Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the podcast with me, Steve Richards.

Thank you very much for tuning in. Now, I'm going to take you behind the scenes of the podcast.

I just recorded and then I literally got out of the studio and got a text.

Prince Andrew has been arrested. So I'm back in the studio to add a few reflections, but then if it's okay with all of you,

we will return to the themes I was exploring, actually via members of the rock and roll

and roll politics cooperative, because I think they are deep and interesting and worth looking at. But just a couple of reflections

on the arrest of Prince Andrew. The way the royal family casts a spell over a lot of people

in this country and elsewhere only works if they are both almost kind of

elevated figures rather than human beings and at the same time somehow or other relatable for people

as a family.

And that's kind of how it works.

So you can see people lining up when Charles or any of them are on a public visit.

And these people almost feel they know them,

but know also that they don't because they are these kind of mystical

figures who hardly ever give interviews and very little is known about them. And both are required

for this spell to work. Now, what's happened with the arrest and all the implications of this is that the spell breaks.

Instead, you get someone who is all too real in his flaws and has been for a long time because of the friendship with Epstein.

We've no idea, as certainly as I record, whether there will be any charges or whatever,

but suddenly it takes a member of this kind of mythologized institution into an all-to-human world where the myth doesn't work.

And so, you know, there's a lot of stuff already on X and elsewhere.

This is a moment of heightened danger for the royal family,

the biggest danger since the abdication crisis and so on. And it is on that level. However, although

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