Prince Andrew has turned the royals into a cross between a soap opera and a circus act
The latest royal scandal is an extinction event. Does the Queen really think a few streamers at her Platinum Jubilee later this year are going to make us forget about it?
There is a moment in The Madness of King George when the King turns to Mr Pitt and says: “I agree with you, Mr Pitt, on everything – apart from the place we mustn’t mention.” What place? “The colonies!” snarls George. “They are now called the United States,” says the prime minister, crisply. “Are they?” sneers the King. The prime minister says firmly: “They are a fact, sir.”
You can imagine something similar happening last week at Windsor. Virginia Giuffre’s case against Prince Andrew in America? Now, tediously, “a fact, Ma’am”. Also a fact: Andrew will be the first royal to appear as a defendant in a sex trafficking case; he will be the first royal sued in America. Another unpalatable fact: the Americans, after his failure to have the case thrown out last week, are now gleefully asking if they can subpoena his daughters and ex-wife as well, just to remind us how entitled people from the old country can be.
To be clear: Princess Beatrice being cross-examined by a rottweiler lawyer on Andrew’s Pizza Express alibi will make Emily Maitlis’s hard-hitting “sweating” interview look like a Zoom Q&A with the CEO/supermodel Miranda Kerr for Vogue Spain about what headphones she prefers.
The Queen must have looked at this in horror and finally decided – far too late – that Andrew will have to fight the case as a “private citizen”. This means for the first time in history the prince, and by extension the royal family, will get a taste of how it is to be treated like everyone else. And it will not be pretty.
There will be no VIP breaks for Andrew in a court in America, no special treatment, no suddenly being allowed to remember or forget things, or whatever, despicably, makes royal cases go away here. He will have to defend himself on his own terms, in his own words, using his own money, and what a chaffering, ill-equipped, mediocre excuse for a big old freebie-loving baby he will seem.
Many of us are looking forward to this long-overdue reckoning – finally, people might see what cavilling, publicity-obsessed husks the royal family are. But for the monarchy it is an extinction-level event. You can’t spend a thousand years telling everyone you’re special and then everyone discovers, in real time, in a court case, that you are really not.
Not only not special, but notably unspecial, an unprepossessing collection of underendowed oddities, led by a woman whose desire to become the longest-reigning, oldest etc etc monarch has left her rigid, out of date and apparently impervious to “facts”. It is said the Queen stripped Andrew of his titles because she didn’t want it to overshadow her Platinum Jubilee – the vanity. Does she think a few streamers are going to make us forget about Diana, Charles, Fergie, Harry, Meghan? Andrew isn’t even the only duke to lose his HRH in the past two years.
As a mother, the Queen has, remarkably, produced not a single child approaching leadership material – not a single person with presence, acumen, insight or balls. It is kind of amazing, if you think about it, how comprehensively Andrew has been thrown under the bus by his own siblings – not one of his own family has come forward to defend him or help him or even guide him to the right decisions, because only one thing matters to them: PR. I don’t like Andrew or respect him, but even Ian and Kevin Maxwell stuck up for their sister Ghislaine.
In America, of course, the punters are loving it. The royals are regarded as entertainment somewhere between the Kennedys and Siegfried and Roy. Glance at any of the papers last week and you’d see they couldn’t wait for the show to come to town.
“Royale with sleaze,” screamed one paper. “Andy gets royal flush”. At The Washington Post a columnist started telling her editor what “ridiculous” titles Andrew had lost, and the editor just laughed. Was he really “honorary air commodore of RAF Lossiemouth"? What does being colonel-in-chief to the Small Arms School Corps actually mean?
I think this is partly jealousy – there is no one in America who comes close to embodying the spirit of a nation. But it’s also rightly baffling to Americans that anyone should get into a position of power or wealth without having earned it.
Not a single person in this country is thrilled by the thought of Charles toiling on, blind to the public’s ambivalence towards him. It is almost as if the more publicity the royals do, the less people like them. Where they were once rulers of the public, they are now slaves to public opinion, clogging our airwaves with their self-serving documentaries and issuing “timeless” and “elegant” portraits. Where is the originality? I saw the pictures the Duchess of Cambridge issued for her recent birthday and just thought: why? She’s a royal, not a celeb.
Looking at the fluffy folds of her strangely unappealing, sexless garb, I wondered: how many pictures will she have to issue when Andrew’s case starts up? How many peculiar ceremonial tent-dresses will she have to drag out to get us even close to forgetting who he is?
THE TIMES