No Prince Above the Law: What Bangladesh Can Learn From Andrew's Arrest

On the morning of February 19, unmarked police vehicles pulled up to Wood Farm on the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk. The man they came for was not from the margins of society. He was Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor -- Duke of York, son of the late Queen Elizabeth II, brother of the reigning King -- the most protected kind of human being that British society produces.

He was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office, held for eleven hours, and released under investigation. King Charles issued a statement saying simply: "The law must take its course."

Pause on that sentence. The brother of a king was arrested -- the first such arrest of a senior British royal in nearly 400 years -- and the king's response was not to intervene, not to deploy lawyers in advance to block it, not to summon the Home Secretary in the night. He said the law must take its course.

Whatever one thinks of the British monarchy, that sentence represents something genuinely extraordinary: An 810-year-old principle, first recorded on vellum at Runnymede in 1215, in a document called the Magna Carta.

What Runnymede Actually Settled

The Magna Carta was not, as its mythology sometimes suggests, a declaration of universal rights. It was a political deal between a weak king and his powerful barons. But from that accommodation grew a principle that would prove to be among the most transformative in human history: That no person, regardless of rank or blood, stands above the law.

Clause 39 -- that no free man shall be imprisoned or stripped of his rights "except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land" --  established that the law is not the king's instrument; the king is the law's subject. That inversion, modest in its original scope, became defining in its consequences.

What Andrew's arrest illustrates is not that Britain is perfectly just. Far from it. Elites there close ranks and protect their own. The palace spent years managing the Epstein scandal, stripping Andrew of titles and public duties in increments.

The same system that eventually permitted the arrest had spent years trying to insulate him from it. But there are limits. And those limits have just been reached. When the evidence became sufficiently compelling, when public pressure mounted enough, when the legal threshold was crossed, the police came for Andrew -- regardless of whose brother he was.

That is the Magna Carta principle in action: Not the absence of elite self-protection, but the existence of a ceiling on it. Implicit in the Magna Carta is another principle that perhaps does even more to shape a society and liberate the genius of all its people: That the law, an abstraction applicable to all, counts for more than the natural tendency to favour blood relations.

Why Kinship Kills Nations

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson's book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty offers a framework for understanding why this ceiling matters so much -- and why its absence is catastrophic.

Their central argument is that nations flourish under inclusive economic and political institutions -- ones that distribute power broadly, protect property rights for all citizens, and allow creative destruction -- and fail under extractive ones, which concentrate power in the hands of a few who use the state as a vehicle for personal enrichment.

Their historical examples are instructive.

The Ottoman Empire, at its height, ran an extraordinary system of meritocratic recruitment: the devshirme. Boys were taken from Christian families, converted, educated, and placed in positions of state power entirely on the basis of ability -- precisely because they had no kinship networks, no tribal claims, no dynastic ambitions. The result was a formidable administrative and military machine. But as the empire aged, this system eroded.

Power began to pass to sons, brothers, and cousins. Property and office became heritable. The logic of merit gave way to the emotional temptation to reward blood relatives. Creative destruction -- the process by which economies and institutions allow stifling customs and institutions to be torn down to make way for new and better ones -- was blocked, because those at the top refused to let new talent displace their children. The empire began its long slide.

This is not a story unique to the Ottomans. Acemoglu and Robinson document it across empires and centuries: when access to power and property becomes a function of kinship rather than competence, societies stagnate. They don’t adapt. They don’t innovate.

They fail to enforce the laws that would constrain those at the top, because those at the top are the law. The seeds of potential progress scattered through the minds of thousands or millions of people are smothered to protect the unearned privileges of the small number of children of the elite. And the nation fails.

Bangladesh: The Textbook Case

Let’s turn now to Bangladesh and reach for a different, complementary theorist. Joel Migdal's Strong Societies and Weak States provides the analytical vocabulary to describe on a granular level what happens in a society like Bangladesh. For Migdal, the key question is not whether a state exists but whether it can actually penetrate society -- whether it can "regulate social relationships, extract resources, and appropriate or use resources in determined ways."

A strong state can do all of these things uniformly, impersonally, according to rules that apply to everyone. A weak state cannot. Instead, it is captured by, or dissolves into, the very social forces it ostensibly governs.

