Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s scandals weren’t lapses – they were bred by a system that shields its own and punishes perception, not behaviour, argues Herald columnist Calum Steele

There is something of a strange habit that exists amongst former cops. When they get together and invariably share war stories about the most despicable folk they locked up, the subject of the conversation is usually referred to by the full name their mother gave them. It no doubt stems from the working practice drilled into you from day one that you record first name, all middle names, surnames, nicknames and aliases from anyone whose details ever made their way into your notebook.

On top of that any accused who subsequently found themselves convicted has their Sunday name read out in all its glory before sentence is passed, and in some small psychological way giving someone their full handle reinforces their position in our minds as cretins worthy of extreme disdain. Revelling in the misfortunes of others is, after all, a pastime we indulge in more often than we care to admit.

You would think therefore that the endless references to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (AMW) would create a schadenfreude pool so deep that I’d soak in it for hours. A man, I was going to say, more worthy of disdain, you would struggle to find – but he is sadly one in a long list of those disgraced in the Epstein files, although to be fair he has worked harder than most to earn the pillorying he now receives. The hyphen in the new abridged name means nothing as you don’t see it when you say it; he is now merely a triple-named man like the hundreds of thousands of others recorded on police systems across the country and he deserves all the notoriety and dripping contempt that goes........

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