If he passed her up he would find himself like a royal Roman Polanski dating thirteen-year-old girls when he was forty. The press, led by Nigel Demps… - Tina Brown

The last hard patriotic triumph in most Brit's recall was Margaret Thatcher's 1982 invasion of an obscure dot in the South Atlantic, the Falkland Islands, to wrest it back from another country no one has time to read about, Argentina.

By many measures, though, Brown's eighties world was less rule-governed than the present, and some rascals show their colors early on its schoolyard turf. In June of 1986, Brown goes to Oxford for a story on the death of a young heiress from a heroin overdose. She hires a student journalist, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, to make introductions. Mostyn-Owen fobs off Brown at a lunch with posh kids and her boyfriend, "a young fogey with a thatch of blond hair and a plummy voice called Boris Johnson." A bit later, the Sunday Telegraph publishes, under Mostyn-Owen’s byline, a snarky account of Brown's visit, centered on the lunch. Brown finds that she's extensively misquoted—unsurprisingly, since Mostyn-Owen wasn't there. "Boris Johnson is an epic shit," Brown concludes. "I hope he ends badly."

International diplomacy rarely offers encounters with angels. But Prince Andrew's adhesive contacts with reprehensible foreign riff-raff went far beyond what was explicable or acceptable. He hosted lunches at Buckingham Palace for the insalubrious relatives of Middle Eastern tyrants, invited a Libyan gun smuggler to Princess Eugenie's wedding and Princess Beatrice's 21st birthday party, and went goose-hunting with Kazakhstan's then-president Nursultan Nazarbayev.
The Kazak strongman's baby-faced billionaire son-in-law bought the Yorks's white-elephant pile, Sunninghill Park, for £3 million over its £12 million asking price. This was doubly puzzling because the only enhancements to the house since the Yorks's occupation was a new zoning designation that put it under the direct flight path of Heathrow Airport.