The fall of Andrew reveals the folly of monarchy

So the slow-motion defenestration of the Andrew formerly known as Prince continues.

Following a ‘discussion with the king’ earlier this month, he had already been forced to give up the title of the Duke of York, as well as membership of Order of the Garter, the most senior order of knighthood in Britain’s honours system. If the royal family’s intention was to draw a line under the scandal-ridden Andrew – forever sullied by his friendship with the world’s most notorious nonce, Jeffrey Epstein – it failed spectacularly. The publication a few days later of Nobody’s Girl, the posthumous memoir of poor Virginia Giuffre saw to that.

Giuffre, who committed suicide in April this year, was the girl Epstein is alleged to have paid to have sex with Andrew in 2011 when she was just 17 – a minor under New York state law. All too predictably, Nobody’s Girl, replete with further allegations about Andrew and his seedy relationship with Epstein, ramped up the pressure on King Charles to lever Andrew further out of the palace window. And on Thursday night, that’s precisely what he did. The Firm announced that the non-working, non-sweating and now ex-royal is to be stripped of all his titles and removed from his Windsor pile. According to reports, he is to be sent to live out the rest of his life in Norfolk, on the royal-owned Sandringham Estate, as plain old Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.

Will that be deemed sufficient punishment? It seems unlikely. Andrew is an unsympathetic character. But in the absence of any criminal proceedings against him, he is being condemned above all on the basis of the morally rotten, high-society company he kept. Beyond the Giuffre accusations, which he still strenuously denies, his wrongdoing remains unspecified, his guilt established by association. Indeed, it is as if he is being damned for the sex crimes of the powerful and wealthy in general – the BBC even republished a 2006 photo this week showing him not only alongside Epstein, but also convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein, the demiurge of #MeToo. An existing public revulsion towards these figures, fuelled by the drip-drip, stateside release of the Epstein Files, has been easily transferred to someone as dislikeable as Andrew.

So, coupled with the absence of anything like due process, in which allegations could be tested and closure reached, there’s no reason to think that there will be any let up in the pressure to keep punishing Andrew. This really is a trial without any discernible end, a media feeding frenzy that will never be quite sated.

Still, the royal family’s Andrew problem didn’t come out of the blue. He is and always has been a liability, lacking in judgement and sense. Epstein wasn’t his only dubious playmate. As the government’s Special Representative for International Trade, he palled around with members of invariably oppressive regimes in the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa, enjoying their largesse. It was his close friendship with Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi’s decadent son, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, that led to him finally being stripped of his role as the government’s special representative in 2011.

Moreover, Andrew has been continually caught out on the real nature of his relationship with Epstein. In 2019, he told BBC’s Newsnight that he broke off contact with Epstein in December 2010 after the two men were photographed together strolling in New York – this, it should be said, was still two years after Epstein had pleaded guilty to Florida state charges of soliciting prostitution and soliciting prostitution from a person under the age of 18. It’s now emerged that Andrew wasn’t being entirely truthful about ceasing contact in 2010. After the now infamous photo emerged in 2011 of Andrew, with his arm around Giuffre’s waist, he wrote to Epstein, a convicted sex offender, to say: ‘It would seem we are in this together and will have to rise above it. Otherwise keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!’ It’s creepy and damning stuff from someone referred to by British diplomats at the time as His Buffoon Highness.

All this provides a timely reminder of one of the main problems with having a hereditary monarchy in the first place. People as flawed, weak and idiotic as Andrew are given prominent public positions, and a great deal of wealth, solely according to having been born to a particular family. They are not only made kings and queens, princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses; they are also appointed as special representatives, trade envoys, spokespersons for all manner of public bodies and state-funded organisations and charities. They are put on a public perch, and elevated far beyond their talents and abilities. And there’s very little we as mere subjects can do about it. We can’t hold them to account and ultimately vote them out, like we do our elected representatives. Instead, we are virtually stuck with them until such a time as the Firm decides a particular royal is doing its brand too much damage – as Andrew’s eventual fall shows.

Of course, some of the Windsor line have turned out as admirable individuals, willing to put public service above all else. But for every Queen Elizabeth there’s an Andrew or a Harry. As Thomas Paine put it in Common Sense (1776): ‘One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise, she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.’

And whatever else Andrew may or not be, he is certainly an ass.

Tim Black is associate editor of spiked.