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The threat to the Royal Family’s reputation was drawing dangerously near, with public disapproval rising like a tide ready to breach their carefully maintained image.
For nearly six years, the scandal surrounding Prince Andrew has cast a long shadow over the monarchy’s efforts, tarnishing their achievements with a series of unsavory and deceitful revelations.
As this toxic saga unfolded, it left a trail of inaction behind, with neither the late Queen Elizabeth nor King Charles able to stop the bleeding of public trust, which turned from shock to profound disappointment with each new development.
Within the Royal Family, tensions simmered, arguments flared, and silence persisted, but no decisive measures were taken. Until last night, when action was finally on the horizon.
Whether Andrew’s decision to relinquish his titles, including that of Duke of York and his place in the Order of the Garter, will mend the fractures within the House of Windsor remains uncertain. For Andrew, however, the path to redemption seems dim.
His prolonged yet unsuccessful attempt to ignore the overwhelming outcry and outlast the scandal he created will likely remain a burden he carries indefinitely.
After a week in which his brother’s name was rarely off the front pages – and despairing at his failure to take any responsibility –Charles has at last shown his ruthless side. Under extreme pressure from the King, the ex-Duke finally yielded. Many will wish Charles had acted sooner, that Andrew’s continued presence as a Garter knight sullied the order’s historic notions of chivalry and honour – just as the dukedom he received on his wedding day in 1986 continued to offend the people of York. But somehow fraternal affection clouded royal good sense. Andrew’s grasping entitlement, poor judgment and boundless arrogance: all were repeatedly excused as courtiers wrung their hands.
For some 40 years I have followed the fortunes of Prince Andrew, as he basked in his extreme good fortune as his mother’s favourite son. It has not been pleasant viewing.

For almost six years the grisly Prince Andrew affair has overshadowed every royal good intention, swamping hard-won reputations with its sleaze and lies, a catalogue of unsavoury revelations, writes Richard Kay

It is too soon to say if Prince Andrew’s (pictured) offer to give up his titles, including that of Duke of York and his cherished membership of the Order of the Garter, will allow the House of Windsor to heal

A grinning Andrew with his arm slung around the bare midriff of 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre (then Roberts), with Ghislaine Maxwell smiling beside them
The tragedy is that he could have been a lifelong royal hero. After all, he piloted a helicopter with great bravery during the Falklands War, drawing Argentine Exocet missiles away from British ships of the Task Force. And who could forget, when he came home, how he jumped ashore with a rose clamped in his teeth.
At times he typified the finest qualities of his royal lineage and its attitude towards public service. Sadly, those moments were all too often dwarfed by foolishness, lying and venality.
Looking back at the ‘Randy Andy’ of the 1980s, the popular pin-up of the Royal Family with a girl in every port, it is hard to reconcile with the figure of Andrew today, exiled and holed up in Royal Lodge, clinging to the vestiges of his past while the world he once bestrode has moved on without him.
How did it come to this?
The simple response is Jeffrey Epstein. But the real answer is more complicated, and it speaks to something deeper about Andrew himself – an absence of common sense and lack of candour that has left an indelible stain on the monarchy.
When he went on that now infamous BBC Newsnight to defend himself in 2019 – just one of many catastrophic decisions – it was not the ludicrous alibis about pizzas and sweating, but the complete absence of contrition that finally did for him.
Here was a man accused of sexually assaulting a trafficking victim – something he continues to deny – and his primary concern was defending his honour.
There was no acknowledgment of the horror Epstein’s young victims endured. No expression of regret beyond a tepid admission that staying at this revolting paedophile’s mansion in 2010 was ‘probably not the right thing to do’. But then this was so characteristic.
I remember when the The Mail On Sunday photograph first emerged in 2011 – of a grinning Andrew with his arm slung around the bare midriff 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre (then Roberts), Ghislaine Maxwell smiling beside them. Palace insiders were nervous. And Andrew? He seemed unconcerned. That was always his problem – an inability to read the room, to understand how things looked to ordinary people living ordinary lives.
When Giuffre went public with her allegations that she’d been trafficked to the Prince by Epstein and his madam Maxwell, and had been forced to have sex with Andrew on three separate occasions, the palace issued denials. Categorical, unequivocal denials.

