A retired royal protection officer at the centre of the Prince Andrew smear scandal has been quizzed by the Metropolitan Police, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Two detectives visited the former Met bodyguard at his home in the South East of England on Tuesday morning.
It came two days after this newspaper exclusively revealed how Andrew embroiled the Met and one of Queen Elizabeth’s most senior aides in a campaign to smear his teenage sex accuser.
A bombshell email the MoS published last weekend exposed how Andrew asked his taxpayer-funded personal protection officer to investigate Virginia Giuffre and passed him her date of birth and confidential US social security number.
In an extraordinary message to Ed Perkins, Queen Elizabeth’s deputy press secretary, on February 26, 2011, Andrew wrote: ‘It would also seem she has a criminal record in the States. I have given her DoB [date of birth] and social security number for investigation with XXX, the on duty ppo [personal protection officer].’
Last weekend, after the MoS published its revelations, the Met Police said it was ‘actively’ looking into the matter – raising the prospect that Andrew could become the first royal to be caught up in a criminal probe in more than 20 years.
This newspaper has confirmed the identity of the retired protection officer who received Prince Andrew’s email, but is not naming him to safeguard his security. The father of one is an officer with an exemplary record who was honoured by Queen Elizabeth ‘for services to royalty protection’.
Last week’s revelations are being investigated by officers from the Met’s Specialist Crime Command.
At about 11am on Tuesday two detectives, a man and a woman, visited the retired protection officer at his £1million three-bedroom home in a commuter town in the Home Counties. They quizzed the man, who is married and in his mid-60s, for around 45 minutes before leaving in separate cars.
The MoS understands the officer was one of the Met’s most experienced bodyguards and devoted much of his career to royal work. He was part of the Met’s elite SO14 Royalty Protection Group, which at the time was thought to have some 400 officers guarding about 20 members of the Royal Family and their homes.
He was one of Prince Charles’s protection officers in the months after his 1996 divorce from Princess Diana, before later working for Prince Andrew.
Paul Page, who worked with the Royal Family as a police protection officer from 1998 to 2004, said he believed the officer would have made his superiors aware of Andrew’s request.
‘That officer would 100 per cent have referred it up the chain. That would have gone through his line managers. I’m guessing he would have taken that to a superintendent who oversees section officers.’
The MoS last week tracked down one of the royal protection unit’s former superintendents but said only: ‘I am subject to all sorts of confidentiality agreements and it’s not in my nature to speak to the media about my policing role.’
The MoS has, however, established that the officer who received Andrew’s email was part of a team who guarded the prince in June 2010 when he met Jes Staley, Epstein’s personal banker, during a night out at Harry’s Bar, a private members’ club in Mayfair.
Details of that evening were revealed in court documents this year as part of a case brought by the Financial Conduct Authority against Mr Staley, the former Barclays Bank boss who is now banned from top financial jobs in the UK over his links to Epstein.
Emails show that on June 15, 2010, Epstein – recently out of a US prison – emailed Andrew asking: ‘If you can find time to show Jes around that would be fun.’
The prince replied to say he had seen Mr Staley in Harry’s Bar, and was having ‘dinner with Jes tomorrow evening’.
The police officer also accompanied Andrew to Buckingham Palace for a family Christmas lunch.
The Met tonight said it would not provide a ‘running commentary’ on its enquiries and repeated the statement it issued last week, saying it was ‘actively looking into the claims made’.
