I find it hard not to feel sorry for the Duke of York. Being asked to denounce one’s friends, however unsavoury, can’t be much fun. It must be particularly galling when the politicians insisting on this act of obeisance were themselves hobnobbing with Hosni Mubarak, Zine-al-Abidine and Colonel Gaddafi until about a week ago. In the Duke’s defence, I don’t see why people in public life should be forced to hold their friends to a higher standard than the rest of us. Prince Andrew is no more responsible for the behaviour of Jeffrey Epstein than Boris Johnson is for Darius Guppy’s.
I can pinpoint the exact moment Sean Langan became my best friend. It was at William Ellis and we were in the Sixth Form Common Room about to head out for coffee. I was the new boy, having joined the school a few months earlier, and had already had my card marked as a bit of a weirdo. It didn’t help that I’d taken a year out after failing all my O-levels and, as a result, was older than everyone else.
‘Oi, Langan, watcha doin’ with that old geezer?’ said one of Sean’s friends, raising a laugh from his companions. ‘Come and play footie with uz lot.’
‘Nah,’ said Sean. ‘We’re goin’ for coffee, innit. Laters.’
Not much, I grant you, but it was enough. Sean had risked his own popularity to stand by me. One of the reasons it made such a big impression is that I was expecting him to do the opposite. As I say, I was a bit of an oddball and no one had ever stuck up for me before, certainly not someone of Sean’s stature. He was just about the most popular boy in school. From that moment on, he could do no wrong.
It would be unfair to compare Sean to Jeffrey Epstein, but he hasn’t always behaved in an exemplary fashion. For instance, there was the time he ended up in debt to a group of South American hoodlums. When they threatened to break his legs if he didn’t come up with an interest payment of £500 I lent him the money.
Unfortunately, on his way to make the drop-off he stopped in a betting shop and put it all on a horse. ‘It was on at five-to-one and it couldn’t lose,’ he explained. ‘If it had come in I could have cleared the entire debt.’ Needless to say, it lost and Sean went into hiding. I ended up having to shell out £2,500.
Then there was the time he failed to show up for my stag weekend in Marbella. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t been the organiser. We sat in the villa waiting by the phone, not knowing what he had in store for us.
It never rang and we ended up in some godforsaken bar by the airport, cursing his name. A pretty poor show given that I’d organised his stag weekend in Barcelona the year before, an extravaganza that involved bullfighting, deep-sea fishing and a whirlwind tour of the city’s top nightspots.
But, of course, I forgave him — then as always. His one act of decency towards me when I was 17 created a sense of indebtedness that persists to this day. And that’s the nature of friendship. We love our friends in spite of their behaviour, not because of it. Failings that we would find unforgivable in other people become a source of amusement in our friends. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve sat in a restaurant with Sean, roaring with laughter at the various occasions when he’s let me down. His chronic unreliability somehow makes him more lovable.
The fact that he’s excellent company helps. One of the idiosyncrasies of friendship is that we grant a licence to misbehave to some that we don’t extend to others. If we love their company we’re prepared to forgive them almost anything. I sometimes think that Sean’s charm has been developed as a corrective to his hopelessness. The less likely he is to turn up to a dinner party, the more entertaining he has to be when he gets there. At the rate he’s going, he should be the most scintillating companion in Christendom in about 20 years’ time.
If I became a Cabinet minister and Sean got embroiled in some terrible scandal, would I be prepared to denounce him if called on to do so by the yellow press? I don’t think I would. And for that reason, the Duke of York has my sympathies.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator
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