Has there ever been such a drive-by shooting of a living figure by their biographer? A new book about Prince Andrew is so stuffed with allegations about sex and acts of stupidity that, even before it is published later this month, many have been left wondering if its author has simply gone too far.
Certainly, there are many breathtaking allegations contained in Andrew Lownie’s biography of the duke – his appalling treatment of Buckingham Palace staff, yet more links to paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, how he was once given a bloody nose at a family gathering by Prince Harry, which Harry has strenuously denied. There are also several upsetting and intensely private revelations that appear to pass the legal threshold for a defamation lawsuit.
The Duke of York might yet choose to hit back at his tormentors in the courts. Were he to do so, it isn’t hard to see how such an episode might help him plot his long-desired return to public life. Could this book be the Duke’s first step on that road to rehabilitation?
Few feel any sympathy towards Andrew, who for years has been an isolated figure. After he was so bovine to those around him, most friends have long since fled. With the death of Her late Majesty, he lost his main channel of support. His eldest brother, the King, tries to be supportive, but has to excuse him from all major state occasions.
While we should resist the opportunity to rehabilitate Andrew, the most eye-popping allegations carried in the extract from the biography offer a glimpse of how he ended up an outcast in disgrace. Put simply, he is a man who has been spoiled by neglect.
The prince once had everything you could desire: palaces, money, status and, so the biography says, over 1,000 women who were prepared to go to bed with him. Throw in the fact that Andrew was always his mother’s favourite, but that he lacks any of her legendary charm and intelligence, and you’re left with a lethal cocktail of entitlement. It is fitting that the new biography is named Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York.
The miracle of the royal family over the last century came about thanks to Elizabeth II, who would have been 100 next year. Despite being in a similar hallowed position to her son at her birth, she escaped the dark taint of entitlement. That was partly luck. She was 10 when her uncle Edward VIII abdicated, and she became heir to the throne.
Until then, she was unlikely ever to become monarch, on the presumption Edward would have children. And so, for those 10 precious years, for all her fame, she wasn’t treated with the crippling flattery of deference. She had the close, loving attention of her parents, themselves relatively insulated from the royal limelight.
As her nanny, Marion Crawford, aka Crawfie, revealed in The Little Princesses (1950), little Princess Elizabeth was also blessed with a decent, responsible, hard-working character with an obsession for order. She would line up her shoes neatly every night.
None of this for young Andrew. His mother’s admirable sense of duty meant she was often absent from the nursery. His father, Prince Philip, was confident Andrew would get the same tough, no-nonsense education he’d had at Gordonstoun. But Philip, despite his royal blood as a Greek prince, had had none of the entitled upbringing that would doom his son. Exiled from his Greek birthplace, shuffled from pillar to post as a boy, cut off from his Nazi in-laws, Philip developed an extraordinarily tough, self-denying approach to life.
In his royal cocoon, Andrew remained insulated from criticism, protected by a nation’s reverence for his mother and the monarchy in general. An entitled buffoon like Andrew could get away with his monstrous behaviour for years as long as it was shielded from the world. To be fair, he was undeniably heroic as a helicopter pilot in the Falklands – and, ridiculous as it seems now with the benefit of hindsight, the nation cheered when he married Sarah Ferguson in 1986.
But those decades of spoiltness meant that, when the criticism started to trickle, and then pour, he was pathetically equipped to deal with it.
More intelligent souls learn the great lessons of being privileged: never being rude, and being able to say sorry even when not meaning it. Not Andrew.
Another disturbing allegation in the Lownie book is Andrew’s response to a long-term royal employee who gets the Queen Mother’s title slightly wrong – to which the Duke of York is reported to have responded: “You still don’t know the proper way to refer to my grandmother? You f***ing imbecile. Get out!”
That strain of moron was never going to be able to handle Emily Maitlis’s 2019 grilling on Newsnight. In fact, characteristically, he thought afterwards it had all gone very well. And so, as the book says, Andrew was a pathetic mouse to Jeffrey Epstein’s rattlesnake when the two fatally flawed sex-obsessives first crossed paths.
All the good fairies were at baby Andrew’s side at his 1960 birth – but so too were the devil triplets: stupidity, entitlement and indulgence by neglect.
Harry Mount is author of ‘How England Made the English’ (Penguin £12.99)
