This is not how Lord Louis Mountbatten planned to have his name remembered.
Mountbatten cured his insolvency by marrying Edwina Ashley, the granddaughter of the Jewish billionaire Sir Ernest Cassel. He wormed his way into the Indian subcontinent’s history by becoming the last Viceroy of India and then its first Governor-General. His final coup – the marriage of his nephew Philip to Princess Elizabeth – spawned his demand that the children of that union should bear his Mountbatten name, hence the hyphenated Mountbatten-Windsor.
Today, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has gone against his great-grandmother Queen Mary’s warning: "I have seen three great monarchies [the Russian Romanovs, the Prussian Hohenzollerns, and the Austrian Habsburgs] brought down because they couldn't separate personal indulgences from duty".
Royalty has always been vulnerable to social upstarts who encouraged their ‘personal indulgences’. Never more so than when monarchs become hostage to faith healers. Tsarina Alexandra succumbed to Grigori Rasputin’s ‘magical’ powers because his prayers alleviated the pain of her haemophiliac son Tsarevitch Alexei. The Dutch Queen Juliana depended on Greet Hofmans to cure her youngest daughter Princess Marijke of near-blindness. And now, a procurer Jeffery Epstein has caused irreversible damage to the British monarchy.
The late Queen Elizabeth II did a disservice to her heir by bequeathing her love-child Andrew to him. As a mother, she had condoned Andrew’s libidinous affairs. As a rich sovereign, she contributed £7 million towards the near £12 million out-of-court settlement made by Andrew in March 2022 to silence Virginia Giuffre. The late Prince Philip’s estate chipped in with £3.5 million and £1.5 million came from Charles’s own funds.
The western press cannot have enough of Andrew’s continuing descent from grace, nor of revelations crawling out of the Epstein files. In January 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice released 3 million redacted pages, including 2,000 videos and 180,000 images. The DoJ admits that there could be up to ‘a total of 6 million pages’.
The scale is mind-boggling. It would take a human over 44 years to sift through them. Where did Epstein hoard so much confidential data on his ‘clients‘? And how did Epstein insinuate himself so smoothly into the highest echelons of society across the globe? He is reported to have boasted: "I control everyone and everything. I collect people. I own people. I can damage people" – even from the grave.
Every day, a new name is being added to Epstein’s roll of dishonour - among them, Crown Princess of Norway Mette-Marit, Baron Peter Mandelson, the U.A.E. billionaire Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, Bill Gates, and Miroslav Lajčák (a former President of the UN General Assembly).
Their indiscretions were not limited lapses, like the Profumo-Keeler affair in 1961 or the former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s assault of a hotel maid in 2011. Epstein ran an expensive, efficient, well-articulated assembly line of victims (some under-age) to oblige his friends and contacts.
Classicists see a parallel between Jeffery Epstein and Milton’s hero Samson Agonistes. Both committed suicide: Epstein, it is alleged, hanged himself in a prison cell; Samson brought the temple down on himself and his Philistine captors. As Milton put it, Samson ‘drew/The whole roof after them with burst of thunder/Upon the heads of all who sat beneath./Lords, ladies, captains, counsellors, or priests,/Their choice nobility and flower’.
Pakistani elite may have been too insignificant for Epstein. India is represented by PM Narendra Modi, diplomat-turned-politician Hardeep Singh Puri, and millionaire businessman Anil Ambani, to whom Epstein offered ‘a tall Swedish blonde’.
President Trump’s name appears 38,000 times in the Epstein papers. He hovers unscathed, though, above the reach of accountability. His priorities are the reapplication of trade tariffs (this time worldwide) and the promotion of his Board of Peace, of which Pakistan has become a non-paying founding member.
Whoever sups with Trump needs a long spoon. Pakistan is beginning to pay for that privilege. Trump has had his eye on PIA’s Roosevelt hotel in New York’s Manhattan ever since it came on the market in 2003. In need of an expensive refurbishment, it has remained unsold. Before PIA’s recent privatization, it was removed from PIA’s assets.
Suddenly, on 19 February, against a backdrop of the BoP logo, Trump’s special envoy Steven Witkoff signed a memorandum regarding the Roosevelt hotel with the Pakistan government, represented by its Minister of Finance. The memorandum outlines plans by the two governments ‘to cooperate on the operation, maintenance, renovation, and redevelopment of the hotel’. (The hotel is still technically owned by PIA Holding Company Ltd.)
A specious press release informed the Pakistani public that ‘the objective remains to secure maximum value for this property in alignment with the government's privatisation strategy while strengthening Pakistan-United States economic ties’.
Personal indulgences cannot masquerade as national interest.
F. S. AIJAZUDDIN
[DAWN, 26 Feb. 2026]
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