Bangladesh is, in Migdal's terms, a quintessential strong society, weak state. The society is strong in the sense that matters to Migdal: Dense networks of kin, patron-client relationships, local strongmen (mastaans), party structures built on personal loyalty rather than programmatic commitment -- all of these provide individuals with their "components for survival strategies," as Migdal puts it, far more reliably than the formal state ever has.

When a Bangladeshi family navigates a land dispute, a business deal, a hospital admission, or a police complaint, they reach first not for the law but for a connection -- a relative with influence, a party contact, a man who knows a man. The state, formally imposing but practically porous, has been chronically unable to enforce its authority over local political elites.

The political culture of South Asia exemplifies weak states overshadowed by strong societies -- and strong ties to relatives alongside very weak commitments to anyone else. The central fact of Bangladesh’s political culture, as is known to every citizen is that since its birth in 1971 the state has largely been governed by two dynastic formations.

The Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party are not merely political parties in the conventional sense -- they are extended kinship networks, in which loyalty is structured by personal relationship to the ruling family rather than by ideological conviction or merit. The same was long true in India and in Pakistan.

After the assassination of Benazir Bhutto I went to the home of Aitzaz Ahsan, a Cambridge-educated barrister and elegant writer whom I admired and who was a leader of the Pakistan People’s Party and of the lawyer’s movement that was campaigning against the politicization of the courts. I said he’d make a great leader of the party.

Ahsan shook his head. ‘But why not?’ I asked naively. ‘Because, Whit, I’m not a Bhutto.’ So instead leadership of Pakistan’s sole national party at the time based to Bilawal Bhutto, a 19-year-old student at Oxford, and to Benazir’s widower, Asif Ali Zadari, who was universally known as ‘Mr. 10%’.

Treating power as family property results in the extractive loop Acemoglu and Robinson describe. Institutions exist not to apply rules impartially but to reward the loyal and punish the disloyal. Judicial independence is nominal.

The police serve power rather than law. Business success is inseparable from political connection. And the state's inability to enforce any of its own rules against those who hold power -- Migdal's defining characteristic of state weakness -- is a feature, not a bug, of a state in which family ties outweigh the law and merit.

The Question of the Ceiling

Let’s return to Andrew, handcuffed in Norfolk. Now try to imagine the equivalent in Bangladesh. The son or daughter of a powerful political family, who had leveraged their connections to pass sensitive information to a foreign financier and had enjoyed decades of impunity. Can you imagine the police arriving at their residence before dawn, while his brother still reigned?

It does not happen. Not because Bangladesh lacks laws. The laws exist. It does not happen because the ceiling does not exist. The Migdalian strong society provides the protection that the state is too weak to deny. The patron-client network activates. Party machinery moves. The case evaporates or is never opened. This is not merely corruption in the ordinary sense -- it is the structural consequence of a society in which kinship, not legality, is the operative currency of power.

The Magna Carta principle is, at its core, a technology for tempering the power of that currency. It says: There is a domain in which your connections do not work, your family name does not protect you, your patron cannot reach. The law applies. This is not a natural state of affairs. It was fought for, over centuries, by people who understood that without it, the alternative was what Bangladesh has – a permanent extraction machine operated by whoever holds the dynasty.

A Lesson from 1215

Bangladesh's interim government, navigating the difficult space left by Hasina's fall, faced precisely this question: Could it begin building the ceiling? Could it establish, even gradually, in small ways, that the law applies to the powerful as well as the powerless -- that a minister's son would face the same court as a poor farmer's son?

No one should be naïve about how hard this is. It took England eight centuries to get from Runnymede to Sandringham. But the direction matters as much as the speed. The Ottoman sultans who let the devshirme erode thought they were strengthening their families and didn’t realize they were weakening their empire.

Bangladesh's dynasties have made the same mistake, generation after generation, confusing the protection of kin with the building of a nation.

Andrew's arrest is a reminder -- imperfect, belated, incomplete -- that has sometimes been possible for a society to rebalance kinship and the law so that even the most protected men eventually face the consequences of their actions.

One of Bangladesh's greatest challenges -- and opportunities -- is to begin to change the balance between privileging a few because they happen to have powerful relatives and respecting justice and opportunity for all.

This is the essential prerequisite for liberating the energies of this creative, industrious nation. The rewards for all Bangladeshis -- including the most privileged -- would be immeasurable.

Whit Mason is a British/Australian/American political communications advisor and analyst on conflict, governance, and the rule of law, with decades of international experience including, since December 2024, Bangladesh.