A heavy load to bear for a woman of 93 and a mother

WHATEVER about the affairs of state, surely the least Queen Elizabeth deserves at her great age is to put her feet up as a parent.

Her husband’s health is ailing and he has stepped aside from royal life. It doesn’t seem too much to ask that the parent-child role be reversed, allowing her to lean on her adult children for a change.

So pity the monarch whose 59year-old son, instead of filling his father’s shoes on public occasions, has saddled his mother with the sort of parenting nightmare that would push her to the limits in her prime, never mind at the advanced age of 93.

She is frankly too long in the tooth now for sifting through the self-serving stories her son has given to explain his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Left alone, her impulse would be to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Prince Andrew is apparently her favourite child and their close bond was forged in the nursery when she finally relaxed into motherhood. But she couldn’t ignore the wave of public disgust at her son and at his vices of greed, dishonesty, selfabsorption, not to mention lack of compassion for Epstein’s young sex slaves.

The longer he was in situ, the more shame he brought on her family and threatened the survival of the monarchy.

Stripping him of his six-figure salary and banishing him from public life may be the sort of hardheaded business decision that, save for the Popes perhaps, no nonagenarian has ever had to take. But the strain of cutting him off would have wounded her most as a mother and is more than any elderly parent should have to bear.

As she summoned him to the palace, like a teenager about to be stripped of his pocket money, how she must have wished to turn back the clock. Back to when monarchs could throw unwanted next of kin into the Tower and forget about them. Or just to 50 years ago when she could sternly tell her small boy once again about the difference between right and wrong.