskilling.  
 
In the UK, Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to reduce the ODA budget, between 2025-2027/8, from 0.5% to 0.3% of UK Gross National Income (GNI), came after a reduction from 0.7% to 0.5% made by  Conservative Governments.  Some 25% of this diminishing budget is still being spent on accommodating refugees in the UK.  In 2027/2028, Defence will be extracting £6.5 billion - not including funding for Ukraine - from today’s £14 billion aid budget 

The need for increased defense spending is itself  a knock-on from the policies of the Trump Presidency.  The UK Government’s mantra “this is a difficult decision” neglects mentioning the choice of alternative difficult decisions, such as wealth taxes - which come with greater political costs.   GNI percentage cuts, but less severe, have also been made in Germany, Europe’s other major donor, from its much higher peak of £28.5 billion in 2022.

No-one denies that despite foreign governmental and NGO funding for development, in much of Africa and parts of Asia, populations remain mired in poverty.   But this does not justify slashing development aid least of all treating it as if it were a criminal enterprise, what President Trump called “the left-wing scam known as USAID” ?

The causes of poverty are complex.  As a result the mix of international development aid needed to reduce poverty is complex.  Because it takes place abroad, the vast majority of people cannot directly see its benefits and can be misinformed.  We seem light years from Live Aid’s response to the Ethiopian famine in 1985.

Two final questions: Will our children and grandchildren be living in a world in which powerful States deny our common humanity – with further devastating consequences?   If and when they are told in school to consult the Oxford English Dictionary - or will it be AI - do we want them to find ‘archaic’ in brackets next to the word  ‘compassion’?  We may not have long to determine the answers.