It started with a simple photograph, probably the most consequential ever taken of a member of the royal family.
There was Prince Andrew, Duke of York, Earl of Inverness, Baron Killyleagh and Knight of the Garter, with his arm around a young woman, while Ghislaine Maxwell stood wolfishly grinning in the background.
Without that snap, taken at a party at Maxwell’s London mews home in 2001, who would ever have believed Virginia Giuffre when she said she had been trafficked across the Atlantic as a teenager and obliged to have perfunctory sex with a prince of the blood royal? As it was, the story could not be convincingly denied, however much friends of Andrew tried to suggest the picture was a fake. Or that Andrew would seek to blacken her name much later by instructing his royal protection officer to seek out derogatory details about her, even providing her birth date and social security number, which can only have come from the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein or his minions?
An odd, giveaway gesture by someone who had publicly pretended to have never heard of her, said he could never have had sex with her and yet paid her $12m of his mother’s money to fend off a long prevaricated lawsuit.
In this context, talk of the royals acting decisively to cut Andrew off are wide of the mark. This scandal has gone on for the best part of 15 years since that photograph, and another of Andrew walking amiably in Central Park with Epstein, came to light. Arguably it was longer still: how long ago did his siblings, perhaps even his parents, know that Andrew was so self-entitled?
They must have realised, if his staff and the police were doing their jobs, that he had some deeply disreputable friends given he openly invited them to Buckingham Palace, or Balmoral, or even Royal Lodge, another of his perks.
If the family did not know about his sexual proclivities, they certainly knew about his extravagance with public money, because the trips were printed in the royal annual reports: the taking of a helicopter from the palace to an Oxfordshire golf course and back again in time for lunch, the private flights instead of scheduled services, all for the convenience of “Airmiles Andy”. Then there was the entitlement that demanded deference when he entered a room (“Let’s try that again, shall we?” when people did not notice his arrival, according to his recent biographer Andrew Lownie) or the supreme consciousness about the use of his royal titles, from on his letterheads to with his personal acquaintances.
He could get away with it while his mother, who inexplicably indulged him, was still alive. Queen Elizabeth did at least strip him of public duties and honorary colonelcies after his disastrous and, we now know, mendacious Newsnight interview six years ago, which he thought had gone rather well. But his behaviour has scarcely changed since, sidling into the limelight at public events, most recently at the Duchess of Kent’s funeral in September, vainly trying to make conversation with an all too evidently discomfited Prince William. And clinging on desperately to his grace and favour residence at the 30-room Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, even into this week reluctant to give it up in the face of pressure from the king.
It was only in the last fortnight that events sped up after the publication not only of Lownie’s book Entitled, but Giuffre’s posthumous memoir, Nobody’s Girl, giving more grim details of his behaviour and that of Epstein and the convicted child sex trafficker Maxwell towards her. Further disclosures have again exposed Andrew’s thinking that he could get away with lying about his contact with Epstein in the Newsnight interview. If the palace thought that ceasing the use of his titles without actually removing them – allegedly, though clearly not actually, at his request and still without acknowledgment of any fault – it had another think coming.
The public (and the media) were far ahead of the royals. There was no one of any consequence to speak up for him, a result of all those years of arrogance, and the gravity of the looming institutional damage was finally clear. The more intelligent royals realised that. The one imperative is to pass on the monarchy, if not as heretofore at least intact and untarnished. They have spent the last 190 years trying to undo the reputation of the Georgians, proving they are useful, responsible and responsive to their subjects; if not exactly like them, then role models for respectability and good behaviour. Andrew was putting all that in danger in an age when deference and discretion is no longer enough.
Finally, the famously indecisive king was prodded further. There was no alternative. The palace had lost control of the narrative. The days when the indiscretions of princes could be overlooked or hidden – think Edward VII and his predilection for chorus girls and mistresses, Edward VIII and his half-secret relationships with Freda Dudley Ward and Wallis Simpson, or even the Belgian Leopold II, who had sex with underage children (not as bad as his treatment of the people of the Congo, his private fiefdom, but bad enough) – were over.
It is the loss of titles and the continued and lifelong public humiliation that will hurt Andrew, demoted to just Mr Mountbatten-Windsor, the most. As will the fact that he is the first royal to lose his titles in modern times; the last to do so was the Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale, who sided with Germany in the first world war, while Japan’s Emperor Hirohito was stripped of his knighthood of the garter after the second. Since one of Andrew’s few claims to fame is his service in the Falklands war, this will particularly sting. He is still a counsellor of state, theoretically able to stand in for the king, and he is still eighth in line to the throne, but neither of these will ever come to pass.
Will people he encounters still defer to him, will they still forget themselves and call him Prince, will they even say Sir, and if they do will he correct them? Will the agreeable golf courses of the north Norfolk coast still welcome him as an honoured guest?
Of course, he is not retiring to Surbiton or Slough, but to the royal family’s 8,100-hectare (20,000 acre) estate at Sandringham. There, he will be furnished by the king with one of the grace and favour houses – will it be York Cottage or Wood Farm? – and given some sort of private allowance, though it may still take some time for him to move in. It is not Royal Lodge, where he paid a peppercorn rent for more than 20 years – that really caused public outrage, and Norfolk is a bit distant, but even so it may not be far enough. Presumably Kazakhstan, where he is friends with members of the elite, was a bit remote.
Will locals be pleased to see him doing the weekly shop at an Aldi in King’s Lynn? (That’s probably a step too far.) Members of the public still stroll through the Sandringham grounds and the royal family themselves decamp there for Christmas and new year (and go to church), but there he would be an unwelcome stranger at the feast. Apparently, Sarah Ferguson, his ex-wife, will not be moving in. It will be an internal exile.
This is not over. There are still files in the hands of the US Congress to be disclosed, though the Americans are understandably more interested in who on their side of the Atlantic was ensnared in Epstein’s net. Will parliament demand more, or investigate the waste of public money? There may even be a police investigation into his behaviour, though that seems unlikely – neither the government nor the king would want that.
Perhaps for the moment the institutional damage to the monarchy is limited. The narrative from the palace on Thursday night was clearly that the removal of titles was what Charles, and particularly Prince William, wanted. No more pretence that Andrew was doing it voluntarily. And, remarkably, the brief five sentences showed clearly that the royals were siding with Giuffre’s version of events, not Andrew’s. Even more, for the first time they finally showed concern for the victims: “The censures are deemed necessary, notwithstanding the fact that he continues to deny the allegations against him. Their majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been, and will remain with, the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse.”
Ultimately it is entitlement, self-seeking and indolence that will kill the monarchy. In his stupidity, self-indulgence and venality, Andrew seems never to have learned that lesson.
Stephen Bates is a former Guardian royal correspondent and is author of Royalty Inc: Britain’s Best-known Brand, and The Shortest History of the Crown