That was always his problem – an inability to read the room, to understand how things looked to ordinary people living ordinary lives, writes Richard Kay

Jeffrey Epstein pictured in a police mugshot from 2017, two years before he died in his prison cell while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges
And for years, that seemed to be enough. Andrew carried on. He opened buildings, cut ribbons and attended functions. All the while continuing to play the role of a working royal while questions swirled around him.
Then came the decision that destroyed everything: that Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis. I’ve covered many a royal crisis over the decades but this was the most grotesque. From the moment I heard Andrew had agreed to sit down with the ferociously skilful Maitlis, I knew it was a disaster in the making.
What I didn’t anticipate was just how spectacularly bad it would be for the Royal Family – and how it would resonate all these years later. From the moment he brought up Pizza Express in Woking and the Falklands injury that accounted for his inability to sweat, his reputation was destroyed. It just got worse.
He had ‘no recollection’ of meeting Virginia Giuffre despite photographic evidence. No empathy whatsoever for Epstein’s victims. It was a masterclass in how not to handle a crisis – and it was broadcast to millions.
The British public watched a man so insulated by privilege that he genuinely believed these excuses would work. He couldn’t have been at a nightclub sweating on a dance floor because he physically couldn’t sweat. Did he really think we’d buy that?
Within days, he was gone from public life. And there was no way back. But his undoing was only just beginning. The lawsuit that followed was almost inevitable.
Virginia Giuffre sued Andrew in New York and suddenly the prospect of him sitting in a witness box, under oath, answering questions about Epstein and young girls became terrifyingly real.
Andrew’s legal team fought hard, putting up 12 different defences, from demands for a jury trial, to ad hominem attacks on Giuffre’s credibility.
Then – with his mother’s Platinum Jubilee imminent – came the inevitable settlement. An estimated £12 million payout, much of it funded by the late Queen and King Charles.
There was no admission of wrongdoing, just a carefully worded statement expressing regret for his association with Epstein, with no apology to Giuffre herself.

Prince Andrew and King Charles departing after the state funeral State funeral for The Duchess of Kent
It made the lawsuit go away, but it didn’t answer the questions. And the British public noticed. Prince Andrew’s love of money and the company of shady billionaires has been no secret. From the moment Lord (Peter) Mandelson arranged for the jobless Duke of York (after quitting the Navy) to become a trade ambassador for Britain – he replaced the dull but reliable Duke of Kent – it was apparent he had little compunction in blurring the line between his official role and his private ambitions.
To the influential rich in many parts of the world, being able to introduce Prince Andrew as a friend guaranteed their own acceptance.
It was money, of course, that drew him into Epstein’s sordid world and that lay at the heart of his downfall. In the ten years he served the nation as a trade envoy, diplomats noticed that he was using the role as a means of ‘ploughing his own furrow’. As one distinguished former diplomat told us, everyone was ‘reluctant to point this out for fear of putting their own careers on the line’.
As for Andrew’s personal diplomacy, even WikiLeaks revealed that a US ambassador described the Prince in the trade role as ‘cocky’ and ‘rude’.
But it was the company Andrew kept that was the most troubling aspect of his decade as an unpaid ambassador for Britain.
His friendship with the family of the murderous Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi strayed well over the official line expected at a time when the aged dictator was forming alliances with the West.
One of his new friends was Saif, Gaddafi’s son, who was studying and being honoured with a phony degree at the London School of Economics. ‘He and Saif became incredibly close,’ recalled a mutual friend. ‘Andrew could open doors with his royal status and Saif could open other doors with his family’s money.’
On his many trips to Libya – and on visits to other capitals and shady states around the world – Prince Andrew never let his royal status drop. He travelled with a team of six, including equerries, private secretaries and protection officers, as well as a valet bringing his own 6ft ironing board to ensure the Prince’s trousers were pressed as he liked.
To some close observers, this studied arrogance could well have been a conscious reaction to being diminished in the royal hierarchy by elder brother Prince Charles.
For the first 22 years of his life, until Prince William was born, Andrew was heir in line to the throne after Charles.

