Jacob Rees-Mogg has said that legal protections such as the right to be deemed innocent should apply to everyone, including high-profile figures such as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
He said on GB News: “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall. One of our foundational constitutional rights is that we should not be subject to illegal searches. Another is that we have the right to be deemed innocent until proved guilty, and a third is the right to trial by jury.
“These rights matter because if somebody is accused of something by the state, the state has enormous, overweening power. It has effectively unlimited funds to investigate, to follow up on any clues it may have found.
“It pays, it supports, it directs the police, the Crown Prosecution Service, and the judges are also part of the State, and they are against you as the individual, and therefore you have to have rights. Otherwise, many innocent people would find that the convenience of officialdom meant that they were found guilty of things that they had not done, and so innocent until proved guilty is fundamental.
“With the burden of proof on the State, why should the state have to suffer that burden? It’s because, at least in part, it is very hard to prove a negative. We all know that. That the reality proves that you weren’t somewhere at such and such a time, it’s a difficult thing to do. You could have been there. You could have got there. You weren’t, but you could have been.
“Proving a negative is very hard. So the state has to prove the positive that you were there and you committed the act to a high level of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, not the lower civil level of reasonable balance of probabilities, that is to protect people.
“Searches, the state likes searching. All states do. It’s what takes a state from being a free, democratic state to being a totalitarian one. It’s why unreasonable searches are banned in the American Constitution, and why unreasonable searches have been a protection in this country for hundreds of years.
“One of the great lines of the Elder Pitt, Chatham, as he later became, is about the poor man in his cottage. The wind may come in, the rain may come in, the cold may come in, but all the forces of the King of England cannot come in unless, of course, there is a warrant.
“It protects all our liberties, and the key with the former Prince Andrew is that he should have the same protections as everyone else.
“As a general principle, the high and mighty should not be protected from prosecution, arrest, if they have broken the law. Be you ever so high, the law is above you. Fortescue writing about the great thing about our constitution being that the king of England is under the law compared to the king of France, who was the law. It’s very important that that is the case. But equally, people in high-profile positions shouldn’t be treated worse.
“They shouldn’t be humiliated by being arrested when almost anybody else would have been allowed to go in for an appointment to discuss the case that the police thought they had, and the principle of innocent until proved guilty, of reasonable searches must apply to the former Prince Andrew as much as it would to any of us. Otherwise, justice is undermined.