Skorupski's Law

The Prince William effect

These pages will tell you nothing whatsoever about Prince William. Nevertheless, the young prince's shadow appeared a number of times in the proceedings documented here. The two most prominent episodes are given below.

The Corner/Esler investigation was ordered by the Principal of the University of St Andrews (Dr Brian Lang) very shortly after the announcement that Prince William would be attending the University the following semester. I had been summoned to a meeting with the Deputy Principal and the Director of Personnel Services on 2 August 2001. By this stage I had been asking various managers for an investigation into abusive behaviour for about a year and a half. A few days before the meeting took place I had had a coffee with a friend who was the University's press officer. I told her that things were so bad in the Department of Social Anthropology that they were likely to end in legal proceedings. If this happened, we agreed, it would inevitably result in negative publicity, and this would likely be heightened by the Prince William effect. As the PR person in the University, my friend was in regular contact with members of the University Executive. I told her that it would be advisable to speak to someone on high so that preventive measures could be taken before the situation became irretrievable.

When I met with the Deputy Principal a few days later on 2 August 2001, I was advised that an investigation would now take place. I was asked to suspend another action (a rather unusual promotion appeal) while this took place and I agreed. However, the Deputy Principal then made an astonishing accusation: that I was trying to blackmail the University. To this day I still wonder what personal advantage I was supposed to be seeking. During the employment tribunal I argued that if one put together the nature of the Deputy Principal's accusation, the shallow way in which the Corner/Esler investigation was conducted, the deep seriousness of the accusations that the investigation report levied in spite of the shallowness of the investigation, the subsequent destruction of all the evidence in the possession of the University Secretary, and various dishonesties that emerged in the course of the running of the promotion appeal hearing, one could only conclude that the Corner/Esler investigation had been a cosmetic exercise. It had been a sop to keep me quiet rather than a genuine investigation into abusive behaviour. It was, itself, a profoundly abusive confidence trick in which, there is good reason to believe, at least four of the University's Executive were complicit.

The second episode in which Prince William was unwittingly involved took place during the employment tribunal. It just so happened that the Friday of the first week that the tribunal was scheduled (30 May 2003) coincided with Prince William's official 21st birthday. The press had turned up at the tribunal, no doubt with the smell of a story to situate against the rosy images of the prince's stay at the University of St Andrews that were appearing in several newspapers that week. Strong —one might say "irresistible" — pressure was brought to bear on me to postpone the tribunal until the following week. It was not clear where the pressure was ultimately coming from, but the only interpretation I could arrive at was that it was very unlikely that such an intervention would have come about if Prince William had not been studying at the University of St Andrews. For legal reasons I prefer not to elaborate on this at this point, but may do so at a later point. A document detailing the nature of the pressure that was brought to bear on me to postpone proceedings has been lodged elsewhere.

The author

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Skorupski's Law: "The more vain one's ambition, the more redundant one's grasp of morality"