Who but Prince Andrew would have Sarah Ferguson, the ex-wife who publicly humiliated him, and whom he was divorced 29 years ago, still living under his roof? writes Richard Kay
But, as the years passed, and William and then Harry had children, Andrew slipped down the royal pecking order. To make things worse, Charles, increasingly taking a more executive role in royal affairs as the Queen aged, had begun ‘slimming’ down the monarchy.
As long ago as the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012, Andrew was angrily telling friends that he and others in the family were
being pushed to the margins of royal life. These ‘others’ included his daughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie.
He saw it as an insult that they were being dissuaded from carrying out royal duties even though – as he always fervently pointed out – they were the only ‘blood princesses’ of their generation.
While maintaining a considerable number of patronages – from all of which he had to stand back – he expanded his other life among the super-rich.
Many would say, especially now, that Prince Andrew was never cut out for royal life anyway.
Even now people still talk about the glee with which, as a 24-year-old on a visit to Los Angeles, he sprayed photographers and journalists with white paint from a spray gun he was being shown. ‘I enjoyed that,’ he said, before the British consul began shelling out money to pay for damage to valuable equipment.
Certainly, Andrew’s life has always been full of surprises. None more so than the trajectory of his marriage. Who but Prince Andrew would have Sarah Ferguson, the ex-wife who publicly humiliated him, and from whom he was divorced 29 years ago, still living under his roof?
After photographs were published of Fergie’s lover John Bryan kissing her toes while on holiday with the Duchess and her two daughters, you would have thought Andrew would have had nothing more to do with her.
Yet Fergie, who is also relinquishing her Duchess of York title, has continued to live with her former husband at Windsor ever since.
While the late Queen was around, Andrew enjoyed some protection. He was the son who pointedly bowed and kissed her hand whenever he visited her at Buckingham Palace – and also the son who, in her eyes, saved the treasures of Windsor Castle when 100ft flames were licking across it in 1992.
Andrew was at the castle when the fire broke out, on leave from the Navy, and he organised staff into a human chain to rescue its priceless paintings and treasures. To the Queen, Andrew could do no wrong.
Rarely chastised as a child, he grew up, says one courtier, ‘with a pompous level of self-importance. And he felt it when he was pushed down in the line of succession.’
Diplomacy was never one of his strong points. When Pan Am Flight 103 and its passengers were blown up over the Scottish Borders town of Lockerbie a few days before Christmas 1988, the Queen’s then deputy private secretary Robert Fellowes urged her to go there.
But, fearing she would be a distraction from the desperate recovery work, she decided Andrew should go instead.
It was not a good choice. He upset local people by declaring it was ‘much worse for the Americans’ (259 passengers and crew were on the US airliner). He added that it was ‘only a matter of time’ before a plane fell out of the sky.
In the last years of his mother’s life, Andrew was frequently at her side, particularly after the death of Prince Philip.
Since her death, it fell to Charles navigate the Andrew problem with a combination of familial loyalty and cold pragmatism. It was he who encouraged his mother to strip him of his military titles and royal patronages. Since then he has cut his allowance and made it clear there is no path back to public life.
Yet there are limits to what even a king can do to his own brother. Andrew will remain a prince – he was born one and that cannot be taken away.
Andrew now exists in a strange twilight. Still a prince. Still living in a mansion on Crown property. But invisible. Irrelevant.
A reminder of scandal that the monarchy desperately wants to forget – but can’t quite erase.