There isn’t much in common on the face of it between the two big biographies out this week, Andrew Lownie’s Entitled, the double biography of Prince Andrew and his former wife, Sarah, Duchess of York, and Frankly, the memoir of Nicola Sturgeon, the diminutive former Scottish first minister. Nonetheless, one observation of Nicola Sturgeon comes to mind in reading Andrew Lownie’s book.
Recalling her amicable conversations with the late Queen Elizabeth, she observes that “having had the opportunity to observe the Royal Family up close, I have little doubt that history, however long … will look back on the day of her death as the beginning of the end”.
That is what anyone reading Andrew Lownie’s book will probably think too. What’s evident is an extraordinary gulf between the generations when it comes to the Queen and her younger son. “Entitled” very much sums up the nature of Prince Andrew, though boorish, ignorant and arrogant are other epithets that, in my opinion, would suit.
See also: Entitled review – From prince charming to the duke of disgrace
The late Queen was a sincere Christian, a product of her generation – think reticence and self-control – and a woman with, as even her detractors point out, an iron sense of duty. Her younger son is without any of those qualities, nor any notable redemptive qualities at all. Just think: before the change in the laws of succession, Prince Andrew was, for a time, second in line to the throne. If some tragic accident had befallen Charles before his marriage, the nation would have been left with Andrew as the next king. It would have strained the principle of primogeniture to breaking point.
There was a point in time when Andrew was second in line to the throne
As it is, Andrew could yet undermine the monarchy. Andrew Lownie is a very decent, pleasant man who is a natural monarchist, but he observes that if the public knew just how the prince had conducted himself while he was taking taxpayer funding, there could be a backlash against the Royal Family. Really, it’s hard to say which is worse: the personal revelations about Andrew’s terrible behaviour, including lewd and obnoxious conduct with women, or the flakiness of his financial dealings with people who should never have been allowed near the Royals, especially one as stupid as Andrew: people like Johnny Hon, who had close associations with the political elites of North Korea and China, and used royal associations to promote his business interests, first in Britain and then in America.
Or there’s the Kazakhstan connection, where the Prince had an uncomfortably close relationship with the controversial president and his son. The organisation, Pitch@Palace which initially looked like Dragon’s Den with a royal backdrop seems less benign once you learn the organisation invited a two per cent commission on successful introductions.
Worse is the corruption of a weak character by being spoilt and royal. As a little boy Andrew told a sailor on board the royal yacht who called him, “laddie”: “I’m not a laddie, I’m a Prince”. That weakness made him susceptible to Jeffrey Epstein, who apparently described Andrew as his “Superbowl” trophy and, according to one source, intended selling the unedifying details of Andrew’s sexual activities to the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, presumably to provide some sort of leverage with the UK government.
When it comes to Epstein, this biography strongly suggests that he was murdered rather than committed suicide, in which case proving the culprit would be on a par with Murder on the Orient Express… there were so many people with good reason to loathe this detestable man.
As for Andrew’s behaviour with women, including Virginia Giuffre, it is only partly exculpated by the hair-raising allegation here that he was himself sexually abused as a young boy. As the book puts it, “According to a source close to Andrew, he had his first sexual experience aged eight and lost his virginity at eleven after a friend’s father hired two escorts for the boys in a West End hotel.”
Andrew told the source that was the moment when he lost his virginity… He admitted that his second sexual experience came before he turned twelve and when he was thirteen he had already slept with “more than half a dozen girls”. I think that if he had been a girl rather than a boy we’d have very little difficulty in identifying this as child abuse. As it is, it puts his hair-raising promiscuity in context.
The real trouble is that Prince Andrew and his former wife aren’t really cut out for the 21st century. If Andrew had continued to serve in the Royal Navy up to retirement, it would have given this unintellectual man the kind of life and discipline for which he was reasonably well suited.
He did seem to respond to the structure of the Navy and served decently during the Falklands War. Come to think of it, it would have been better for his nephew Harry if he too could have remained in the army. The armed services would have been able to contain these problematic individuals and they would have been far happier with the discipline and camaraderie - and a coherent job description. They would have been less likely to have fallen victim to the other temptation of contemporary life: monetising their royal connections. Ditto their wives.
Fergie, herself a victim of a troubled childhood, is one of the many upper-class women who weren’t beneficiaries of feminism; had Sarah Ferguson lived a wholly conventional life as the wife of the Queen’s son, with a country existence centred round dogs, horses and children, enlivened by good works, especially with children (for whom she seems to have genuine empathy), I ‘d say she would have been far happier than in her present incarnation, which is both venal and undignified. Both these not-terribly-bright individuals would have flourished in the old social order and they’ve come unstuck in the new.
It’s clear from the book that the next king, William, detests his uncle, and his own approach to his royal status is very different from Andrew’s. Yet friends of the monarchy should consider the closing lines of Andrew Lownie’s book: “It is ironic that the Duke and Duchess of York, ostensibly the strongest defenders of the monarchy, may through their behaviour between them have done most to hasten its demise”. He may be right, you know.
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist
