AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
Charles 1 lost his head in 1649 and the British Monarchy abolished. Andrew Mountbatten Windsor only lost his title as Prince and Duke of York and his home in the Royal Lodge at Windsor. His disgrace follows ongoing revelations about his association with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and sex with the late Virginia Guiffre when she was 17 and detailed in her book Nobody’s Girl.
Andrew had picked her like a mail order from several pictures of girls sent him by Ghislaine Maxwell.
Andrew’s nephew Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, may well be the next to lose his title having dished the dirt on the Royal family in his book Spare, after quitting Britain for the US with wife Meghan and turning his back on royal duties in 2020.
Both Andrew and Harry are second sons and the title of Harry’s book speaks volumes about their situation. What do you do with the spare once you have the heir? They are needed initially, just in case something happens to the heir or he fails to produce heirs, otherwise you become superfluous. By the time he left for the US Harry was fifth in line of succession while Andrew has moved from second down to eighth.
It’s like something straight out of a Jane Austen novel. Among the British landed gentry the first-born inherits the estate, the second goes into the army or navy and a third who has no ’expectations’ generally enters the church. True to tradition Andrew served in the navy for 12 years, seeing action in the Falklands War and Harry went into the army where he did two tours in Afghanistan. He described his 10 years in the army as the happiest time of his life.
When they transitioned back to civvy street there was a ready-made role with duties in the ‘Firm’ but after seeing action, life in the Royal family may have seemed incredibly stuffy.
Prince Andrew, who married Sarah ‘Fergie’ Ferguson in 1986, got a role as the UK’s special representative for International Trade and Investment in 2001. This is where his reputation began to go from hero to zero, at the time Prince Charles was said to be opposed to the appointment viewing it as “a disaster waiting to happen”.
Andrew was known among diplomats as ‘His Buffoon Highness’, given the way he would do exactly the opposite of his agreed brief, according to Andrew Lownie in Entitled. his book on the Yorks. Foreign Office officials wanted Andrew reigned in to prevent his personal interests (sex, golf and making money) getting in the way of his figurehead role in the UK’s export industry. Andrew left the post after 10 years amid queries over expenses funded by the British tax payer and friendship with a string of shady characters and undesirables like Epstein and Colonel Gadaffi.
Like Edward VIII, whose refusal to give up Wallis Simpson led to his abdication in 1936, Harry married an American divorcee. Within two years of their marriage in 2018 Harry had abdicated from his royal duties and, like Andrew, his behaviour caused an irreparable rift with the Royal family. “Is each generation doomed to unthinkingly repeat the mistakes of the last?” Harry asked in Spare.
It happens, but why? There seems to have been an extraordinary failure on the part of the powers-that-be to intervene, especially in Andrew’s case, before serious damage by what Lownie calls a tale of “entitlement, Establishment cover-up and hubris” is done to the monarchy. Too little is done too late. Instead matters have been allowed to drag on following Andrew’s disastrous 2019 interview with Emily Maitlis for BBC Newsnight, ensuring that more and more sordid details have emerged without any action having been taken, with more revelations to come.
A sense of entitlement seems to play a large part in Andrew’s scandals and Harry’s departure: the sense that they could do what they wanted and that the normal rules don’t apply to them. Also the failure to modernise the Royal family and to slim it down has played a part in the crisis.
Is it time for the British Monarchy to end and replace Kings and Queens with Presidents? At least those can be changed every seven, five or better three years – if they don’t behave.
